African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze

Abstract

LITERATURE AND THE ARTS Olivier Barlet. African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Zed Books, 2000. Distributed by Palgrave. xii + 315 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Appendix. Index. $69.95 Cloth. $29.95 Paper. relationship between the Western gaze and the Other is the main concern of Olivier Barlet's African Cinema: Decolonizing the Gaze. Much like Keyan Tomaselli's Appropriating Images and E. Anne Kaplan's Looking for the Other, Barlet's text reconsiders the relationship between the gaze and its object, relationship that has been explored thoroughly by scholars of film studies and feminist theory but only recently examined in work on African film. Barlet suggests that African cinema offers another way of looking, one that has revealed the African's belonging to humanity (x). It is this universal humanness, for Barlet, that provides an alternative to the binary logic of Self and Other, which continually positions the African as the inferior and exotic object of Western derision and desire. Barlet contends that to dissemble this polarity, the Western subject must learn to look differendy. Yet, in his efforts to define the ephemeral Africanness that encapsulates African film's difference, Barlet secures the very polarity he wants to dislodge. African Cinema describes Barlet's personal and intellectual encounter with African film. His approach is neither historical nor entirely thematic, but rather playful, employing a degree of uncertainty, in order to focus on films as they come to mind and take the reader with me on journey in which we don't always know what lies around the next corner (ix). book is divided into three parts: part 1, The Origin Akin to Passage (chapters 1-6), sketches an African film tradition; part 2, At the WeIlSprings of Narration (chapters 7-11) describes the stylistic features of African film; the third and strongest section, Black Prospects? examines the financial limitations and obstacles that African filmmakers must learn to navigate in order to produce their art. book offers wealth of information on African film and would be valuable resource for both readers new to African film and film scholars. Concise plot summaries of rarely exhibited films are accompanied by rich visual archive, including location snapshots, photographs of filmmakers, and reproductions of film posters. book draws from variety of sources, including interviews with filmmakers, newspaper reviews, critical analyses, and, most interesting of all, well-selected stories from Barlet's experiences with African film and filmmakers culled from years of writing and research. Also of use is an appendix entitled Where to see African Film, which lists information about African film festivals and theaters all over the world. Barlet's text promotes African film and filmmakers, advocating certain filmic, critical, and funding practices. It is liberal humanist celebration of pluralism underwritten by the assumption that the histories and cultures of Africa and the West are not distinct, but entangled. Indeed, perhaps the most interesting, and troubled, premise Barlet articulates is that African film theorizes conception of identity based on synergy (201), hybridization, (201) or cross-fertilization (156) from which we might begin to plot social change and undo the destructive logic of binary oppositions. …