James E. Genova. Cinema and Development in West Africa.

Abstract

This short book is a study of the history of cinema production and distribution in colonial and postcolonial French West Africa. Its main goal is to reconstruct the political and cultural context in which a pioneering cohort of African filmmakers emerged. James E. Genova asserts that the work of such directors as Med Hondo, Souleymane Cissé, and Ousmane Sembène is too often evaluated (and criticized) without a thorough understanding of the conditions of production, distribution, and censorship imposed upon these artists by colonial and postcolonial regimes. This has led to an under-appreciation of the institutional and structural obstacles that informed their art. Viewed in their proper historical context, these filmmakers can be recognized as heroic figures who boldly challenged the cultural imperialism of the French government and its postcolonial collaborators. The book's title is somewhat misleading, as the work is narrowly focused on cinema in Francophone West Africa. Nor is it interested in the relationship between development and film as it was understood by colonial filmmakers, that is, as a didactic genre intended to improve the material conditions of the African masses. “Development” here is used more broadly to also include the inculcation of an anti-imperialist, modernist sensibility among the African public. Although the early chapters place the films of these pioneers in a colonial context, the work's focus is the decade immediately following independence, in which a handful of high-profile films were made by the luminaries of African cinema.