Regarding Cinephilia and Africa

Abstract

Cinephilia in Africa arguably began with Lumiere brothers as early as 1896 when they sent Alexandre Promio, their most esteemed and prolific operator (and arguably first auteur in history of cinema) to Africa to film Algeria. The Cinematographe (and images it captured and projected) intrigued and fascinated Africans, who instantly engaged with it by touching it, positioning themselves in space and time in relation to it and even seeking to appropriate it. A few months later in 1897, another Lumiere operator filmed an Ashanti traveling group in Lyon as part of notorious colonial exhibitions (in effect, popular modes of spectatorship in Europe and North America at time). The doubling of curiositas (for apparatus and for in profilmic space) helped set tone for some early forms of (problematic) cinephilia in Europe itself. Yet, in several of these shot-films, one sees a teacher named Mr. Oko, who wrestles directorial control off hands of Lumiere operator, making him at once arguably one of very first African filmmakers and consequently one of first directors in world. In colonial age, cinephilia took several forms in relation to Africa. This included voracious filming and screening of a plethora of images of Africa designed to justify colonial project and spearheaded by an eclectic mix of characters and institutions from adventurers to procolonial lobbies, from missionaries to governments of colonizing countries. The spectacularization of visual and sonic expressions of African cultures, filming of majesty of African landscapes and rivers, its flora and fauna, played no small role in advent of a global scopophilic regime of cinema. For colonial administrations on ground, African spectatorial cinephilia was often considered subversive. Thus, strict censorship boards were established to prevent from seeing films deemed potentially damaging to colonial system. In some cases decrees were passed to control not only what to screen, but also what to film and who could film under what conditions. In others, a for Africans (premised on notion that could not understand complex filmic language) was invented by such institutions as Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and furthered by Colonial Film Units that often promoted an inept, slow-paced, and deliberately retarded cinema. For African audiences, however, Hollywood, Egyptian, and Bollywood films were what they loved most. Indeed, cinema in many cases was a refuge against harsh conditions of colonialism and oppression. South African actors and writers reminisce in Peter Davis's In Darkest Hollywood (1993) about importance of Hollywood cinephilia as an alternative space of possible in era of apartheid. Yet this very Hollywood tradition also often created a schizophrenic cinephilia by positioning spectators in such a way that they loved narratives, actions, and songs on one hand, but on other decried filmic images that degraded Africans. The battle for African independence was therefore also a fierce and loving battle for cinema, for right to produce and diffuse one's own filmic images, to counteract heritage of colonial cinema and to have a cinematic dialogue between African filmmakers and spectators in Africa and around world. Two major approaches have been experimented since advent of independence in that regard. The first one (directorial cinephilia) has been auteurist. Spearheaded by late Ousmane Sembene, it interpellated audiences as the people with whom filmmaker should identify, whose experiences s/he should seek to translate cinematically and whom s/he should enlighten it as well. This tradition sought to create a new language of cinema that would be appropriate to its socially relevant, pedagogic, and avant-gardist project, producing a fine school of filmmaking that included such auteurs as Souleymane Cisse, Med Hondo, Haile Gerima, Djibril Diop Mambety, and Idrissa Ouedraogo, among others, who gave us unforgettable moments of cinema. …