New African Cinema by Valérie K. Orlando (review)

Published in the Rutgers University Press Quick Takes series, Valérie Orlando's New African Cinema takes on the complex task of introducing its reader to contemporary African cinema both north and south of the Sahara. Orlando opens the book by stating that it will offer a "cogent overview of the latest trends in twenty-first-century African film production" (vii), but she also provides her reader with a history of African cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. New African Cinema is divided into three parts: a thirty-eight-page introduction, a forty-two-page chapter on African cinema from the 1960s to the 1990s, and a fifty-eight-page chapter dedicated to the new African cinema of the book's title. At times the book includes African television and digital media in its purview, but not consistently. New African Cinema seems to be targeted toward undergraduate readers, perhaps in the context of a survey course on international film traditions.

It is quite difficult to tell the histories of North African, sub-Saharan African, and South African cinemas and medias in a single short work, and Orlando for the most part keeps these strands separate. Her knowledge of North African and particularly Moroccan history, politics, and films makes these sections the strongest of the book. When discussing the other parts of the continent, which receive less attention, Orlando tends to rely on series of lengthy citations, which at times give the text a collage-like character. Manthia Diawara's 1992 African Cinema: Politics and Culture, for example, is quoted eight times on pages 22–24 and six times on pages 53–54. Over the course of the book, Orlando refers to important scholarly works on African cinema by Frank Ukadike, Roy Armes, Anjali Prabhu, Kenneth Harrow, and Olivier Barlet (whose name is misspelled as "Bartlet" throughout). New African Cinema also highlights key filmmakers and films from different areas and eras, addressing primarily their social, historical, and political contexts. In the chapter devoted to the New African Cinema of her title, Orlando recognizes new modalities of film production and distribution, with digital video for the most part replacing celluloid and DVDs, and internet platforms replacing chronically scarce movie theaters.

In such a brief survey, it is understandable that an author would speak in generalities. Yet Orlando misrepresents the variety and range of African cinema when she begins by stating that it is "never made purely for entertainment" (3) and concludes by characterizing contemporary African cinema as fundamentally didactic, with filmmakers who "instruct audiences worldwide" (141). The contrasts that she draws along the way are sometimes jarring to a reader familiar with African cinema, as when "raw" women's filmmaking is compared to Ousmane Sembene's "glitzy" work (70). And Orlando's description of all contemporary African cinema as "Afropolitan" (40, 93, 141) both erases any distinction between filmmakers working in Africa and those based in Europe or North America and ignores a by-now extensive literature debating this term.

It is disappointing that New African Cinema appears to have been rushed to press without sufficient editing and revision. In an early discussion of Rwanda, for example, Orlando claims that filmmaking "has returned to the country following the genocide of the early 1990s" (9). To support this assertion, she offers a list of films by non-African directors, yet never mentions Kivu Ruhorahoza's 2011 Grey Matter, the first feature-length film shot in Rwanda by a Rwandan filmmaker. Later in the same introductory chapter, Orlando reverses chronological time to state that the Lumière films shot and screened at the turn of the twentieth century "fueled the fires of colonial desire and were thus a determining pillar of the French mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) of the nineteenth century" (25). Orlando's writing is uneven and can be confusing. In only the second paragraph of the book, we read that "Films from nations as diverse as South Africa, Algeria...