Black African CinemaFrom 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
21 | |
29 | |
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 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Afri African countries African culture African film practice Ansah artistic audience Balogun black African cinema black African film Black African Filmmakers Borom Sarret Bosomfield British Film Institute Burkina Faso camera Camp de Thiaroye Ceddo Cissé's colonial Côte d'Ivoire creative critics dance Decolonizing depicts director documentary dominant economic ethnographic European example Fanon feature films FESPACO Film Festival film industry Film Institute film production film's filmic Finzan foreign France francophone French Gaston Kaboré Ghana griot Hollywood Hondo ideological Idrissa Ouedraogo images independence indigenous Kaboré Mandabi Med Hondo ment neocolonial Nigeria oral tradition Oumarou Ganda Ousmane Sembene pan-African Pfaff political Press problems programs revolutionary role Rouch Sarraounia scene Sembene's Senegal sequence shot social Soleil story storytelling strategy struggle style television theater theme Third Cinema Third World tion viewer village Visages de femmes Wend Kuuni West Africa Western Xala Yaaba Yeelen York Yoruba