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- Volume 9, Issue 2, 2017
Journal of African Cinemas - Volume 9, Issue 2-3, 2017
Volume 9, Issue 2-3, 2017
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Pedagogies and practices of disaffection: Film programmes in arts schools in a time of revolution
Authors: Jyoti Mistry and David AndrewAbstractThis article offers a set of interrogative questions about the role of arts schools at the time of political change. It is significant for institutions on the African continent and in the global South to create an interventionist space that might provide an enabling environment that is both reflective and reflexive of knowledge production. By potentially positioning artistic research as a mode of pedagogy and practice (in the arts school generally) and by recognizing its implications for film programmes, this article sets out to scrutinize the changing role of the arts school. The focus in this article is on the general historical relationship between arts schools and film schools as institutional frameworks where specific pedagogic practices take place. More specifically, this scrutinization of the arts school in the global South takes place from the vantage point of Johannesburg, South Africa with a view of expressing the potential of artistic research as a potentially decolonizing approach to curriculum transformation.
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Point of view: Engaging with history and memory in the classroom
By Tanja SakotaAbstractSouth Africa’s turbulent past has led to its history being rewritten a number of times. The events of the last 450 years in particular have had a huge impact on the social, political and historical context, resulting in the current social tropes and inequalities emerging frequently as topics for discussion in the classroom. In April 2015 students at the University of Cape Town embarked on the RhodesMustFall campaign. The spirit of the campaign spread quickly across the country as students and citizens embarked on heated debates and protests on the significance and memory of such monuments. In the classroom students were encouraged to rethink monument spaces and interrogate the politics of remembering within the context of film studies. The theoretical framework focused on Marita Sturken’s premise that history, culture and memory are immersed in cultural artefacts that play a significant role in how we understand the past and its relationship with the present and the future. This article will discuss key theoretical ideas that emerged through interactions with students with reference to the RhodesMustFall campaign and how the cinematic space acts as a platform to rethink monument spaces.
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Redirecting the gaze: Film education in an individualistic era
Authors: Linda Sternö and Klara BjörkAbstractThis article offers consideration to an alternative use of film practice and the role of pedagogy in challenging the conception of film as a product and entertainment medium. Instead the authors reflect on the potential of the camera as a tool for facilitating dialogue with communities and individuals, which allows student filmmakers to draw on images and representations that challenge the stereotyped and repetitive images generated in mass media. Furthermore, they draw from their own experiences of working with the visual practice (VP) model where the camera is a research tool. As a tool, the camera is used to explore issues in contemporary society and is related to contextual responsibilities and concerns regarding film pedagogy and its connection to enabling social change, with a broader correlation to civil society that aims to promote democratic rights.
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Learning, growing and making films in a diverse setting: Collaboration and reflection in a community-engagement video training programme
More LessAbstractStepping Stone community-engagement video training was launched in 2012 to open University of Cape Town film and media facilities, equipment and knowledge to a wider audience, linking university with non-university communities, and creating opportunities for creative collaboration and social interaction between diverse participants. The current curriculum and approach are the result of ongoing action research aimed at evolving the programme based on observation and reflection to best serve the diverse group of participants. One of the course assignments challenges participants to identify original concepts about their geographical communities and communities of interest, and generate content that will appeal to niche audiences that they are uniquely positioned to access. Another provides opportunities for in-service learning in a supportive environment. The aim of this article is to reflect on the ongoing design, implementation and impact of the project by asking: What strategies have been used to inform the design the course? Have they fostered an environment conducive to creative collaboration between diverse participants? And what impact has this had on the participants and their potential to work in the South African film and television industries?
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The changing cinema spaces of Accra: Fragmented spectatorship and the loss of empathy
By Jan NålsAbstractCinema theatres are designed to foster collective emotional responses. Ghana’s capital Accra, like many other African cities, used to be full of such spaces. Urban infrastructures no longer support cinema theatres, and subsequently, television, video and small screens, in general, have replaced the dark room. This study explores some key aspects of how film spectatorship is embedded in the historical and current geography of Accra. It traces the undoing of cinema and its spaces, as well as the possible consequences of this development. The article retells an artistic research process that took place in a video parlour in Accra. The findings of the artistic research are supported in part by theories on space and apparatus. In Accra, collective spectatorship has turned into a mostly random event. Passers-by watch short glimpses of narratives without a pre-existing understanding of, nor commitment to, the narrative. Fragmented spectatorship can ultimately lead to a loss of shared feeling – empathy – between audience members and film characters, and as a consequence, between members of broader societal and even global contexts.
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Practice-led research: Home video and the autobiographical self
More LessAbstractThis article explores the place of personal testimony against broader political landscapes of official histories and narratives. It looks at family archive as a curated record of the autobiographical self and the enduring political value of the everyday. I reflect on my creative arts Ph.D. where I made a documentary exploring personal history and memory. The film, comprised predominantly of my own home video footage, is set against the backdrop of the political situation in Southern Africa during the 1980s and 1990s, when my twin brother and I were born in Zimbabwe and then returned to South Africa after the unbanning of the African National Congress. Home video is employed as a methodological instrument to explore a theoretical landscape where I have located my mode of practice as an autoethnographic. This article analyses how the film provided an objective anchor for my deeply personal entry into filmmaking and academia.
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Thinking through the visual: Cinematic practice as a productive site of epistemic inversion
More LessAbstractThis article considers ways in which multiple expressions and interpretations of Johannesburg can best be understood when processes at the fringes are articulated through creative/artistic practices. Often these expressions are in languages or forms that seek to challenge dominant or pre-determined forms and give rise to modalities that are determined from within the (artistic) communities that occupy fringe spaces. This article suggests that the methods of artistic research enquiries are viable modes to read three contemporary South African films – Driving with Fanon (Mokwena, 2005), Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (Matabane, 2005) and I Mike what I Like (Mistry, 2006). It further investigates how the forms of these films write an alternative vocabulary of selected African cities, which might be expressed rather than simply represented. Following Sarat Maharaj’s idea of visual art as knowledge production, this discussion considers these film case studies as epistemic engines/contraptions and explicates the attended questions of artistic research as a mode of enquiry. Second, in reading the formal and discursive moves offered in these films, this analytical description mobilizes Achille Mbembe’s modes of self-writing in order to develop techniques of reading and writing that are characterized by aesthetic openings and encounters, a kind of reading and writing characterized by intersecting encounters between diverse fields of knowledge(s) and epitomes. Finally, the analysis tentatively locates artistic practices in the case studies within the broader frame of the decolonial, suggesting that the representational strategies present in the film case studies can be read as entry points in conversing with Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s question of thinking about what decolonization means, what it wants and requires.
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Mama Jack and the Spectre of makwerekwere
More LessAbstractThis article looks at the ways in which Mama Jack, a South African slapstick comedy, frames certain individuals and groups as makwerekwere. The term, which is popularly used in reference to African migrants in South Africa, appears in the film despite the absence of any African migrant in the literal sense. Nonetheless, Leon Schuster, who plays the lead roles in the film, provides the conditions of the term’s use by performing blackness and exhibiting a stock of images associated with black foreignness. Makwerekwere therefore signifies a phony presence and serves to visualize violence against black foreigners. The article develops from the understanding that all texts, film included, communicate specific ways of seeing the world and therefore participates in the construction and circulation of normalized and misrecognized forms of violence. Film’s signifying potential need not be understated. By focusing on the various ways in which makwerekwere are deployed in Mama Jack, it will be noted that the pursuit of the comic tends to obfuscate and validate the negative portrayal of black foreigners.
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The representation of African womanhood in Sembene’s Moolaade: An Africana womanist reading
More LessAbstractIn Moolaade, Sembene engages the subject of female circumcision (excision). Female circumcision has generated several debates in many circles within and beyond the borders of Africa. Feminists and other activists consider it a violation of human rights and an extreme form of women oppression. On the other hand, its practitioners consider it a rite of passage and a procedure of purification. In many of the debates, the image of African womanhood is subjected to a pornotropic gaze. Pornotroping, as explained by Tamura Lomax, refers to the ‘othering’ of black women and girl’s bodies that occurs through the production, reproduction, circulation and maintenance of myths, superimposed on these bodies through signs, symbols, significations and representations. This article seeks to utilize an Africana womanist reading in examining how Sembene represents the identities and subjectivities of African womanhood within the circumcision debate in Moolaade. The article questions whether Sembene subscribes to or subverts pornotropia in his representation of African womanhood and the larger female circumcision debate in Moolaade.
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Surviving the impossible: The function of magical realism in Teresa Prata’s Terra Sonâmbula
More LessAbstractTeresa Prata’s film Terra Sonâmbula (2007), an adaptation of Mia Couto’s magical realist novel of the same name, examines violence from a different perspective than its source material – although both the novel and the film consider the difficulties confronting Mozambican society in the face of a horrific civil war, Couto’s novel was published the same year the war ended, while Prata’s film was released fifteen years later, with the national climate much altered. Despite this difference, both the novel and the film make use of magical realism in certain pivotal moments of their narratives. This study analyses the function of magical realism in both works, arguing that the concept serves as a sort of coping mechanism, a way of making sense of the world that allows the narratives’ characters to remain hopeful despite the violence and devastation that surrounds them.
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Waywardness of mood and mode in Love the One You Love and Necktie Youth
More LessAbstractAt a time when the reconciliation narratives peddled during the Mandela and Mbeki eras are increasingly coming under stress, a number of South African filmmakers have been offering viewers deeply felt, often autobiographically inflected and experimental filmic engagements with the everyday, affective textures of contemporary political disillusionment. This article reads two films associated with the so-called ‘New Wave’ in South African filmmaking – namely Jenna Cato Bass’s Love the One You Love (2014) and Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015) – in order to map the contours of waywardness as a mood and mode of cinematic narration peculiar to a particular post-transitional South African political conjuncture. Inspired by a recent flurry of international scholarly activity on the topic of mood, my analysis of these films considers the nuances that a reading of mood bring to understanding the aesthetics of ‘wayward feeling’ in contemporary South African visual culture.
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