Journal of African Cinemas - Current Issue

This number of the Journal of African Cinemas continues with its variable entries, full articles, reviews and a report on an arts festival and interview with one of its film festival organizers. These two items reveal the energy, vibrancy and contribution of a smaller, shorter, less well-known film festival event. Tigritudes was held during 2023 at the first established South African film school, then known as the Pretoria Technikon, set up in 1971. The Tigritudes Arts Festival relocates the school’s transformed significance as the Tshwane University of Technology (renamed from 2004) within the contemporary period.

Journal of African Cinemas interviewed Professor Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren about her experience of organizing the Tigritudes and TUT Film Festival that took place as part of the 2023 Tshwane University of Technology’s Annual Arts Festival.

A wealth of scholarship exists around looking relations in cinema, but there is a paucity of research into looking relations in South African cinema. With this article we show that the examination of looking relations in South African cinema offers valuable insights and suggest that similar analyses of other South African films can only be fruitful. Through a close textual analysis of Nosipho Dumisa’s Nommer 37 (2018), we interrogate the nature of the gaze directed at Pam, the woman protagonist. The works of María Lugones, Elaine Salo, Azille Coetzee and Louise Du Toit, and Pumla Dineo Gqola allow us to interpret and apply Laura Mulvey’s male gaze within the raced and gendered South African context shaped by colonialism. We show that even though Dumisa displays an awareness of the power relations in looking, and even though she problematizes male looking, the way she uses the camera to frame the look continues to centre the gaze of the men in the film.

Water plays a crucial role narratively, thematically and visually in two films, which follow young Senegalese female protagonists as they emigrate in search of work and hopes of a ‘better’ life. La noire de… (Black Girl)’s (Sembène 1966) Diouana travels to Antibes while Nanny’s (Jusu 2022) protagonist Aisha voyages to New York. Each landscape, which provides its respective protagonist with a new home, is characterized by a distinct proximity to bodies of water. This article argues that the literal, imagined and folkloric manifestations of water in both narratives liberate their respective protagonists. Comparing these case studies allows for the assessment of the intersection of genre, folklore, cultural heritage and gendered storytelling as they are performed in almost identical stories made by a male filmmaker tied to the global decolonization movement of the 1960s and a female filmmaker who embodies the transgenerational implications of the diasporic self. Water recurs symbolically throughout both films in senses beyond the simply geographical. Water is an ideologically charged force for both characters which alternately encloses and liberates them. The character arc of each woman reaches its emotional climax in bathtubs, water acts as a force that seduces and promises clarity. Ultimately, water-based imagery and the guidance of the infamous water spirit, Mami Wata, facilitates the liberation of each protagonist as they resist the imposition of colonial power dynamics and enslavement.

The arena in which films are made within the Kenyan film industry forms the elaborate network of artistic, technical and economic apparatuses that produce, distribute and exhibit films to audiences. While this arena is ever-changing, filmmakers and marketers must explore various ways to position their films within the minds of consumers to encourage consumption of their films. This article sought to investigate the marketing strategies of two Kenyan films: Mission to Rescue (2021) directed by Gilbert Lukalia and A Grand Little Lie (2021) directed by Philip Karanja. The study was guided by the need to establish the marketing strategies used by the producers of the films and the overall impact these strategies had on the success of the films. Content analysis and interviews were the main data collection methods. Guided by the theories of marketing mix, this article brings to light ways in which the choice of a proper marketing strategy by the producers contributed to the success or lack of films in the market.

This reflexive article examines how identity is informed by the personal, the political and the practice of filmmaking. As a South African filmmaker of mixed heritage (classified as ‘coloured’ under the Apartheid-era code), I recall a childhood of cinema, of cinematic moments, of screen heroes and of sociocultural traditions (imported, imposed and Indigenous) that shaped our ideas and expressions of masculinity as boys and men. Constant in this reflection is how spatial Apartheid (as effected through the Group Areas Act of 1950) impacted Black life in all its manifestations, but particularly the ways it determined how we lived and engaged with cinema in these designated and tightly controlled spaces. The fact that we could find resonance with films narratives, by interpreting them into our own lingo and bribing the screen icons into our realities gave us a window to reimagine our reality.

Review of: Cinematic Independence: Constructing the Big Screen in Nigeria, Noah Tsika (2022)

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 262 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-52038-609-9, p/bk, $34.95

Review of: No Simple Way Home, Akuol de Mabior (dir.) (2022), South Sudan: LBx Africa and STEPS