Critical Interventions Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture African Cinema(s (original) (raw)

African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics

2010

African Film is mostly set in Ouagadougou, Berlin and Nollywood. Extended by Visions of a New African Cinema and Filmographies, the book is visually cinematic. Its layout displays a spectacular use of color, form and space. Preceding the forward, seven photographic pages from different films preview its content.

Imruh Bakari, Mbye Cham, African Experiences of Cinema

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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.

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.

Is the African Cinema Definition ‘Real’ or ‘Idealistic’

International Journal of Current Research in the Humanities

To a large extent, the world seems to have seen more films from the West than from anywhere else. In sub-Saharan Africa for example, it was not until the early 1960s that the Africans had the opportunity to stand behind the lens to tell their own story. Unlike the cinema of the West, ‘African cinema’ was borne more out of the resistance to its representation by the West. From Ousmane Sembene’s time till now, other filmmakers from Anglophone as well as Lusophone countries have made different films on different subjects about nation and culture. But in many scholarly writings, for several years, these national cinemas are not seen as such but are bundled up under the rubric of African cinema. Who defines African cinema, can we look at its constituents as national cinemas? Is the definition known before evolving? Are the films made in contemporary times in cosmopolitan settings losing their ‘Africanness’? Does the term African cinema possess colonial undertones? This article seeks to t...