Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: language, power, identity by Katrina Daly Thompson (review)

Katrina Daly Thompson’s study of Zimbabwean film and television presents a valuable addition to the ever-expanding corpus of analytical and historical studies on African film and media. Very few book-length studies exist on this topic; in fact, only a handful of books cover the film and television industries of single African countries (with South Africa being one of the exceptions), and for that reason alone the book also offers a useful contribution to African film history and theory. Thompson’s focus thus reflects a shift in studying African screen media from a continental or regional comparative perspective to in-depth studies of the national cinemas and screen media of specific African countries.

Thompson’s interdisciplinary approach is of interest to a range of scholars working within areas such as African cultural studies, popular culture, film and screen media. I particularly commend her inclusion of television, as very few studies have looked at the development and reception of television in postcolonial African countries, from either regulatory or audience perspectives. But as Thompson argues, there are good reasons to examine film and television together, as there is often not a big distinction between African audiences’ film and television viewing habits, in the absence of developed cinema infrastructures in many African countries.

Thompson’s main aim is a study of how ‘cinematic arts’ express cultural identity in Zimbabwe. As ‘cinematic’ is usually associated with film, the term ‘screen media’ might have been more apt but she justifies and explains the choice of the term convincingly. She studies what she terms ‘talk and texts’ about the cinematic arts, an inventive and useful approach that looks not only at the primary texts of film and television productions, but also at the public discourse by audiences and practitioners surrounding these productions. The study also interprets how these debates have been received by the Zimbabwean public by linking reception and interpretation to the notion of Zimbabwean cultural identity – an admittedly complex task, as the author states that identity should be understood as socially constructed, and that it is as complex and multifaceted in Zimbabwe as it is in any other multilingual, multi-ethnic postcolonial African state. As Thompson points out, Zimbabwe has had a complex and contentious postcolonial history, and her study presents a shift from a focus on its well-documented economic and political crises towards an impending cultural crisis.

Thompson’s writing is interspersed with captivating anecdotes of her time doing field research in Zimbabwe, which add to the book’s readability. Chapter 1 outlines the complex and problematic history of representation in Zimbabwe. Because of the country’s colonial history and experiences of continuing cultural imperialism in the post-independence era, this is still mostly taking place from the outside. This fact makes the book’s focus on case studies of the ‘marginalized discourse’ offered by viewers and local cultural practitioners most welcome, sketching an in-depth and detailed picture of the complexities surrounding definitions of the ‘local’ in the Zimbabwean context. Chapter 2 charts the development of film and television in Zimbabwe from independence in 1980 until the 2001 Broadcasting Services Act, and includes developments such as the use of the country as a location for foreign filmmaking, and the problems of donors pushing didactic films and development agendas within the context of post-independence optimism, nation building, and attempts to democratize language and access. Chapter 3 deals with authorship and identities, in attempting to understand what makes a film ‘local’. Thompson rightly and convincingly argues that a film’s identity cannot be inferred from the identity of its author, but rather that a cinematic work’s identity is constructed through the ‘authorship’ of viewers who produce their own interpretations of the film’s story. Chapter 4 deals with the presence and influence of foreign cinematic texts in Zimbabwe. Thompson argues that, notwithstanding cultural imperialism, Zimbabweans are active agents who enjoy imported programming and use it to...