Beti Ellerson - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Beti Ellerson
Gaze Regimes : Film and feminisms in Africa, 2005
African cinema born during the African independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s re-appropria... more African cinema born during the African independence movements
of the 1950s and 1960s re-appropriated the camera as a tool to
counter the colonialist gaze that had dominated representations
of Africa up until that time. The emergence of women in African
cinema coincided with this nascent period during which a cadre of
film professionals positioned themselves for the creation of a veritable
African cinema culture.
Black camera, Mar 1, 2024
Black camera, Mar 1, 2024
Black camera, Mar 1, 2024
Black camera, Sep 1, 2023
Safi Faye was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1943, and throughout her life embraced her Serer roots o... more Safi Faye was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1943, and throughout her life embraced her Serer roots of the rural world. Raised in a large family—the second of five sisters and a brother, her parents emphasized the importance of formal education and encouraged their children to succeed academically. She received her teaching certificate from the Normal School of Rufisque and spent her tenure as a teacher in Dakar. As an official guide at the First World Festival of Black Arts held in Senegal in 1966, she was introduced to African cultures and learned about the significance of their contributions on a global scale. This was a turning point in her personal and professional development. During the event she would meet intellectuals from around the world, including anthropologist and cineaste Jean Rouch who would invite her to participate in his film. During the shooting, she would travel to Europe and other parts of Africa. She often talked about receiving a French colonial education, which gave her more knowledge about France than about Africa, and the paradox of having to go to Europe to learn about her continent. In 1970 she went to Paris to study ethnology at the Sorbonne, from a desire to work on her own culture and traditions—she completed her doctorate in 1979. She studied as well at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. As part of the curriculum at the Sorbonne she had recourse to the camera as an instrument of research. Having understood the significance of film as a visual record, she enrolled in the Louis Lumière Film School; there she “dared” to make a film, La Passante, in 1972. Other films followed, fourteen in total, notably the internationally acclaimed Kaddu Beykat (1975), Fad’jal (1979) and Mossane (1996). Using cinema as a tool for teaching and learning, Safi Faye aimed to educate future generations of Africans about their origins, their history. The passion that she had for her continent and its people has been evident throughout her career as educator, ethnologist, filmmaker. She talked fondly of her beloved daughter, Zeïba, who was born in 1976; she was also a grandmother: “I am spending more and more time with them, and I enjoy it.” In 2023 she joined the ancestors, where she lays to rest in her paternal native village of Fadial. But rather than a library burning down—a famous citation of Amadou Hampâté Bâ that she quotes in her legendary film Fad’jal—her story will remain alive, passed on to the next generation, as we continue in the oral tradition, to say her name—and show her work. Safi, may the earth rest lightly upon you. Indeed, in the words of her compatriot Birago Diop, Safi Faye lives—through the sounds and whispers of the Serer country, through her daughter, her grandchildren, through our memories, through her films—the last of which invokes the Pangool ancestors. May they guard and protect her. This essay is a tribute to her life and work.
Black Camera: An International Film Journal , 2024
The objectives of the Close-Up, The Africas-Diasporas of Women in the Evolution of a TransAfrican... more The objectives of the Close-Up, The Africas-Diasporas of Women in the Evolution of a TransAfrican Film Practice and Critical Inquiry, to recover, to chronicle, to affirm, to reimagine even, African/Diasporan women’s cinematic world-making, indeed self-making—envisioning the manners in which they devise, create, make, a space, a universe, a domain, a world; within which they may tell/relate their stories—storytelling as a project of world-making through cinema.
Black Camera, Oct 1, 2016
Indiana University Press eBooks, Aug 8, 2023
Indiana University Press eBooks, Aug 8, 2023
Black Camera: An International Film Journal, 2023
Safi Faye was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1943, and throughout her life embraced her Serer roots o... more Safi Faye was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1943, and throughout her life embraced her Serer roots of the rural world. Raised in a large family—the second of five sisters and a brother, her parents emphasized the importance of formal education and encouraged their children to succeed academically. She received her teaching certificate from the Normal School of Rufisque and spent her tenure as a teacher in Dakar. As an official guide at the First World Festival of Black Arts held in Senegal in 1966, she was introduced to African cultures and learned about the significance of their contributions on a global scale. This was a turning point in her personal and professional development. During the event she would meet intellectuals from around the world, including anthropologist and cineaste Jean Rouch who would invite her to participate in his film. During the shooting, she would travel to Europe and other parts of Africa.
She often talked about receiving a French colonial education, which gave her more knowledge about France than about Africa, and the paradox of having to go to Europe to learn about her continent. In 1970 she went to Paris to study ethnology at the Sorbonne, from a desire to work on her own culture and traditions—she completed her doctorate in 1979. She studied as well at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. As part of the curriculum at the Sorbonne she had recourse to the camera as an instrument of research. Having understood the significance of film as a visual record, she enrolled in the Louis Lumière Film School; there she “dared” to make a film, La Passante, in 1972. Other films followed, fourteen in total, notably the internationally acclaimed Kaddu Beykat (1975), Fad’jal (1979) and Mossane (1996). Using cinema as a tool for teaching and learning, Safi Faye aimed to educate future generations of Africans about their origins, their history. The passion that she had for her continent and its people has been evident throughout her career as educator, ethnologist, filmmaker. She talked fondly of her beloved daughter, Zeïba, who was born in 1976; she was also a grandmother: “I am spending more and more time with them, and I enjoy it.”
In 2023 she joined the ancestors, where she lays to rest in her paternal native village of Fadial. But rather than a library burning down—a famous citation of Amadou Hampâté Bâ that she quotes in her legendary film Fad’jal—her story will remain alive, passed on to the next generation, as we continue in the oral tradition, to say her name—and show her work.
Safi, may the earth rest lightly upon you.
Indeed, in the words of her compatriot Birago Diop, Safi Faye lives—through the sounds and whispers of the Serer country, through her daughter, her grandchildren, through our memories, through her films—the last of which invokes the Pangool ancestors.
May they guard and protect her.
This essay is a tribute to her life and work.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2019
While African women in film have distinct histories and trajectories, at the same time they have ... more While African women in film have distinct histories and trajectories, at the same time they have common goals and objectives. Hence, “African women in film” is a concept, an idea, with a shared story and path. While there has always been the hope of creating national cinemas, even the very notion of African cinema(s) in the plural has been pan-African since its early history. And women have taken part in the formation of an African cinema infrastructure from the beginning. The emergence of an “African women in cinema movement” developed from this larger picture. The boundaries of women’s work extend to the global African diaspora. Language, geography, and colonial legacies add to the complexity of African cinema history. Women have drawn from the richness that this multiplicity offers, contributing on local, national, continental, and global levels as practitioners, activists, cultural producers, and stakeholders.
Black Camera, Jun 1, 2022
The influential film La Noire de… by Ousmane Sembene released in 1966, offers a range of themes f... more The influential film La Noire de… by Ousmane Sembene released in 1966, offers a range of themes for a discussion on afro-descendant women and their myriad experiences in relationship to France. The project that this article undertakes encompasses the period around the time of its release to the present. The challenge that it lays for itself is imbedded in a caveat posed as a question: What does the title even mean in the context of a “France” and more particularly a “Paris” that is often viewed as a “fantasy,” but is a real, concrete place—with its contradictions and faults, promise and hope? Who is this discursive cohort of afro-descendant women—negotiating their place in the country/the capital: as student, expatriate, citizen, first-generation diasporan, third-culture “glocal” transplant, traveler, immigrant, migrant? The films selected to problematize these questions set the framework for this discussion.
Black Camera
The womanist work in African women’s cinematic practice empowers, supports and promotes women in ... more The womanist work in African women’s cinematic practice empowers, supports and promotes women in tandem with upholding the fight for racial, ethnic, social, political, and economic justice in their society and throughout the world. A selection of women’s voices contextualizes the notion of a womanistic standpoint as a conceptual framework that embodies their cinematic vision. Based on excerpts from interviews, critiques, citations, filmmakers’ statements, and intentions presented as leçons du cinéma, in their own voice, women tell their stories about filmmaking, their cinematic vision, their deci- sion-making, lessons learned.
Black Camera, 2014
very existence is a bugbear to some. This is where reality uncompromisingly slashes ideals and wh... more very existence is a bugbear to some. This is where reality uncompromisingly slashes ideals and where the film highlights the contradictions. While a conversation between students, their tongues loosened by alcohol, recalls how enduring prejudice is, reproducing a hierarchy between them, the voiceover indicates that only fifteen percent of the films produced at the school break out of the usual navelgazing or commercial film modes. Lewat shot some preliminary footage and was planning to return for a proper shoot. But given the sensitivity of the subject, she didn’t manage to find extra funding and had to make do with what she had already shot. This can be felt in the avenues opened but then not really explored—for example, the Palestinian feminist who is given a considerable platform, but then is no longer there to defend her point of view and her intellectual and human positions. We thus jump somewhat from viewpoint to viewpoint, in the process losing some of the human depth of Lewa...
African women in cinema studies, a nascent field of research which has taken shape during the pas... more African women in cinema studies, a nascent field of research which has taken shape during the past ten years, is located at the intersection of African women research methodology, women’s studies, screen studies, African studies, transnational cinema and feminist film theory. Its epistemological approach frames the voices and live experiences of African women image-makers at the center of exploration; it proposes an alternative discourse. The paper offers an agenda for future research and study, outlining a selection of themes relevant to African women in cinema studies: the role of the filmmaker in the production of knowledge; African women’s cinematic gaze as alternative discourse: a theory-practice-activist approach; identity and screen practices; training, formation and cinematic identity. Keywords: feminist film theory, African studies, women studies, transnational cinema.
Black Camera, 2018
Abstract:African women as cultural producers in the realm of the moving image, screen culture, au... more Abstract:African women as cultural producers in the realm of the moving image, screen culture, audiovisual media—what are their experiences? These women who work actively in the behind-the-scenes roles; in front of the screen as journalist, critic, cultural reader; in the corridors as organizer, activist, advocate, promoter in the vast cinematic enterprise, many wearing multiple hats as filmmaker, actor, presenter, producer, scholar. Whether working on the local, regional, continental, international, or transnational level, their role is vital, their work essential. This survey by country provides an indication of the span of activities of these cultural workers: most striving for the cause, or out of a sense of duty, or of purpose—some in perilous situations, so that African images are seen and stories told—produced, disseminated, distributed, exhibited, discussed, critiqued, documented, archived, preserved.
Gaze Regimes : Film and feminisms in Africa, 2005
African cinema born during the African independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s re-appropria... more African cinema born during the African independence movements
of the 1950s and 1960s re-appropriated the camera as a tool to
counter the colonialist gaze that had dominated representations
of Africa up until that time. The emergence of women in African
cinema coincided with this nascent period during which a cadre of
film professionals positioned themselves for the creation of a veritable
African cinema culture.
Black camera, Mar 1, 2024
Black camera, Mar 1, 2024
Black camera, Mar 1, 2024
Black camera, Sep 1, 2023
Safi Faye was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1943, and throughout her life embraced her Serer roots o... more Safi Faye was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1943, and throughout her life embraced her Serer roots of the rural world. Raised in a large family—the second of five sisters and a brother, her parents emphasized the importance of formal education and encouraged their children to succeed academically. She received her teaching certificate from the Normal School of Rufisque and spent her tenure as a teacher in Dakar. As an official guide at the First World Festival of Black Arts held in Senegal in 1966, she was introduced to African cultures and learned about the significance of their contributions on a global scale. This was a turning point in her personal and professional development. During the event she would meet intellectuals from around the world, including anthropologist and cineaste Jean Rouch who would invite her to participate in his film. During the shooting, she would travel to Europe and other parts of Africa. She often talked about receiving a French colonial education, which gave her more knowledge about France than about Africa, and the paradox of having to go to Europe to learn about her continent. In 1970 she went to Paris to study ethnology at the Sorbonne, from a desire to work on her own culture and traditions—she completed her doctorate in 1979. She studied as well at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. As part of the curriculum at the Sorbonne she had recourse to the camera as an instrument of research. Having understood the significance of film as a visual record, she enrolled in the Louis Lumière Film School; there she “dared” to make a film, La Passante, in 1972. Other films followed, fourteen in total, notably the internationally acclaimed Kaddu Beykat (1975), Fad’jal (1979) and Mossane (1996). Using cinema as a tool for teaching and learning, Safi Faye aimed to educate future generations of Africans about their origins, their history. The passion that she had for her continent and its people has been evident throughout her career as educator, ethnologist, filmmaker. She talked fondly of her beloved daughter, Zeïba, who was born in 1976; she was also a grandmother: “I am spending more and more time with them, and I enjoy it.” In 2023 she joined the ancestors, where she lays to rest in her paternal native village of Fadial. But rather than a library burning down—a famous citation of Amadou Hampâté Bâ that she quotes in her legendary film Fad’jal—her story will remain alive, passed on to the next generation, as we continue in the oral tradition, to say her name—and show her work. Safi, may the earth rest lightly upon you. Indeed, in the words of her compatriot Birago Diop, Safi Faye lives—through the sounds and whispers of the Serer country, through her daughter, her grandchildren, through our memories, through her films—the last of which invokes the Pangool ancestors. May they guard and protect her. This essay is a tribute to her life and work.
Black Camera: An International Film Journal , 2024
The objectives of the Close-Up, The Africas-Diasporas of Women in the Evolution of a TransAfrican... more The objectives of the Close-Up, The Africas-Diasporas of Women in the Evolution of a TransAfrican Film Practice and Critical Inquiry, to recover, to chronicle, to affirm, to reimagine even, African/Diasporan women’s cinematic world-making, indeed self-making—envisioning the manners in which they devise, create, make, a space, a universe, a domain, a world; within which they may tell/relate their stories—storytelling as a project of world-making through cinema.
Black Camera, Oct 1, 2016
Indiana University Press eBooks, Aug 8, 2023
Indiana University Press eBooks, Aug 8, 2023
Black Camera: An International Film Journal, 2023
Safi Faye was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1943, and throughout her life embraced her Serer roots o... more Safi Faye was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1943, and throughout her life embraced her Serer roots of the rural world. Raised in a large family—the second of five sisters and a brother, her parents emphasized the importance of formal education and encouraged their children to succeed academically. She received her teaching certificate from the Normal School of Rufisque and spent her tenure as a teacher in Dakar. As an official guide at the First World Festival of Black Arts held in Senegal in 1966, she was introduced to African cultures and learned about the significance of their contributions on a global scale. This was a turning point in her personal and professional development. During the event she would meet intellectuals from around the world, including anthropologist and cineaste Jean Rouch who would invite her to participate in his film. During the shooting, she would travel to Europe and other parts of Africa.
She often talked about receiving a French colonial education, which gave her more knowledge about France than about Africa, and the paradox of having to go to Europe to learn about her continent. In 1970 she went to Paris to study ethnology at the Sorbonne, from a desire to work on her own culture and traditions—she completed her doctorate in 1979. She studied as well at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. As part of the curriculum at the Sorbonne she had recourse to the camera as an instrument of research. Having understood the significance of film as a visual record, she enrolled in the Louis Lumière Film School; there she “dared” to make a film, La Passante, in 1972. Other films followed, fourteen in total, notably the internationally acclaimed Kaddu Beykat (1975), Fad’jal (1979) and Mossane (1996). Using cinema as a tool for teaching and learning, Safi Faye aimed to educate future generations of Africans about their origins, their history. The passion that she had for her continent and its people has been evident throughout her career as educator, ethnologist, filmmaker. She talked fondly of her beloved daughter, Zeïba, who was born in 1976; she was also a grandmother: “I am spending more and more time with them, and I enjoy it.”
In 2023 she joined the ancestors, where she lays to rest in her paternal native village of Fadial. But rather than a library burning down—a famous citation of Amadou Hampâté Bâ that she quotes in her legendary film Fad’jal—her story will remain alive, passed on to the next generation, as we continue in the oral tradition, to say her name—and show her work.
Safi, may the earth rest lightly upon you.
Indeed, in the words of her compatriot Birago Diop, Safi Faye lives—through the sounds and whispers of the Serer country, through her daughter, her grandchildren, through our memories, through her films—the last of which invokes the Pangool ancestors.
May they guard and protect her.
This essay is a tribute to her life and work.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2019
While African women in film have distinct histories and trajectories, at the same time they have ... more While African women in film have distinct histories and trajectories, at the same time they have common goals and objectives. Hence, “African women in film” is a concept, an idea, with a shared story and path. While there has always been the hope of creating national cinemas, even the very notion of African cinema(s) in the plural has been pan-African since its early history. And women have taken part in the formation of an African cinema infrastructure from the beginning. The emergence of an “African women in cinema movement” developed from this larger picture. The boundaries of women’s work extend to the global African diaspora. Language, geography, and colonial legacies add to the complexity of African cinema history. Women have drawn from the richness that this multiplicity offers, contributing on local, national, continental, and global levels as practitioners, activists, cultural producers, and stakeholders.
Black Camera, Jun 1, 2022
The influential film La Noire de… by Ousmane Sembene released in 1966, offers a range of themes f... more The influential film La Noire de… by Ousmane Sembene released in 1966, offers a range of themes for a discussion on afro-descendant women and their myriad experiences in relationship to France. The project that this article undertakes encompasses the period around the time of its release to the present. The challenge that it lays for itself is imbedded in a caveat posed as a question: What does the title even mean in the context of a “France” and more particularly a “Paris” that is often viewed as a “fantasy,” but is a real, concrete place—with its contradictions and faults, promise and hope? Who is this discursive cohort of afro-descendant women—negotiating their place in the country/the capital: as student, expatriate, citizen, first-generation diasporan, third-culture “glocal” transplant, traveler, immigrant, migrant? The films selected to problematize these questions set the framework for this discussion.
Black Camera
The womanist work in African women’s cinematic practice empowers, supports and promotes women in ... more The womanist work in African women’s cinematic practice empowers, supports and promotes women in tandem with upholding the fight for racial, ethnic, social, political, and economic justice in their society and throughout the world. A selection of women’s voices contextualizes the notion of a womanistic standpoint as a conceptual framework that embodies their cinematic vision. Based on excerpts from interviews, critiques, citations, filmmakers’ statements, and intentions presented as leçons du cinéma, in their own voice, women tell their stories about filmmaking, their cinematic vision, their deci- sion-making, lessons learned.
Black Camera, 2014
very existence is a bugbear to some. This is where reality uncompromisingly slashes ideals and wh... more very existence is a bugbear to some. This is where reality uncompromisingly slashes ideals and where the film highlights the contradictions. While a conversation between students, their tongues loosened by alcohol, recalls how enduring prejudice is, reproducing a hierarchy between them, the voiceover indicates that only fifteen percent of the films produced at the school break out of the usual navelgazing or commercial film modes. Lewat shot some preliminary footage and was planning to return for a proper shoot. But given the sensitivity of the subject, she didn’t manage to find extra funding and had to make do with what she had already shot. This can be felt in the avenues opened but then not really explored—for example, the Palestinian feminist who is given a considerable platform, but then is no longer there to defend her point of view and her intellectual and human positions. We thus jump somewhat from viewpoint to viewpoint, in the process losing some of the human depth of Lewa...
African women in cinema studies, a nascent field of research which has taken shape during the pas... more African women in cinema studies, a nascent field of research which has taken shape during the past ten years, is located at the intersection of African women research methodology, women’s studies, screen studies, African studies, transnational cinema and feminist film theory. Its epistemological approach frames the voices and live experiences of African women image-makers at the center of exploration; it proposes an alternative discourse. The paper offers an agenda for future research and study, outlining a selection of themes relevant to African women in cinema studies: the role of the filmmaker in the production of knowledge; African women’s cinematic gaze as alternative discourse: a theory-practice-activist approach; identity and screen practices; training, formation and cinematic identity. Keywords: feminist film theory, African studies, women studies, transnational cinema.
Black Camera, 2018
Abstract:African women as cultural producers in the realm of the moving image, screen culture, au... more Abstract:African women as cultural producers in the realm of the moving image, screen culture, audiovisual media—what are their experiences? These women who work actively in the behind-the-scenes roles; in front of the screen as journalist, critic, cultural reader; in the corridors as organizer, activist, advocate, promoter in the vast cinematic enterprise, many wearing multiple hats as filmmaker, actor, presenter, producer, scholar. Whether working on the local, regional, continental, international, or transnational level, their role is vital, their work essential. This survey by country provides an indication of the span of activities of these cultural workers: most striving for the cause, or out of a sense of duty, or of purpose—some in perilous situations, so that African images are seen and stories told—produced, disseminated, distributed, exhibited, discussed, critiqued, documented, archived, preserved.