Transcript African Film Lecture 12_Presentation

African Cinematography: Colonial
Film to Nollywood
Lecture 12
Derek Barker
www.derekbarker.info
[email protected]
Structure of presentation
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Definition of African film
Defence of African film
History of Film
History of African Film
Role of film
Role of sound and music
Genre
Auteur or populist?
Feminism and Film
African Film
An African film (and African filmmaker by
inference) may be defined in three ways:
Definition 1:
• Director was born in sub-Saharan black
Africa and has spent the greater part of his
or her formative life in Africa
• Film is set in Africa and is made primarily for
an African audience
• In an African language?
African Film
An African film (and African filmmaker by inference) may be defined
in three ways:
Definition 2:
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Director is born in sub-Saharan Africa [North African film belongs
to the older West Asian tradition]
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Films produced after independence (post 1960s – all colonial or
pejorative / propagandistic films are excluded, as well as films in
which Africa serves merely as an exotic background for a story
targeted at Western audiences)
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Film is set anywhere but is made primarily for an African audience
and deals with issues relevant to people living in Africa
African Film
An African film (and African filmmaker by inference)
may be defined in three ways:
Definition 3:
• Location of birth and where the director lives is
irrelevant; the definitive criteria is that the
director’s work (or most of it) deals with issues
relevant to Africa
• Film is set anywhere and deals with African
related issues
Questions on the definition of
African film
• Do we need a definition at all? Some African
filmmakers have rejected the label "African"
and would prefer to be called "Filmmakers"
only, without any qualifiers. Why would they
object to this label? Why do we need such
categories? Or do we need them at all?
• Do these definitions serve any particular
agenda? Is that agenda positive or negative that is, does it serve Africa and Africans? Or
who do they serve?
In Defence of African Film (Barlet)
Typical accusations levelled against African
filmmakers’ films:
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It is not African enough (lacks “authenticity”)
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It is intended to seduce the West (contaminated by the West,
since many African flimmakers are based in Western countries)
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It no longer defends anything at all (it is less committed to
awakening black consciousness)
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It is not for the masses (it is intended for intellectuals or amateurs
of exoticism)
In Defence of African Film (Barlet)
Typical accusations levelled against African
filmmakers’ films:
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It has financial motives (filmmakers in search of Western funding
and easier access to media coverage in the North)
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Young people do not like it (boring, not modern enough)
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It is not urban enough (should document an Africa in crisis and
provide spectators with real-life situations that they can relate to)
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It belongs to others (Western technicians, European money,
requirements of aid committees), etc.
History of Film
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The history of film began in the late 1880s with the invention of
the first movie camera.
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Most films before 1930 were silent.
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1895 to 1906:
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motion pictures move a carnival novelty to an established
large-scale entertainment industry.
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movement from films consisting of one shot, completely
made by one person with a few assistants, towards films
several minutes long consisting of several shots made by
large companies in something like industrial conditions.
History of Film
Up till 1906:
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First commercial exhibition of film took place on April 14, 1894 at
Edison's Kinetoscope peep-show parlor.
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The most successful motion picture company in the United States,
with the largest production until 1900, was the American
Mutoscope company.
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Peep-show type films using 70 mm wide film each frame printed
separately onto paper sheets for insertion into their viewing
machine, called the Mutoscope.
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By 1896, however, motion picture films with a projector to a large
audience proved more commercially viable than exhibiting them
in peep-show machines.
History of Film
1906 - 1914
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1906 saw the production of an Australian film called “The Story of
the Kelly Gang”.
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More than an hour - longest ever narrative film
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First shown in Melbourne, Australia on 26 December 1906 and in
the UK in January 1908
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In 1907 there were about 4,000 small "nickelodeon" cinemas in
the United States; silent films accompanied by music, usually
pianist playing live.
History of Film
1906 - 1914
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Up to 1913, most American film production was still carried out
around New York
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In 1909, first production unit opened in California
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By 1910, the French film companies starting to make films as long
as two, or even three reels
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This trend was followed in Italy, Denmark, and Sweden.
History of Film
1914 – 1919
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films changed from short programmes of one-reel films to longer
shows consisting of a feature film of four reels or longer
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exhibition venues also changed from small nickelodeon cinemas
to larger cinemas charging higher prices after the advent of the
“film star”.
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move in USA towards shooting more films on the West coast
around Los Angeles continued during World War I, until the bulk
of American production was carried out there.
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The Universal Film Manufacturing Company formed in 1912 as an
umbrella company for many of the independent producing
companies, and continued to grow during the war.
History of Film
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1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the "Vitaphone"
system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and
public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral
scores to some of its major features.
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During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer, which was
mostly silent but contained synchronized dialogue (and singing) in
a feature film;
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Not at first considered viable, later "talking pictures", or "talkies",
boomed.
History of Film
1940s
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Demand for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the
film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas like 49th Parallel
(1941), Went the Day Well? (1942), The Way Ahead (1944) and
Noël Coward and David Lean's celebrated naval film In Which We
Serve in 1942, which won a special Academy Award. Etc.
History of Film
1940s
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The US entry into World War II also brought a proliferation of films
as both patriotism and propaganda.
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American propaganda films included Desperate Journey, Mrs.
Miniver, Forever and a Day and Objective Burma. Notable
American films from the war years include the anti-Nazi Watch on
the Rhine (1943), etc.
1950s onwards saw major boom in filmmaking in all industrialized
countries
History of Film - Africa
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During the colonial era, Africa was represented [almost]
exclusively by Western filmmakers.
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The continent was portrayed as an exotic land without history or
culture.
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Examples:
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Tarzan and The African Queen, King Solomon's Mines and, in
the mid-1930s, the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment
(BEKE) was carried out in order to educate the Bantu
peoples.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzcRa6n_qoE
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otze5gxzjck
BEKE
• The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment
(BEKE) was a project of the International
Missionary Council in coordination with the
Carnegie Corporation of New York and British
colonial governments of Tanganyika (Tanzania),
Kenya, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and
Nyasaland (Malawi) in the mid-1930s
BEKE
• The project aim was that of realizing educational
films to be played by mobile cinemas for the
education of the black ("bantu") people.
• Approx 35 such films, on 16mm, were produced
between 1935 and 1937, when the project's
Carnegie grant expired.
BEKE
• BEKE productions were silent, low quality films
with naive plots that usually involved a "wise
guy" (giving the good example) prevailing over a
"stupid guy" (impersonating bad habits).
• While some actors were black, everything else in
the production was British, building on a
stereotypical representation of Africa and
Africans.
BEKE
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The main teachings conveyed by the films were about hygiene
rules, methods of cash crop cultivation and cooperative
marketing, and "prestige films" that highlighted the institutions of
British rule.
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Only three of the BEKE films survive and are held at the British
Film Institute Archives:
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"Veterinary Training of African Natives" (1936).
http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1533
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"Tropical Hookworm" (1936).
http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/735
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"African Peasant Farms - the Kingolwira Experiment" (1936).
http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/230
Colonial Film Unit
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1939 – 1955
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Over 200 short films
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The CFU was originally established under the Ministry of
Information to produce ‘propaganda’ films, encouraging African
support for the war effort.
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After 1945, under the Central Office of Information, the CFU
produced instructional films for African audiences
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From 1950 onwards, the Colonial Office finally assumed full
control of the CFU; ceased film production, instead supporting
and sponsoring the establishment of local film units and training
schools.
Examples
• Landing of Savage South Africa 1899
http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1186
• Father and Son 1945
http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1755
• Colonial Month 1949
http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/387
• Star Beer 1949
http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1887
• Nairobi 1950 http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1698
Barlet I
Western criticism reflects the [paying]
public’s desires and thus the success
of these films in Europe, films by
directors of African descent must
intrinsically prove their African
identity. They can then receive the
supreme blessing: general recognition
of their “authenticity.”
Barlet II
LOADED GAZE OF THE WEST: two criteria come into
play:
• demand for exoticism: films must be limited to
both a geographic territory [Africa] and an
ideological territory (an Africa that is magical,
immemorial, legendary, mythical, and so on).
• demand for reality: films must document
contemporary African problems, which, in
general, are limited to those of the urban milieu.
Fictions must be based on the experiences of a
disintegrating Africa.
Barlet III – 1960/70s
• Early post-independence films of 1960s and 1970s were
about re-appropriating one’s own gaze
• Widespread belief that affirming one’s culture was part
of the solution to economic and political problems
• Radical films attacking neocolonialism (for example
Xala), corrupt new elites, denunciations of obsolete
traditions and beliefs
• Self-affirmation led to idealisation of difference and
belief in a fixed identity proved to be xenophomic,
negative and circular
Barlet IV – 1980s
• The 1980s saw a turn to “novelistic” type
strategies by favouring events over action,
avoiding explaining causes and instead
presenting successions of events
• Messages less explicit, neorealistic narratives that
are not didactic or do not carry and overt political
message
• However, merely documenting Africa through
film in this way (“fictionalised reporting”) or a
realism without a clear directing hand (TILAI?)
Barlet V – 1990s
• 1990s saw realism still dominant, but a shift from
“fictionalised reporting” to a “realism that made
the visible readable”
• The more you show reality, the more you
manipulate it
• Depending on the veracity / believability of the
characters rather than using them / turning them
into symbols, avoiding didacticism and forcing
the audience to think outside of the habitual box
of representation
Barlet VI – 2000 and beyond
Post 2000 strategies:
• Depict the complexities: The aim is not to dress a
story in reality, but to grasp it in all its complexity,
in short, to scramble the markers to depict
Africa’s complexities and to move away from
reductive simplifications.
• Viva Riva?
Barlet VII
• Go beyond autochthonism. This presupposes
letting one’s characters exist freely, for
themselves, in all their singularities. It
presupposes not making them the emblematic
symbols of a cause
• Bamako?
Barlet II
• Capture the present. The filmmakers show not
pity, of course, which would be a slight on dignity,
but a deep tenderness for their characters, an
affection on the order of respect. Their behavior
is never anecdotal: it is that of human reality.
• Dry Season?
Barlet II
Use the intimate to disorient. The purpose of this
quasidocumentary approach is to affirm the human.
The filmmaker manages to reveal what reality
beholds by opening him or herself up to the
intimate, far from grand discourses. Far from
offering a globalized vision of Africa, the filmmaker
affirms a here and now, a place and a country, a
relationship..
• Tsotsi?
Barlet II
Examine memory. This does not rule out the fact
that slavery, colonialism, and apartheid still cast
their shadow on thought and dignity. But rather
than focusing on the torturers’ guilt and repentance,
these films carry out a salutary examination of
memory.
• Teza?
1960s
• African Filmmakers: odd “pioneers of
decolonisation” aiming to re-appropriate the
gaze, reacting against ideologically charged
representations by colonial filmmakers,
ethnologists, missionaries.
= Locked in a negative dialogic relationship
= Odd because considered extraneous to the
project of decolonisation, a luxury, an import
1960s
• Fighting against the “negation of self” conveyed
by colonial images
• “militant” but not “banner waving”
• Replacing the “civilising mission” by the “progress
mission”
• Denouncing obsolete customs and corrupt elites
1960s
• Not only a “decolonisation of gaze and thought”
but a positive project of cultural assertion,
claiming one’s own space and self-image
• English colonists left film units established during
the colonial era for purposes of propaganda;
French colonists did not
• Filmmakers depended on co-productions, little or
no independent African production
1970s
• 1969 “Week of African Cinema” first held in
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
• 1972 Panafrican Film and Television Festival of
Ouagadougou (Festival panafricain du cinéma et
de la télévision de Ouagadougou or FESPACO)
• 1979 Durban International Film Festival
1970s
• 1970 FESPACI (Pan-African Filmmakers
Federation) established
• Promoted films that were militant and
panafricanist - cinema as “tool of liberation”
• “Commitment” films flourish; however, in
practice, many introspective films made in this
period: “finding the self” and populating the
screen with individuals embedded in a place,
thus working against the use of “Africa” in films
as a “setting”
1980s
• “Fiction of the self” : facing the disillusionment of
independence, films depicted new perspectives for social
change and world views
• 1982 Niamey filmmaker manifesto: called for the
construction of a cinematographic industry for “anticolonial” struggle; called for non-binding state support
• CIDC – first Inter-African Consortium of Cinematographic
Distribution; bankrupt by 1984
1980s
• Films mirrored life: dictatorships, economic
struggle
• African films “broke out” and entered world stage
• 1987 Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival to
Yeelen/The Light by Louleymane Cisse brought
wide-scale recognition and commercial success
• 1980s: European Film industry stale, boring:
African films taken up by European audiences in
this period of imaginative drought
1990s
• “Individual and the World” – struggle to find a
path between individualism and the illusion of
identity
• Success of black African films decreased “because
we no long knew how to listen to what they had
to say” (Barlet)
• 1990 Cannes Jury prize for Idrissa Ouedraogo’s
“Tilai” – last film to achieve real international
success for that decade
1990s
• End of cold war and end of Africa’s role as a pawn
in the struggle US-Soviet contest
• Rejection of Negritude / essential “African”
identity
• Soyinka: “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude; it
pounces on its prey and eats it”
• New cinema taking risks in form and content,
asking questions without answers
2000s
• Journey into the Human: return to cultural roots
while still rejecting fixed identities
• Use of techniques of oral literature:
• vagueness about the direction of the
narrative;
• many digressions
• direct address to the camera
2000s
• Oral literature techniques used in films give it a
rhythm comparable to the blues
• Films asking questions about “journeying” into
the world
• Intertextual references to global cinema (Daratt
uses “Hitchcock like aesthetics”; Bamako makes
global appeal for a world that functions more
humanely)
2000s
• Acutely conscious of the state of Africa
• Rather than idealizing origins, African cinema
questions Africa’s place in the world
• Marginality no longer an issue
• Films “vibrate with the complex and violent
relationship to the West”
• No definite answers: “no longer shapes a truth,
but encourages us to reinvent it”
Role of film?
• Vehicle for cultural expression
and dissemination?
• Didactic / education ?
• Leisure and pleasure ?
• Propaganda?
• Pure escapism?
Role of popular video film in
Nigeria?
• Karin Barber: Primary role of popular arts in
Africa is making sense of the experience of
the city and modernity for the masses
• Emmanuel Obiechina: popular arts are a way
address the dislocations of modernity and to
provide some kind of guidance and direction
to the masses of the people caught in the
violence and confusion arising from these
changes
Is cinema good for you?
• Collective experience
• One of the most powerful media in today‘s world –
primary mode of consumption of cultural values
and ideas
• Positively contributes to mental health
• Cinema is a safe environment in which to experience
roles and emotions we might not otherwise be free
to experience
• Exercise of personal preferences – empowering
• Conclusion: cinema attendance can be both a
personally expressive experience, good fun, and
List of Films
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1. Ousmane Sembene (Senegal) – Xala (1975)
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2. Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkino Faso) - Tilaï ("The Law") (1990)
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3. Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe) – Everyone’s Child (1996)
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4. Kingsley Ogoro – Osuofia in London, Part 1 (2003) & Part 2 (2004)
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5. Gavin Hood (South Africa) – Tsotsi (2005)
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6. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Chad) – Dry Season (2006)
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7. Abderrahmane Sissako (Mauritania) – Bamako (2006) [set in Mali]
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8. Haile Gerima (Ethiopia) – Teza (2009)
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9. Djo Munga (DRC) – Viva Riva (2010)
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10. David Gitonga (Kenya) – Nairobi Half Life (2012)
Auteurs or Populists?
Which of the directors
are Auteurs and which
are populists?
Genre
There are two main methods of grouping films - by auteur (directors) or genre. What
genres are the films that were set for this course?
ACTION-THRILLER
POLITICAL SATIRE
DRAMA
DEVELOPMENT FILM/DRAMA
COMEDY
ACTION-DRAMA
POLITICAL DRAMA
Feminism and Film
Which of the films deconstructs assumptions that
view the status of women as natural or simply
true? (that is, where the “natural” role of
women is directly or indirectly questioned?
In popular genres (action, detective, crime) there
is great dependence on stereotypical characters
and clear good/bad distinctions – does this
somehow prevent the positive representation
of female desire? In which of the films do we
have assertive and desiring women?
Sound and Music
What is the role of sound in the films we have
watched?
What is sound doing?
What is achieved in the film by constructing
sound in a particular manner?
Does the sound enhance the narrative or the
image or does it actually change it or
contradict the image?
Auteur/Popul
ar
Genre
1. Sembene – Xala
(1975)
Auteur
Polit. Satire
2. Ouedraogo - Tilaï
(1990)
Auteur
3. Dangarembga –
Everyone’s Child
(1996)
4. Ogoro – Osuofia in
London, (2003/4)
Popular
5. Hood – Tsotsi
(2005)
Popular
6. Haroun – Dry
Season (2006)
Audience
(African or
Wester)
African
Representations of Women
Sound and Music
Examples of positive, assertive,
emancipated women with
agency
Drama
? Not clear,
Subordinated women, but not
prob. Western entirely passive; women’s
desires positive
Dev. Film /
Western
Subordinated women mainly
Drama
tragic outcomes of any
assertiveness
Comedy
African
Subordinated women not
entirely without agency,
stereotypically represented
Action Drama Both
Traditional female roles,
especially that of motherhood
Wolof language chants, un-translated (on
purpose); redundant music; sound plays
dominant role at times
Sections of silence supporting the dramatic
effects of narrative; African instrumental
music + 1 section piano
Non-diegetic Zimbabwean music supporting
image and narrative
Auteur
Drama
Western
Passive female roles; mainly
about men and male conflicts
Diegetic sound throughout except for
narrator
7. Sissako – Bamako
(2006)
Auteur
Polit. Satire
Western
8. Gerima – Teza
(2009)
Auteur
Polit. Drama
Western
Strong, assertive female
Diegetic sound throughout supporting image
protagonists, verbal, intelligent, and narrative
positive
Several strong positive female Sound subordinate to image and narrative
role
9. Munga – Viva
Riva!(2010)
Popular
Action Drama Both
10. Gitonga – Nairobi
Half Life (2012)
Popular
Action Drama Both
Popular
Subordinated women, but not
without agency; strong rep of
female desire
Subordinated women largely
without agency
Ironic use of music giving humorous
additional messages (additional to image
and narrative)
Non-diegetic South African music supporting
image and narrative
Non-diegetic African music supporting
image and narrative
Non-diegetic African music supporting
image and narrative
Thank you for your attention and
good luck in the examination!