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Books on
African Film
African Film:
Re-Imagining a Continent
/
Symbolic Narratives: African Cinema
African
Cinema: Politics and Culture
Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives In
Sub-Saharan Francophone African Films
Black
African Cinema /
African Cinemas:
Decolonizing the Gaze
Questioning African
Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers
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Reviews
Symbolic Narratives: African Cinema
This volume
provides a unique and unprecedented forum for debate
between the different African cinematic communities
(including North African filmmakers). Views are
exchanged on topics ranging from the problems of
production, exhibition, and distribution to questions of
"modernity," postcolonial theory, and the (arguably
increasing) presence of western cultural imperialism.
The papers and the responses to the papers edited by
critic and programmer June Givanni are presented in full
and Imruh Bakari's introduction places the material in
the context of previous and subsequent debate.
Contributors: Manthia Diawara, Teshome Gabriel, Clyde
Taylor, John Badenhorst, Ferid Boughedir, Gaston Kabore,
Tafatoana Mahoso.
Contributing film-makers: Ousmane Sembene, Idrissa
Ouédraogo, Haile Gerima, Nouri Bouzid, John Akomfrah,
Kobena Mercer, Ella Shohat, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Tahar
Cheriaa, and Sylvia Wynter
About the Author
June Givanni was editor of the Black Film Bulletin until
1997 and is now a freelance film programmer and African
cinema consultant/advisor. Imruh Bakari lectures in
Media, Film and Communication at King Alfred's College,
Winchester, and is coeditor of African Experiences of
Cinema (BFI, 1996).
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Black African Cinema
From the
proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian
missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa
through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the
development of black African cinema. He examines the
impact of culture and history, and of technology and
co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa.
Every aspect of
African contact with and contribution to cinematic
practices receives attention: British colonial cinema;
the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering
"francophone" films; the effects of television on the
motion picture industry; and patterns of television
documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike
gives special attention to the growth of independent
production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba
theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist
tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers.
He offers a lucid
discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and
the relationship between cinema and other forms of
popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films
with those based on the traditional paradigm, he
explores the trends emerging from the eighties and
nineties.
Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general
reader alike, Black African Cinema's analysis of key
films and issues--the most comprehensive in English--is
unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds
important new strategies for appraising a cinema that
increasingly attracts the attention of film students and
Africanists.
About the Author
N. Frank Ukadike teaches in the Department of
Communication and in the Center for Afro-American and
African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor.
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Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with
Filmmakers
Diverse in their art, paradoxically
more celebrated abroad than they are at home, African
filmmakers eke out their visions against a backdrop of
complex historical, social, economic, and political
practices. The richness of their accomplishments emerge
with compelling clarity in this book, in which African
filmmakers speak candidly about their work.
Featuring
interviews with key personalities from a variety of
nations, Questioning African Cinema provides the most
extensive, comprehensive account ever given of the
origins, practice, and implications of filmmaking in
Africa. Speaking with pioneers Med Hondo, Souleymane
Cissé, and Kwaw Ansah; renowned feature filmmakers
Djibril Mambéty, Haile Gerima, and Safi Faye; and
award-winning younger filmmakers Idrissa Ouedraogo,
Cheick Oumar Sissoko, and Jean-Pierre Bekolo, N. Frank
Ukadike identifies trends and individual practices even
as he surveys the evolution of African cinema and
addresses the politics and problems of seeing Africa
through an African lens.
Situating the
unique achievement of each filmmaker within the
geographic, historical, social, and political context of
African cinema, he also explores questions about acting,
distribution and exhibition, history, theory and
criticism, video-based television production, and
television's relationship to independent film.
About the Author
N. Frank Ukadike is associate
professor of film and of African and African diaspora
studies at Tulane University.
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update 4 August 2008 |
