Black African Cinema

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University of California Press, Sep 1, 2023 - Performing Arts - 384 pages
From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa.

Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties.

Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, Black African Cinema's analysis of key films and issues—the most comprehensive in English—is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.
 

Contents

Africa and the Cinema
21
Some Early Contacts with the Cinema
29
Genealogy of an Ideological Formulation
35
Toward a Positive Image?
48
Francophone Origins
59
The Indigenous African Film Production
68
The Schism between Theory and Practice
90
Developments in Anglophone Film Production
105
Oral Tradition and the Aesthetics of Black African Cinema
201
Film and the Politics of Liberation
222
New Developments in Black African Cinema
246
Narration Transgression and the Centrality of Culture
250
Toward the Tradition and the Centrality of the Paradigm
288
Conclusion Whither African Cinema?
304
The Present Situation
305
The Question of Aesthetics
308

Film Television and Bureaucracy
108
The Formation of Independent Cinema in Ghana and Nigeria
126
Contrasts in Ideology and Practice
130
Paradox of Mediocrity?
141
The Cultural Context of Black African Cinema
166
Notes
313
Selected Bibliography
343
Index
357
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About the author (2023)

N. Frank Ukadike teaches in the Department of Communication and in the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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