African cinema

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The African cinema usually includes film production south in the countries of the Sahara since it gained formal independence , which was for many countries in the 1960s. In some of the Arab states that geographically belong to Africa , particularly in Egypt , a functioning film industry had developed much earlier. On the other hand, African directors who live in the diaspora are counted as part of African cinema .

Film in Africa during the colonial era

Africa was and is the “continent of projections”, which like no other is covered with images, but also with clichés and prejudices. As for African literature , an important motive for African cinema is the rejection of the racist images of Africa and the Africans that the colonizers had made for themselves. In the Hollywood films that were made during the colonial era , Africa - as it did later in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick - only serves as a backdrop. It is limited to the landscape or is equipped with some “savages” who are stereotypically portrayed as dangerous “primitives” or “grateful” servants. These degrading representations were continuations of the Völkerschauen with more modern technical means in which non-Europeans were exhibited like animals in European zoos.

In the French colonies, Africans were expressly forbidden to make films. The first African film, L'Afrique sur Seine by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra , was therefore made in Paris in 1955 . The theme of Africans in the Diaspora remained an important motif in African cinema.

A few anti-colonialist films were made before independence, such as Les statues meurent aussi (1953) by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais about the theft of African art, which was banned for ten years in France because of its anti-colonial tendencies, or Afrique 50 by René Vauthier about uprisings in the Ivory Coast and Upper Volta, today's Burkina Faso .

The ethnographic films made during this period, for example B. by Jean Rouch ( Au pays des images noirs 1947, Bataille sur le grand fleuve 1950–52), in which the rituals and customs of the Songhai , Zarma and Sorko are documented, are now regarded by many African filmmakers as distorting reality and are rejected. However, with his contributions to the ethnofiction genre he created, Rouch became the mentor of many African filmmakers such as Damouré Zika and is considered the father of Nigerien cinema. Be the first such short film with a play story , Les maîtres fous (1955) portrayed the Haukakult , a dance with a religious background in which the military drill of the colonial troops was exaggerated in order to steal their power from the white authorities.

1960s and 1970s

The first African film to gain international attention was the 1966 film Die Schwarze von Dakar ( La Noire de ... ) by Ousmane Sembène about the desperation of an African woman who works as a maid in France. The film was awarded the Prix ​​Jean Vigo . The writer Sembène had turned to cinema in order to reach a wider public. He is still considered the 'father' of African film today. Sembène's home country Senegal was one of the most important production countries for a long time. His first short film was made in 1963: Borrom Sarret (The Cart Man) shows the everyday life of a porter whose horse cart is used for all kinds of services. The film parabolic describes the structure of the still young independent state, not without pointing out the problems. His best film is often considered to be Xala (1974), which deals with the problem of polygamy . Sembène retained his clear and at the same time rich, symbolic imagery until his last works (2004).

With the founding of the pan-African film festival FESPACO in Burkina Faso in 1969, African film created its own forum. It takes place every two years, alternating with the film days in Carthage ( Tunisia ).

With Soleil O , the Mauritanian Med Hondo caused a sensation not only in Europe but also in the USA in 1970. The film was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival . Politically no less committed than Sembène, he chose a more restless, experimental film language for his film about the experience of being a stranger and humiliation in France, which was made with a budget of only 30,000 US dollars .

Production and reception conditions

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Filmmakers' self-image and political aspirations

The filmmakers' self-image and political aspirations emerge particularly clearly from the Charte du cinéaste africain , which was unanimously adopted at the second meeting of the FEPACI Association of African Filmmakers in 1975 in Algiers. The filmmakers start from the neo - colonial situation in Africa. "Contemporary African societies still live in a situation in which they are dominated on several levels: politically, economically and culturally." In this situation, the filmmakers saw their social responsibility in contributing to the awareness of the African people, emphasizing their solidarity with progressive filmmakers in other parts of the world. African cinema is therefore often counted among the 'third cinema'.

The objectives of the third cinema were defined in manifestos by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas ( For a Third Cinema , 1968) and Julio García Espinosa ( For an Imperfect Cinema ). The third cinema was defined as a distinction from the first Hollywood cinema and an 'apolitical' auteur cinema.

In the words of Souleymane Cissé , “the first task of African cineastes is to affirm that the people here are human beings and to make known those of their values ​​that could be useful to others. The generation that will follow may open to other aspects of cinema. It is our duty to make people understand that the whites lied about their pictures. "

In the first few decades, African film had primarily set itself the goal of decolonizing the view of Africa through its own images of the reality of the young African states and realities. The claim therefore had to be explicitly political in order to achieve this goal: the company deliberately set itself apart from commercial Hollywood cinema as well as from European art and author films. The goal of giving African people their story back was also realized dramatically by making use of a specifically African narrative tradition: the oral tradition or oral tradition. The filmmakers referred to the griots : storytellers who are and have been to Africa as historians, genealogists and ambassadors. The filmmakers not only see themselves as modern griots, but also as development workers for a new, critical dialogue with society.

In recent years, African cinema has increasingly turned to topics that no longer have to do only with the colonial era or neo-colonialism. Your own responsibility is increasingly addressed in the story, as well as problems that are homemade. Corruption, AIDS , the oppression of women, the problem of filmmakers as elites in their own country have been added as new topics. Different genres are also increasingly being served, an "African film" is no longer synonymous with a political one. There are African comedies and dramas, action films and soaps can be found on the video market.

Women as directors

The ethnologist and filmmaker Safi Faye was the first African female director to become internationally known. Her film Kaddou Beykat (Letter from a Peasant Woman, 1975) about poverty and despair in a Senegalese village fulfills the demands made by the Charte cinéaste africain . In 1977, the Algerian Assia Djebar made a film about village life for women. The film Femmes aux Yeux Ouverts (1994) by Togolese Anne-Laure Folly follows a similar feminist tradition .

Sarah Maldoror made her film Sambizanga about the liberation struggle in Angola as early as 1972 . More than 20 years later, the documentary Les oubliées by Anne-Laure Folly is dedicated to the women who survived this war . A younger African filmmaker is Tsitsi Dangarembga , who became known as a writer . The first woman in Zimbabwe she turned with Everyone's Child (1996) a film. Other films by Dangarembga include Ivory (2002), Elephant People (2002) and Kare Kare Zvako: Mother's Day (2005). Dangarembga also works as a producer and in 2003 launched an international film festival for women in Zimbabwe. In 2008 Manouchka Kelly Labouba became the youngest filmmaker and the first woman to ever make a feature film in Gabon . Her 40-minute short film Le Divorce describes the conflict between tradition and modernity using the example of a young Gabonese couple trying to get a divorce from their traditional marriage.

Recent developments

  • Return to the source - films
  • Souleyman Cissé, Yeleen (Mali 1987)
  • Cheick Omour Sissoko, Guimba (Mali 1995)

These films are accused of serving the exoticist tastes of the European audience.

  • Films that are set in the globalized African city such as B. Quartier Mozart by Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Cameroon 1992)

Cinema in the individual states

Directors by country and origin

Festivals and sources of supply

literature

Books

  • Roy Armes: Dictionary of African Filmmakers , Indiana University Press, 2008, ISBN 0-253-35116-2
  • Roy Armes and L. Malkmus: Arab and African Film Making . Zed Books 1991
  • I. Bakari and MB Cham: African Experiences of Cinema . BFI Publishing 1996
  • Olivier Barlet: African cinema worlds. The decolonization of the gaze . Horlemann Verlag 2001
  • Manthia Diawara : African Cinema - Politics and Culture . Indiana University Press 1992
  • Manthia Diawara: New African Cinema: Aesthetics and Politics , Munich: Prestel, 2010, ISBN 3-7913-4343-2
  • Marie H. Gutberlet and Hans-Peter Metzler: African cinema . Arte Edition 1997
  • Marie Hélène Gutberlet : On the road: African cinema . Stroemfeld, Frankfurt am Main / Basel 2002, ISBN 3-86109-167-4 .
  • Francoise Pfaff: Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study . Greenwood Press 1988
  • Francoise Pfaff: Focus on African Films . Indiana Univ. Press 2004
  • KW Harrow [et al.]: African Cinema - Postcolonial and Feminist Readings Africa World Press Inc. 1999
  • Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike: Black African Cinema . University of California Press 1994
  • Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike: Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers . University of Minnesota Press 2002, ISBN 0-8166-4005-X
  • Johannes Rosenstein : The black canvas. Contemporary African cinema . Stuttgart 2003
  • Melissa Thackway: Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film . Indiana University Press 2003

Magazines

(with detailed bibliography and selected filmography)

  • Africultures , www.africultures.com
  • Afrique contemporaine n ° 238 - 2011/2, main topic: L'industrie du cinéma en Afrique
  • CinémAction N ° 106 premier trimestre 2003: Cinémas africains, une oasis dans le désert?
  • Écrans d'Afriques (1992–1998)
  • CICIM - Revue pour de le cinéma français (magazine of the Institut Français in Munich) No. 27/28, 1989 - contains u. a. an interview with Sembène (in German) and the Charte du cinéaste français - in the French original

Essays

  • Fernando E. Solanas, Octavio Getino, "For a third cinema" in: Peter B. Schumann , Cinema and Struggle in Latin America. On the theory and practice of political cinema , Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser 176, pp. 9–19

Films about African film

  • Caméra d'Afrique , directed by Férid Boughedir, Tunisia / France 1983
  • Les Fespakistes , directed by François Kotlarski, Eric Münch, Burkina Faso / France 2001
  • Sud - les diseurs d′histoires , directed by Mohammed Soudani , Switzerland / Algeria 1998
  • Talking about Trees , director: Suhaib Gasmelbari , Sudan / France / Germany / Chad / Qatar 2019, Berlinale -prizewinner

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Beyond Africa: Continent of Projections. Leaflets of the Information Center 3rd World ( iz3w ), 2000, No. 213, p. 16 f.
  2. ↑ Examples of colonial and exotic films at www.freiburg-postkolonial.de .
  3. ↑ Pierre Hafner: The model: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra , in CICIM. Revue pour le Cinéma français, No. 27/28, Institut Français de Munich, Munich 1989, pp. 93-116.
  4. ↑ Les statues meurent aussi , in: www.larevuedesressources.org, 2016.
  5. ↑ Eduard Schüttpelz: The modern in the mirror of the primitive: world literature and ethnology (1870-1960). Munich 2005, p. 296 ff.
  6. ↑ Biography on www.elcorresponsal.com (Spanish)
  7. ↑ Manfred Loimeier: Scene Africa: Art and culture south of the Sahara. Frankfurt / M. 2013, p. 22.
  8. ↑ Thackway 2003, p. 39.
  9. ↑ IMDb

Web links