awareness of the complex intersections between gender and ethnicity. Notions of authentic culture often reinscribe patriarchal hegemony, while claiming anti-colonial agency:
In relation to who is able to make claims on the state, and how those claims might advance Third Cinema, it is useful to note the masculinist and occidental bias in the original theories, given that approaches may vary not only according to historical circumstances (which Solanas and Getino recommend), but according to gender and ethnicity. Feminist cinema and indigenous media have had [a] far-reaching impact on the mode of production, chosen film language, and targeted audience, which might not always be a “mass” audience, yet is viewed as no less conducive to generating change at the national level. Finally, there is the complex goal of cultural self-determination, and the extent to which a truly autochthonous media practice can develop in under-industrialized or in neo- and postcolonial circumstances (Benamou [nd]).
To write against, or rather re-frame, the revolutionary discourse of Third Cinema is not simply to bring gender into the equation, but to further account for technological shifts that inform production conditions and to recognise that some of the canonised discourses on African representation also need to be reconsidered against emerging nationalist discourses which serve to subvert the historically more ‘homogenising’ discourses on cultural production in Africa.
In a broad historical overview, Beti Ellerson’s account offers some of the key moments and early women contributors to the building of cinema on the African continent. Her contribution sets the terrain to contextualise the establishment of the Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) and the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) in 1969 and the political agenda that informed these initiatives. African Cinema taxonomy and theory was, in part, the recognition of the representation of colonialism – the use of films to rethink pre-colonial knowledge and as a mode of realist storytelling to capture the experiences of colonialism and the post-colonial state. In this historical context the notion of ‘privileged’ is a way of suggesting that the filmmakers mostly referred to in this canon were formally trained as filmmakers – many of them in institutions abroad. This distinction is necessary as contemporary practices of filmmaking on the continent, as result of technological accessibility, have revolutionised the landscape of contemporary filmmaking in Africa. African Cinema, posited as a Pan-African concept with its impetus informed by a political vision to use cinema not only to connect and make accessible the experiences of Africans to each other, also served as a vehicle for different, non-Eurocentric, cultural representations. As Diawara writes:
… the new members of the FEPACI believed their prophetic mission was to unite and to use film as a tool for the liberation of the colonized countries and as a step toward the total unity of Africa. It was in this sense that in its early days FEPACI sought to be affiliated with its sister association, the Organization of African Unity (OAU). In 1969, at the Festival Panafricain de la Culture in Algiers, African filmmakers gathered to create an inter-African organization (1992:39).
The establishment of FEPACI was a defining moment for the programmatic agenda of ‘decolonising cinema’.
Decolonisation by rejecting white imaginations in cinematic representations was a way of building solidarity; a way to provide a platform for a conscious political will through cinema and to ‘take back’ African history which, through colonialism, had denied Africans the ability to tell stories in a uniquely African way. While FEPACI continues to be instrumental in organising the biennial film festival in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, exponential changes and growth of film production on the continent have created a new generation of filmmakers who, firstly, do not rely on the privilege of formal film school training and, secondly, are able to tap directly into markets and create content outside of the infrastructure that has historically been necessary for the making of films (for example, national funding sources and foreign funding agencies).
There are a number of important and interesting contradictions emerging from these contemporary production conditions. These are largely informed by the collapse of certain infrastructures (for example, the closing down of many movie theatres and a lack of funding from broadcasters). Digital technology and the rapid turnover from production to distribution have further facilitated and revolutionised how films as products move into markets, not only locally and nationally, but through the current prolific network for moving products into the diaspora more globally.
Christina von Braun’s chapter, ‘Staged Authenticity’ makes a significant departure from the more accepted idea that filmic gaze is gendered. She argues for a neutrality of the gaze on account of its mediation through the camera apparatus and rethinks the position of the observer and the potential offered in reordering gender. It is an important political move that suggests that the camera and the act of filming can ‘choose between identifying with masculinity or femininity, between the experience of “inviolability” and that of “lack”, and even both simultaneously’. Such a hypothesis allows for a radical shift in the politics of gaze regimes initially inscribed in cinema studies (Laura Mulvey 1975, 1981, 1989), and creates the possibility for reconfiguring identity formations to serve the multiple functions that the ‘cinema-arm’ offers in an African context. Von Braun concludes: ‘[t]hat means learning to differentiate between the phantasmal self-images of the collective imaginary and one’s own individual violability. Only then can the images of the collective imaginary be “made legible”’. It is this invitation to view the apparatus as the camera with infinite identity possibilities that enables women’s film narratives to be extricated from a gendered gaze. This offers the starting point for the rest of the contributions, where there is an acute awareness that the women who reflect on their experiences and observations do so from multiple historical-political positions: colonial histories, histories of liberation and oppression. These histories and places of personal memory constitute the place for a re-imagined sense of the collective which informs a number of the underlying concerns expressed by the subjects who are interviewed in this book: Jihan El-Tahri and Taghreed Elsanhouri.
In the interview that Ines Kappert conducts with Christina von Braun and Taghreed Elsanhouri, the two subjects answer very differently to the question ‘Are you a feminist?’ Elsanhouri speaks of her identification as a ‘feminist’ as a private articulation while Von Braun offers a public declaration of her political subject positioning. Herein lies the summation of the recurring tensions that emerge in the interviews that follow and the prevailing themes that underpin the experiences of women on the African continent. The multiple roles of women, not simply as cultural practitioners in film, is bifurcated if not multi-furcated; a split-consciousness with dual agendas that inform their politics and their practices and reveal the tensions between private positions and public articulations.
There are other participants who totally refute any feminist categories, who do not ascribe to feminist politics as collective identity, as tools of analysis and as vehicle for change. Feminism for them is neither instrumental in informing their practice nor relevant in transforming the patriarchal structures in their communities. Instead, in their discussions femininity and feminism come to be conflated or are viewed as mutually exclusive. Feminism is an individual experience, a private act, and the collectivisation of feminist politics is seen, in part, as anti-feminine. In this instance, these film practitioners claim an individual agency but refuse a collective political identity. This refusal is not infused with a post-modern anti-identitarian critique as raised by post-colonial and/or queer feminists, who problematise politics of belonging based on imagining a homogenous ‘we’. The rejection of the need to adopt a position within a chosen political collective is often grounded in situating oneself as an individual, in notions of natural femininity and heterosexuality and/or a tactical disguise of one’s sympathies with a collective battle in order to better ‘work the system from within’. Mozambican filmmaker Isabel Noronha in her interview with Max Annas and Henriette Gunkel calls her filmmaking practice ‘cinema of
