Higgins, Maryellen. Hollywood’s Africa after 1994. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013, 288 pp (original) (raw)

The gaze of Hollywood films about Africa

African Identities, 2010

This paper discusses the nature of Hollywood's ‘gaze’ on Africa. The focus is on the import of the claim that the film Hotel Rwanda (Terry George 2004) is based on a true story – and therefore is somehow ‘true’. Indeed, the film appears to be based on a mode of seeing that is constructed to show the 1994 Rwandan genocide as it is supposed to have happened. I argue that the attempt to make ‘truthful’ films is illogical. It is illogical because it is based on an elemental misunderstanding of the function of cinematic images. The function of cinematic images is to communicate specific ways – gazes – of seeing the world. Behind every film, then, is a gaze, or a conscious attempt to see the world in a certain way. Gazes are not objective, nor do they really need to be. Rather, gazes are part of communities of meaning that have no inherent validity, but must of necessity be contested, celebrated, or fought over. Gazes not only imply a source and a sender, but have never had the capacity to show the world as it is. In any case, truth – whatever it is – cannot fit a cinematic frame, but merely exceeds it. Film texts that purport to be able to project Africa ‘believably’, ‘realistically’ and ‘truthfully’ are either carelessly mistaken, or simply working a deception.

Stereotypes and the Cinema of Africa

Journal of American Academic Research (JAAR), 2023

Published by American Journals Publishing Center, USA (Website: https://www.american-journals.com/americanjournals). The agitation for “Africanness” of the African Cinema came promptly; so did the resolve to launch counteractive actions towards the stereotypical impressions of the African peoples, which was eminent in the imperialist rules across the continent. It is in this same manner, that image reclamation and reconstruction of the negative stereotypes about Africa—as presented through the Colonial Film Unit in Nigeria and other colonial enterprises in West Africa became a concern for the pioneer filmmakers and scholars in various regions of the continent. Obviously, the concept of colonialism was to control or enslave the entire territory, gain access to their languages and cultures and then change them to suit their aim. This work is aimed at undoing the negative stereotypes created about West Africa. Haven used a qualitative research approach, the paper finds that the colonial governments in West Africa and other parts of the continent targeted the minds of the people, played a “mental supremacy game” on them and consequently altered their cultures, projecting and determining how they see themselves and how they relate to the rest of the world. Frowning at the foregoing, the paper makes salient recommendations, key of which is the need for institutions and professional guilds and associations within Nollywood to enact required reforms towards changing the negative impressions about Africa.

African film in the 21st Century: some notes to a provocation

Communication Cultures in Africa (CCA), 2018

As a transnational cinema event, the release of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther (2018) is arguably a monumental moment in the African experience of cinema. Coincidentally, this is followed in 2019 by the 26th edition of the bi-annual festival of Pan-African cinema, FESPACO, which will mark fifty years of the festival’s existence. In addition to the programme of screenings, African filmmakers, critics, theorists, among others, are expected to gather in Ouagadougou to engage with issues of memory, identity and the economy in relation to the idea of a sustainable and diverse Pan-African cinema. These issues have long been prominently placed on the agenda of those concerned with African filmmaking. That they remain a preoccupation of current debates, suggests their persistence, and perhaps, an urgent need for these debates to move beyond the metaphorical polarities of ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘dog eat nothing’. These ‘notes’ are therefore, in anticipation of new perspectives that would shape the futures of African filmmaking. Importantly, a perspective will be sketched to help frame an approach to the idea of Pan-African cinema as a global and transnational economy – cultural, financial and ideological. Keywords: African film, Black Panther, Pan-African cinema, FESPACO, Nollywood, Wakaliwood.

THE CINEMA OF AFRICA: A SUCCINCT ELUCIDATION

THE CINEMA OF AFRICA: A SUCCINCT ELUCIDATION, 2023

Film came to Africa almost immediately after its invention. But Africans didn't get the opportunity to access it until the eve of the imperialist rules within the regions of the continent. This essay aims at identifying the margins and definitions of African Cinema, from prehistoric, historic and post modern points of view. In a way, it also tried to define which film is African or not. It uses a Qualitative approach to analytically draw it findings and concludes that African Cinema is a conglomerate of many national cinemas within the continent and not a single branded cinema as often portrayed in some international cinema discourses.

Glimmering Utopias: 50 Years of African Film

The history of African film began in the 1960s with the independence of the colonies. Despite all kinds of political and economic difficulties, numerous films have been made since then, featuring wide-ranging processes of consolidation, differentiation and transformation which were characteristic of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. However, these feature films should not merely be viewed as back references to specifically African problems. The glimmering fictions are imagination spaces. They preserve ideas about how the post-colonial circumstances should be approached. Seen from this perspective, the history of African film may be studied as a history of African utopias.

Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2016

What does "Africa Watch"? Anjali Prabhu begins her study of contemporary African and African diasporic cinema with a bold proposition: to watch films through an "Africanized perspective." (1) Questions of decolonizing the "gaze," spectatorship, and popular viewership have long preoccupied discussions of African cinema. Prabhu's intention, however, is not to offer a historically situated and experiential account of spectatorship in the African continent but rather to provide a theoretical analysis of the spectator-positioning demanded by African cinema. For Prabhu, African cinema requires "of the spectator an interactivity and emotive and intellectual engagement that transports and transposes questions of Africa into his or her very own subjectivity." (12) The question thus becomes less what does "Africa" watch and more what should Africa, and those outside the continent, watch in order to be "Africanized." Prabhu presents "Africa" not as a narrowly defined geographical or political appellation but as a form of engagement. The study is structured in three parts, each examining a particular formal principle. Part One examines the construction of space and the making of the postcolonial city, first through a close textual analysis of The Cathedral, a 2006 film from Mauritian filmmaker Harrikrisna Anenden, and second through a more intertextual examination of the urban African subject in films ranging from Ousmane Sembène's classic La Noire De. .. to more recent fare, from South Africa's Tsotsi to Morocco's Casanegra. Although the argument of the "Africanization" of space is not necessarily new, it is here that Prabhu's analysis is at its strongest, offering a vivid and richly detailed account of the variety and complexity of African cinematic engagements with urban spaces-through genre, camera movement, and framing-as sites of postcolonial contradiction, dissonance, and irony. Part Two tackles the question of character, developing gendered arguments around the making of postcolonial subjectivities and "revolutionary personhood." In Chapter 4, Prabhu extends her previously published argument on the "monumentalization" of the female heroine in Ramaka's Karmen Gëi; one wonders, though, if this argument, and its attempt to elide the "male gaze" in postcolonial African cinema, is actually fetishization in different theoretical clothes. Prabhu's subsequent analysis of Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palaces provides a slight https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.