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  • Africultures Dossier

The four essays that comprise this first installment of the Africultures Dossier were authored by the prominent French film critic Olivier Barlet, director of publications for Africultures. A unique cultural entity and resource for the study of African societies and cultures, Africultures' holdings are vast, remarkable for their depth and diversity of documentation and coverage of cultural developments on the African continent and diaspora. The essays selected for this issue engage with African filmmakers' "new" survival strategies "so that they can exist without renouncing who they are," the absence of a market for African films, and concludes with Barlet's survey and periodization of African film during the past five decades.

  • African Filmmakers' New Strategies
  • Olivier Barlet (bio) and Thibaud Faguer-Redig

The demand for authenticity thought to constitute African identity forces the question of reality to remain central in film. Several recent films reveal new strategies filmmakers have adopted to avoid being labeled without renouncing who they are.

Confronted with Western criticism (which, after all, reflects the public's desires and thus the success of these films in Europe), films by directors of African descent must intrinsically prove their African identity. They can then receive the supreme blessing: general recognition of their "authenticity."

Two contradictory criteria come into play:

  • ▶ a demand for exoticism: films must be limited to both a geographic territory (they must be shot in Africa, a condition for a long time imposed by the French interministerial Fonds Sud [End Page 63] commission, one of the main sources of funding for African film) and an ideological territory (an Africa that is magical, immemorial, legendary, mythical, and so on).

  • ▶ a demand for reality: films must document contemporary African problems, which, in general, are limited to those of the urban milieu. Fictions must be based on the experiences of a disintegrating Africa.

African criticism, for its part, is often a distorted mirror of the North's, at times also spurning "bush films" or very often closely examining the veracity of the film.

These two demands have evolved over time: we have already examined the turnaround in mainstream criticism (the national newspapers and film journals) in the early 1990s,1 which favored the second demand over the first, rejecting new films after having lauded the authenticity of earlier works. These were qualified, depending on the case, as natural, contemplative, primitive, ingenuous, a "cinema of origins," with their charm, or even delicious naiveté, celebrated.2

Before this loaded gaze, filmmakers have developed survival strategies so that they can exist without renouncing who they are, or, in short, strategies that allow them to affirm themselves beyond all projections. A difficult exercise!

A Historical Recap

Gaston Kaboré used to say that "reality is the heart and body of films" in African cinema. This has always been so, but, after a series of impasses, an evolution became imperative.

At the time of Independence, film was about reappropriating one's own gaze, one's own space, one's own modes of thought. The aim was to replace the ethnologist's external or colonialist's propagandic gazes with one's own vision of the self. Like African thinkers, filmmakers believed that Africa could resolve its contemporary problems by affirming its culture. Around the 1970s, the first films made by Africans in Africa formed a cinematic mirror that denounced obsolete traditions, rife with anathemas against neocolonialism and corrupt elites, and called for values that would replace "civilization" with "progress."

This radicalism and its didactical designs did not survive the invasion of television or the assaults of a Hollywood cinema that quickly imposed itself as an imaginative model as well as reassuring entertainment. It came up against the ambivalence of relationships with the West, experienced both as dream and nightmare. [End Page 64]

It was the trap of the mirror: refusing a reductive view of the Other required self-affirmation that in turn led to an idealization of difference, which became dogmatic. The illusionary dream of a world without the Other loomed behind the demand for authenticity. Asserting one's specificity to escape the exclusion of being made to feel inferior led to the formulation of a territorial and racial discourse. Belief in a fixed identity...

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