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C h a P t e r 3 Authorship and Identities: What Makes a Film “Local”? At the end of the twentieth century, fictional film and television narratives— dramas as many Zimbabweans call them—became more central to viewers’ interaction with cinematic texts as their access to “factual” information decreased. Two films made in Zimbabwe, Jit (1990), the first, and Yellow Card (2000), the last one to appear before the 2001 Broadcasting Services Act went into effect, span Zimbabwe’s first eleven years of feature film production and are largely representative of them. The long history of colonial discourse and later Hollywood aesthetics in Zimbabwe’s cinematic culture is reflected in these films’ pairing of education with entertainment, their depiction of local cultures, and their use of English. Zimbabwean filmmakers and critics have long debated the extent to which existing cinematic texts have represented Zimbabwean identity to their satisfaction, tending to react to films made in Zimbabwe as if such an identity could be quantified: a film is either completely Zimbabwean or completely not. What does it mean to viewers for a cinematic text to be Zimbabwean? I argue that a film’s identity cannot be read off of the identity of its author; instead, identity is constructed through the “authorship” of viewers who write their own interpretations of a film’s story. Moreover, identities are not fixed and therefore not quantifiable. Cinematic texts, creative and intellectual property, ownership, and authorship act as proxies in discussions that are really about Zimbabwean identities. Decisions about meaning are ultimately ideological, so the question of what constitutes a Zimbabwean text is open to a range of answers. Looking at film criticism not only by professionals but also by ordinary viewers, we find that what they say about films is an important kind of discourse—so important that it has the power to disrupt the binary categories that dominate other conversations about Zimbabwean identity. Is a Zimbabwean film one about Zimbabweans? Is it one made by a Zimbabwean? If so, how do we determine who is a Zimbabwean? Is it one that expresses a Zimbabwean “vision”? If so, how is that vision defined? In my 2001 conversation with Remias Msasa, the head of TV production at ZBC, he raised similar questions, asking how local should be defined—Zimbabwean or African? What if a Zimbabwean makes it with a foreign audience in mind? Or a foreigner with a Zimbabwean audience in mind? Cinematic texts are produced by a crew 72 Zimbabwe’s CinematiC arts rather than an individual and funded by still others, so we might ask: who counts as a film’s maker or author? While race is still a difficult subject, Mugabe’s vitriolic discourse about Zimbabwe’s white citizens raises questions about whether a white filmmaker is Zimbabwean. The films made in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 2001 may or may not be called Zimbabwean depending on how one answers these questions. No critic, to my knowledge, has attempted to answer such questions, but the words critics choose to describe a film often implicitly construct Zimbabwean identities. By examining discourse about particular films, we can see how identity has been constructed and contested. I agree with feminist scholar Chris Weedon that “authorship cannot be the source of authority of meaning.”1 The involvement of Zimbabwean people in cinematic production and their viewing of cinematic texts have significant implications for their negotiation of not only a film’s identity but also their own identities. Moreover, those identities encompass national identity as well as language, age, stances toward tradition and modernity, socioeconomic class, race, and gender. What Counts as “Zimbabwean” for Critics? A concern with “firsts” is often used to delineate the identity of a film. What was the first Zimbabwean film? Who was the first Zimbabwean director? Kedmon Hungwe calls Jit (1990), directed by white filmmaker Michael Raeburn, the “first locally produced post-independence feature film,” calling attention to the differences between the film and the previous features made by international producers who had used Zimbabwe as a location. On the other hand, William Brown and Arvid Singhal call Neria (1992), directed by black filmmaker Godwin Mawuru, “Zimbabwe’s first feature film made by a local director.”2 Is Michael Raeborn less local than Mawuru? Does his whiteness make him foreign? Film critics interested in gender representation in the cinematic arts raise similar questions. Who was Zimbabwe’s first female film director? In Culture and Customs of Zimbabwe, Oyekan Owomoyela gives this credit to...

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