Editorial

A new kind of revolutionary attitude, one that accepts contradictions and doesn't discard old values so much as recycle them, is increasingly active in cinema and media. It's especially visible in the work of young African and African-diasporic filmmakers.

In this Framework issue, the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo makes a fascinating bridge in his essay "Welcome to Applied Fiction." He aligns his African childhood perspectives, still vibrant in him when he is with his grandmother in her village, with the "new alliances, new layers, new identification" of which, he believes, cinema, the art he learned in Europe, is capable. His 1996 film Aristotle's Plot (FR/UK/ZW) asked What is cinema? And how does an African sensibility tell a story cinematically? Now, twelve years later, he posits this with more insight: "The question I'm putting is this: How can technology help me as a filmmaker turn the cinema experience into an experience similar to the one I had with the old woman [his grandmother]?" In November 2007 I attended the African Video Film Arts Festival at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. I acted as a discussant in what became a conference on "Nollywood," the thriving Nigerian video industry, which has economically stormed Africa and the world as no other except perhaps the nascent film industry of the early twentieth century. So-called Nollywood is a business of primarily quick videos, made in short periods (sometimes two days), with low production standards. Some videos are much more skillful, and many have a host of assets, but they often are denigrated as low art and loved as engrossing fun. But, whatever its make up, Nollywood has made a mark and, more astoundingly, is emerging as an identity among young diasporic filmmakers. British-Nigerian Zina Saro-Wiwa, whose inventive film This Is My Africa (UK, 2007) screened at this year's New York African Film Festival (NYAFF), thinks of herself as a Nollywood director. She told me that what "makes me Nollywood [is the] fact that I don't use film, the way I get funding, and the attitude with which I create a film. Also the idea of creating new forms of filmmaking or new film languages also makes me Nollywood!" British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah, who was once invited to participate in a Nigerian film festival, also claims a Nollywood status and thus, as well, a Nollywood status for her hard-hitting film Shoot the Messenger (UK, 2007), also screened at NYAFF, about black self-hatred and the internal convolutions of prejudice. The work of Bekolo, Saro-Wiwa, and Onwurah reflect some of the most energized thinking about art, globalization, politics, and form that I hear and see. My guess is, like those who really challenged the status quo in history, these artists have nothing to lose and everything to gain by re-accessing their situation and re-accessing what cinema can do for them and what they can do with cinema.

Two thousand eight saw the fortieth anniversary of May '68, a date specific to the Paris riots but often used to stand for the upheavals of the 1960s. But France's May '68 resulted in fewer key social transformations than those that evolved in the United States. Despite this, in 2008, "1968" retrospectives and conferences repeatedly screened art films of 1960s Europe, with their clean but overt sexuality, disruptive cinematic forms, and antiestablishment position. But these films, however artful, don't reflect the blood and guts of '68 and don't reflect its revolution. Almost entirely made by white, European, middle-class males, they display the gauntlet of prejudice—racism, sexism, homophobia—that dominated art cinema in the United States and abroad. These prejudices rarely are highlighted, much less deplored, when screened even now. That the French were against the Vietnam War was a chic stance of the era, but they nationally had little self-reflection on their own years of occupation in Southeast Asia. Crucial self-confrontation and change—legal, social, and cultural—happened in the United States. An intense dent was made in the wall of prejudice through two decades of violence between...