essays and interviews are informed by a set of different inquiries unified not by an essentialising retreat to a universal womanhood, but by an interrogation of what it means for people who self-identify as women to work with and in film in various contemporary contexts on the African continent.
The stories are nomadic. They transgress the shores of Africa as a geographical location, inviting reflections from the post-colonial West, including perspectives from the African diaspora in the USA and Europe, and sympathetic positions of anti-imperial self-reflections on North-South collaboration. Whereas the initial conversations at the Goethe-Institut also included practitioners from countries formerly colonised by Portugal and France, one could argue that due to the prevalence of Anglophone academic structures and the linguistic hegemony of English, not only in Africa, the British Empire has succeeded posthumously one more time. Therefore this compilation is, with some exceptions, located in an Anglo-Saxon-inspired framework.
After the Goethe-Institut’s ARTSWork: Meeting of African Women Filmmakers in 2010, we took three years to search for more stories, experiences, insights and analyses to enable the evolution of the project. Our ‘field research’ resulted in a heterotopian set of contributions, interviews, manifestos, keynote addresses, reflections and discussion statements which form an assemblage – coming together here as bricolage.
As mentioned earlier, this approach also implied a grappling with the expectations and restrictions of academic publishing, which at times appeared to be at odds with Claude Levi-Strauss’s concept of ‘wild thinking’, introduced in his book The Savage Mind (1962), which ‘employed the bricolage metaphor in his search for underlying structures that govern human meaning-making’ (Rogers 2012:2), and this became an inspiration for our textual assemblage. The value chain of cultural practitioners is reflected in the bricolage approach of this collection, which seeks to create a way of understanding the multiple factors that are involved in meaning-making and knowledge production, specifically in relation to the conditions that women in film practice encounter.
The stories required alternative research methodologies to echo the layered understanding and knowledge of what it means to identify as a woman film practitioner on the African continent. As ‘wild thinking’ bricoleurs, we employed another concept from Levi-Strauss: the notion of ‘mythical rationalities’.1
This notion was useful for collecting stories on two levels: firstly, the filmmakers are storytellers within the narrative world of the films they make; and secondly, they tell the stories of their practice of making films: the obstacles, trials, tribulations and triumphs. The sum of these narratives further contributes to how meaning is made and serves to enhance the understanding of the socio-cultural and economic circulation of these products as cultural and political artefacts.
The multiple layers of making meaning and making sense of the climate and landscape of filmmaking are seen through the veneer of the different strata at which knowledge production is possible. The conditions for differing regimes of hetero-patriarchy and (neo)-postcolonialities are inscribed in the hierarchy of cultural production: from the producers, filmmakers, curators, businesswomen and entrepreneurs, to the cultural commentators. To reflect the multiple positions women encounter in their work lives, often very much entwined with their private lives, situated within the public complexities of post-conflict and sometimes neo-colonial societies, necessitated a non-dogmatic approach, an approach that could hold ambiguities and seeming contradictions together, that did not position all women as those to whom something is done and all men as those who are doing and that enabled us to reflect on the lived realities of a North-South exchange within multiple sets of power relations without searching for innocent authenticities. What was needed was an approach recognising and promoting a different kind of knowledge production.
The socio-cultural and economic circulation of films as cultural and political artefacts provides the context to engage the relationship of filmic practices with modes of social change and justice, as well as forms that engage collective traumata.
An increasingly wide range of studies on the social, political, cultural and psycho-social consequences of regimes of terror and violence, most prominently of the Holocaust and transatlantic slavery, speak to the inter-generational transmission of trauma. This happens not only between individuals but, due to the intersection of collective and individual traumata, also within the different generations of traumatised collectives more broadly. These processes are highly gendered and racialised as they are based in past and present identification politics: who has been identified/labelled by whom as what and consequently been violated? These politics often inform till today, in more or less subtle ways, individuals’ and groups’ access to redress and to resources. These politics are used to reinforce or to dismantle systems of privilege. Trauma is intimately linked to the hidden, the repressed and the forbidden – to taboos and silences. As such, collective traumata are related to memory politics: to acts of silencing and to the remembrance of certain experiences and stories on behalf of others. The politics of memory itself reflects gendered and racialised power relations (see the interviews with Djo Tunda wa Munga and Rumbi Katedza and the examination of Zanele Muholi’s work).
The political condition of colonial histories, coupled with the violence of creating post-colonial freedoms in Africa, emphasises the significance of trauma as subject matter in film. As subject matter it enables filmmakers to access production possibilities (funding and exhibition) and it circumscribes form and content.
These circumstances lead to questions around establishing women’s film productions as normal commodities within the framework of an (often still to be established) industry versus artistic freedom under conditions of severe financial restrictions and a lack of infrastructure and state support. The gap is often filled with NGO money, which poses new questions about independence and ‘agenda setting’.
Access is not simply about navigating the local and regional production terrain. One of the complexities for women practitioners is the recurring issue of funding, resources and infrastructure. There is an important double bind in the funding models for filmmakers on the African continent. Many projects which allow opportunities for filmmakers are projects commissioned by NGOs which have specific mandates on their content production. Often themes that pertain to health, children and women’s issues, or human rights programmes, or those that deal with the traumatic impact of civil unrest are well funded and offer filmmakers sustainable employment. But these projects are not necessarily the projects with which filmmakers themselves want constantly to be involved in the way that NGOs require.
NGOs are invariably positioned in the North and create varying dependencies on how content is generated on the African continent and across classic North-South divides. Through these platforms of North-South exchange a conversation between cultural agents in film production, film programming (film curating), film criticism and the reception of film offers further reflection on how meanings come to be made differently, based on the various contexts of their reception. This is dealt with through the interviews and case studies documented in the latter part of the book.
The initial three chapters serve as a way of establishing the themes of the book in relation to one another. Beti Ellerson’s historical overview of women filmmakers in Africa, alongside Christina von Braun’s interrogation of the development on ideas of ‘the gaze’ in relation to feminist theory take the reader into a direct conversation, mediated by Ines Kappert, that questions experiences of feminist values versus practice and its lived experiences.
Since 1969, the Third Cinema manifesto written by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino has challenged dominant modes of production and representation inscribed in North American and European ideologies. However, the politics of the manifesto and its underlying theories were developed further to address its appropriation in an African context and, more recently, to incorporate multi-culturalism as one of the means to find elasticity in its definition. Feminist re-readings acknowledge not only the need to critically (re)-examine the maybe too-positive
