On the Matter of African Cinema—Some Introductory Remarks

"Africa's experience with motion pictures for six decades had been one of existential distress."

—Clyde Taylor

"Cinema is a conversation I hold with my people."

—Ousmane Sembène

What is to be discerned from the long history of African cinema and its diasporic articulations? Like other artistic modes, evinced in a kaleidoscope of genres, thematic subjects, and emblematic representations, African cinema is a work-in-progress, recuperating the past, as it imagines and gestures a futurity.

In the project of world making, African cinematic texts labor as mediated solidarity between the filmmaker/cultural producer and marginalized peoples and movements they identify with and endeavor in solidarity to represent. In the African specificity, such films' reflexivity is at once "about a subject and about itself," in the former, as political praxis, and the latter, the process and apparatus of filmmaking.¹ Differences in genre, aesthetic, narrative form, style, etc. notwithstanding, films of this kind and ilk are in correspondence with historical activity, the evidentiary and the fantastical. Such counter-historical texts, indeed, all cinematic texts, are no less contingent on the vagaries and determinations of circumstance, place, and the temporal by which they are informed and constituted in regional, national, continental circuits of production and exchange.

Broadly speaking, with these conditionalities in mind, the genealogy—the descent lines—of African cinema is situated and rendered intelligible, historical, and culturally distinct. Beginning with the colonial project of denial and cultural devaluation to the formative utterances by African cineastes and their allies to cohere and become a collective call and demand for a cinema borne from and fashioned by Africanity, as a decolonial assertion and valorization of all manner of African experience. No less determining, this cinema's nascita was realized in the play of Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial struggles during the 1960s. Then, in the postindependence period, with African cinemas "nationalizations" in the early 1980s to late 1990s, under conditions of a "market economy," contend Olivier Barlet and Claude Forest, marked the decline of "collective awareness" and rise of a cinema of "individuation".² Since then to the present moment, the authors assert that the digital revolution has occasioned "a radical thematic and aesthetic revival" of African cinema, which in this collection contributors interrogate, as they do for each stage in the continuum of African cinema.³

One of several chronologies mapping the African cinematographic encounter and topography, and its periodization and conjuncture to the present, is suggested in the following, and intentionally, simplified line-up of films.

In 1895—the year of the Lumière brother's screening of La Sortie des Usines Lumière—Félix Regnault documented the labors of a Wolof clay potter in A woman ouolove. The next year, screenings occurred in Egypt and South Africa; the following year (1897), Tunis and Morocco. During the period of colonial denunciation, René Vautier condemned the colonial project in the documentary Afrique 50 (1950, France), Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr addressed identity among African students in Paris and the emblematic and locational meaning of Africa, as a floating signifier in Afriquesur-Seine (1955), and Chris Marker and Alain Resnais examined racism in readings of African art in Statues also die (1963). For cinematic texts during the anti-colonial period, consider Ousmane Sembène's Borom Sarrett (1963) and Emitai (1971), Gillo Pontecorvo's theorized meditation on the Algerian War of Independence in the Algerian-Italian production of The Battle of Algiers (1966), Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga (1972), Med Hondo's Soleil (1970), Djibril Diop Mambety's Touki bouki (1973), and Gaston Kaboré's allegorical Wend Kunni (1982). And during the period of market economy and nationalizations referred to above, Souleyman Cissé's Finyè (1983, Mali) and Yeelen (1984, Mali), Hondo's Sarraounia (1986), Flora Gomes' Mortu Nega (1988, Guinea-Bissau), Sembène's Guelwaar (1993, Senegal), Jean-Marie Teno's Afrique, je te plumerai (1992) and Clando (1996, Cameroon), Kaboré's Buud Yam (1997, Burkina Faso), and Bourlem Guerdjou, Living in Paradise 1998). Lastly, consigning films to Barlet and Forest's contemporary "moment...