African Cinema(s): Definitions, Identity, and Theoretical Considerations

Figure C.

Artwork by Carole Ouedraogo. Image courtesy of the artist.

This essay re-examines the various cultural, historical, as well as numerous political considerations that have prevailed in film scholarship since the inception of African cinema. These paradigms deserve full reconsideration in light of the completely transformed postnational landscape where goods, cultures, and individuals tend to circulate with greater ease between and around national borders. In addition, contemporary directors, many of whom have not experienced traumatic colonial experiences, do not feel compelled to "film back" or to be politically committed. Not only are they exploring completely new genres, languages, forms, and systems, but they also omit traditional conceptualizations of nationhood, race, the continent, and political contestations which appear at times to be almost completely lacking from their films. In such a context, the conception of "African cinema" as essentially political, or rendered "authentic" because of essentialist racial, geographical, or cultural considerations, becomes problematic, if not controversial.

In his latest book, African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, Manthia Diawara asks some pointed questions about the interest, or rather lack thereof, vis-à-vis certain African films by its spectators:

Why are we still drawn to films like Borom sarret and La Noire de … and less interested in Afrique sur Seine (Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, 1955), which is made in the language of classical cinema and stars a professional actress like Marpesa Dawn? Why are [Ousmane] Sembène's images of Africa considered richer and more authentic than those of his countryman Vieyra, who seems to have mastered film language? The same question could be asked when comparing Sembène's earlier films to Jean Rouch's Moi un noir (1958) and Les Maîtres fous (1955). Why are Sembène's considered more authentically African than Rouch's films, which were also shot in Africa and, in other respects, upheld as ground-breaking in visual anthropology and the French New Wave?¹

This line of questioning which seeks to problematize "authentic" versus "inauthentic" representations of African cinema may apply equally to Sarah Maldoror, a filmmaker of West Indian origin, married to an Angolan citizen, but whose major work was about Africa. Although her film Sambizanga (1972) has established her as a major filmmaker who best represented the Angolan liberation, nationalist aesthetics, and has been systematically discussed in studies on African cinema, she was excluded from the meeting of female film professionals at FESPACO in 1991.² What, then, makes Sarah Maldoror an "African" filmmaker or inversely denies her of this appellation? While there also seems to be little doubt about Safi Faye's "Africanness," quite possibly because she is black and from Senegal, one is also entitled to wonder how "African" for example, her Ambassadrices nourrières (1984) is as a film about Chinese, Indian, Hungarian, and other "ethnic" restaurants in Paris.

In addition to Diawara's and my own questioning, Olivier Barlet, in reaction to the increase of films on African immigration in Europe, has asked this key question: "Are the new films of Africa African?"³ It is a question he does not explicitly answer but which is central to this essay's understanding of "African" cinema or, rather, cinemas. What is at stake in Diawara's and Barlet's concerns is the very definition and identity, or plurality of identities, of what is meant by African cinema in its singular form. What exactly is African cinema? Or, rather, should we talk of African cinemas? How "African" are films directed by African directors in comparison to those by Europeans whose work have chosen Africa as a category of representation? Is a cinematographic or cultural citizenship feasible, and can one define it in comparison to civil nationality? Is a cultural identity conceivable, and could one define it in relation to a specific national, continental, or racial framework? Is it possible to unequivocally determine, in a way that is coherent and acceptable, the fundamental constituents of an "African cinema?" Should the plurality of the cinemas, as Samuel Lelièvre suggests, be examined on the...