the video-film industry in Africa is part of a booming informal economy where content is made locally for specific local audiences whose expectations and reception are very distinct from those informing the selection made for international film festivals.
The capacity for cinema as an instrument of political commentary and as a challenge to colonialism, as a reflection of post-colonial experiences and as a challenge to hegemonic, Eurocentric and bourgeois representations, is historically well anchored in the theories of Third Cinema.
Paul Willemen makes a valuable observation about Indian cinema that may usefully be applied to the shift in conditions of film production in Africa:
It allows us to address questions regarding the mobilization of pre-capitalist ideologies and capitalist but anti-imperialist tendencies among urban workers and underclasses; about the operative differences between central and regional capitals, and so on. This type of approach allows us to envisage the possibility that in some circumstances, bourgeois cultural trends may have a greater emancipatory potential than anti-capitalist ones which hark back to an idealized fantasy of pre-colonial innocence (2006:40).
Such an observation speaks directly to the issue of the shifting economic and political landscapes in contemporary Africa. The tension between ‘bourgeois trends’ and a socio-political drive is well captured in Wenner’s reflections on the complexities of programming films made in Africa for European festivals.
And again, as bricoleurs our aim was not to find voices that echo our positions, but rather to position multiple perspectives in their contradictions next to one another and allow them to be interpreted within the socio-political and cultural context, as well as the local and national position of the speaker and the reader. The perspectives of the women whose voices we collected for this book are shaped by their respective experiences of empowerment or disempowerment. They are shaped by class, gender, sexuality and race and so are their interpretations. Willemen draws from Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1986) concept ‘creative understanding’ to address the relationship between reading, interpretation and the position of the reader relative to how meaning is produced:
… one must be “other” oneself if anything is learned about the meanings of other cultures, of another culture’s limits, the effectiveness of its borders, of the areas where, … “the most intense and productive life of culture takes place.” … for Bakhtin, creative understanding requires a thorough knowledge of at least two cultural spheres. It is not simply a matter of engaging in a dialogue with some other culture’s products, but of using one’s understanding of another cultural practice to re-perceive and rethink one’s own cultural constellation at the same time (Willemen 2006:37–38).
In offering this assemblage as bricoleurs we have brought together some of the most vocal and instrumental female-identified cultural practitioners working in film on the African continent today. We follow hereby a notion of creative understanding that not only demands that the writer and participant be subject to making meaning but also, as Bakhtin suggests, invites the reader to rethink their own position when engaging these contributions.
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Mulvey, L. ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema inspired by Duel in the Sun (1946)’. Feminism and Film Theory. Ed. C Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. 69–79.
Mulvey, L. ‘Feminism, film and avant-garde’. Visual and other pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989. 111—126.
Newell, S and O Okome. Eds. Popular Culture in Africa: The episteme of the everyday. Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies. New York: Routledge, 2013.
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NOTES
1 ‘In societies adopting mythical rationalities, Levi Strauss explains, meaning-making processes mirror a bricolage process. Like an “intellectual bricolage”, he explains, mythical-knowers piece together their life-history with artifacts (e.g. texts, discourses, social practices) of their given cultural context to construct meaning’ (Rogers 2012:3).
CHAPTER 1: AFRICAN WOMEN IN CINEMA: AN OVERVIEW1
BETI ELLERSON
African cinema born during the African independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s re-appropriated the camera as a tool to counter the colonialist gaze that had dominated representations of Africa up until that time. The emergence of women in African cinema coincided with this nascent period during which a cadre of film professionals positioned themselves for the creation of a veritable African cinema culture. One such professional of note is the pioneer of Senegalese media culture, Annette Mbaye d’Erneville: feminist, journalist, writer, communications specialist, media activist and culture critic. The first Senegalese to earn a degree in journalism, she studied in Paris in the late 1940s, and since returning to Senegal in 1957 she has devoted her life to the cultural politics of the country, forging important institutions such as the Association Sénégalaise de la Critique Cinématographique, Rencontres Cinématographiques de Dakar (RECIDAK), and the Henriette Bathily Women’s House.2
Similarly, Guadeloupean Sarah Maldoror, who was born and raised in France, joined forces with artists from Africa and the Caribbean during a time of heightened cultural, intellectual and political discovery. In the early 1960s she went to Moscow to study filmmaking. 3 Having already joined the pro-independence movements, it is not surprising that her films would take on similar anti-colonialist themes. She has been a mentor and role model to many African women filmmakers, notably Togolese Anne-Laure Folly Reimann,
