Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema ed. by Lizelle Bisschoff, David Murphy (review)

Reviews 197 l’expérience du lectorat au centre de la critique postcoloniale. Une problématique intéressante et une contribution pertinente construite sur des travaux théoriques majeurs et un corpus littéraire et cinématographique qui demeurent d’actualité. Auburn University (AL) Parfait Bonkoungou Bisschoff, Lizelle, and David Murphy, eds. Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema. London: Legenda, 2014. ISBN 978-1-907975-51-6. Pp. 234. $99. Extending work begun in a 2007 dossier of Screen, Bisschoff and Murphy purposefully play with notions of the lost in their title: discovered and forgotten or unfamiliar gems. Not only are the films themselves lost, they often lack the requisite context. Thus this longer reprise forms part of a larger conservation effort seeking to draw together “diverse and fragmented strands of an evolving reassessment of African film history” (5). Part I engages new historical approaches to more extensively explore theoretical, aesthetic, institutional, and ideological issues. Ouissal Mejri’s “The Birth of North African Cinema”traces cinema’s arrival in Tunisia to 1897 when Samama Chikly used a Lumière cinématographe to project and to film Zohra (1922) and Ain El Ghezal (The girl from Carthage, 1924), both of which are analyzed in detail. David Murphy’s contribution more fully contextualizes current understanding of Sembène as the‘father of Africa cinema’offering two other foundational films, Afrique-sur-Seine (Vieyra and Sarr, 1955) and Aouré (Alassane, 1962) in their context as new aesthetic beginnings. Remaining parts offer case studies grouped regionally,with parts two and four focusing on North and Francophone Africa, respectively. Part II on North Africa offers close readings of films by two pioneering women,Selma Baccar and Assia Djebar,by Stefanie Van de Peer, and two chapters by Jamal Bahman on Nouri Bouzid and Mohamed A. Tazi. In Part IV, Sada Niang compellingly posits Alassane’s Le retour d’un aventurier (1966) and Bon voyage Sim (1966) as worthy ‘lost classics’ obscured by the shadow of Diawara’s and Ukadike’s early histories of African film, inspiring Bekolo, Ouédraogo, and Mambéty—a somewhat surprising assertion for a Western and an animated film, respectively. Patrick Williams claims Med Hondo“the most‘lost’of the major African directors”(120). Hondo’s entry into cinema corresponded to a decade of reinvention, when“Third cinema”sought to transform cinematic language and theory, and appropriately so, as Soleil Ô (1969) gives voice to those without and to himself as he develops a political consciousness. Sada Niang’s analysis of Badou Boy (1969) offers a concise reading of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s film aesthetics, teasing out intertextual references of this gangster film. He concludes that Mambéty is not a mere eccentric, but an astute voice for the Senegalese negotiating independence. Much of the work of this volume is archaeological, seeking to surpass extant Anglophone knowledge of African film and its premises. Since the emergence of African film criticism in the late 1980s/ early 1990s with Manthia Diawara’s African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992) and Frank Ukadike’s Black African Cinema (1994),‘African cinema’seemed to refer to sub-Saharan, Francophone film, leaving us the impression that it was born in 1962 with Ousmane Sembène’s Borom Sarret. These essays dispel that misprision. University of Tennessee, Chattanooga Victoria S. Steinberg Ervine, Jonathan. Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the Margins in Contemporary France. Cardiff: UP of Wales, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7083-2596-4. Pp. 240. £85. In 1995, Mathieu Kassovitz made his landmark film, La haine. Ten years later, two young people were electrocuted as they fled from police in Clichy-sous-Bois. In the decade between, as well as the one following, France witnessed an explosion of films about les banlieues and the frequently, though not always, related issues of undocumented immigrants and France’s double peine, which facilitates the deportation of non-French nationals convicted of a crime. Films on these themes are the focus of Ervine’s Cinema and the Republic, a well-written, insightful study of the representation of various marginalized populations in French film. Divided into five chapters and accompanied by an introduction,conclusion,extensive notes,filmography,bibliography, and...