De l’écrit à l’écran: Les réécritures filmiques du roman africain francophone (review)

The symbiotic relationship between African literature and cinema has met with surprisingly little attention from critics. This critical oversight is addressed in Alexie Tcheuyap’s extremely rigorous monograph, which, as its title suggests, provides a series of case studies of cinematic adaptations of a small number of largely canonical francophone African literary texts: Sango Malo (Bassek Ba Khobio), L’aventure ambiguë (Cheikh Hamidou Kane), L’enfant noir (Camara Laye), Sarraounia (Abdoulaye Mamani), Xala and Guelwaar (both by Ousmane Sembene). Not only does Tcheuyap open up a relatively neglected area within African film studies, but he also brings a degree of theoretical sophistication to his analysis that is sadly lacking in much African film criticism. This theoretical interrogation of his subject matter is particularly evident in the first half of the text, which is given over to a sustained questioning of issues relating to literary adaptation, orality, and narrative voice. Deploying a formidable knowledge of both literary and film theory, Tcheuyap consistently tests the specificities of his corpus against a series of “universal” theoretical claims. The style is, at times, slightly dense and the discussion somewhat abstract, but I believe that this is a price worth paying, for Tcheuyap’s text achieves the notable feat of drawing African film criticism out of its often debilitating exceptionalism and places it firmly within the field of film studies. The second half of the text, in which the author carries out more concrete analysis of specific film adaptations, is written in a more accessible style, and Tchueyap’s analysis of issues relating to montage, ideology, power, gender, marginality, and comedy is as convincing as the more abstract ideas in the first section. Informed readers will not necessarily find much that is “new” in this analysis (although the chapter on gender is exemplary in the way it dismantles some received ideas on this subject), but this is not really a criticism, for (as suggested above) the strength of Tcheuyap’s text does not lie particularly in the originality of his analysis but rather in the sustained critical and theoretical attention that he brings to the subject. The few criticisms I do have in relation to the text are largely centered on its omissions. The analysis of narrative structure successfully charts the broad outline of the issues at stake in each of the media under discussion but there is often insufficient attention to the role of genre; for example, if the film Xala differs from the novel of the same name, it is in large part because of the generic shift that takes place in the movement from novel to film. Equally, the inclusion of films by non-African directors within his corpus is a rather controversial move that deserves far more discussion than a brief reference to it in the conclusion. These, however, are minor criticisms, and they do not detract from the overall success of the volume, which, as the conclusion dictates, promises to open up whole new “avenues” of research in the field of African film criticism.