The Black Face Of Cinema In Africa

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. Festival Panafricain de Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (Burkina Fasso)/Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou. 2. Some books even deal what is called ‘Third World Cinema’, referring not only to cinema from Africa but also from parts the Middle-East, Asia, Latin America and India. 3. Franz Fanon (Martinique, 1925–1961) is a pre-eminent theoretician of decolonisation. His best known work, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), is a personal account and conscientious study of his experience as a black intellectual in France. 4. Resolution on African Cinema (Propos sur le cinéma African), speech given at the Présence Africaine conference in 1958. 5. Gutsche's book is based on the doctoral thesis she submitted in 1946. 6. From 1896 to 1964, Zimbabwe was a British colonial settler state named Southern Rhodesia. Thereafter, until 1980, it was simply known Rhodesia. 7. In the 1920s, William Sellers, a medical officer with the Nigerian government, developed a special method to make films for African audiences. The rules he proposed were first tested in 1935–1937 by L. A. Notcutt and G. C. Latham in what is now known as the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE). These experiments resulted largely in a confirmation of the rules for making films for illiterate Africans put forward by Sellers. 8. See e.g. R. Smyth, The British Colonial film unit and sub-Saharan Africa, 1939–1945, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 3(2) (1983), 135–143; R. Smyth, Movies and mandarins: the official film and British colonial Africa, in: J. Curran and V. Porter (eds) British Cinema History (New York, Barnes and Noble Books, 1983), pp. XXX; D. Kerr, The best of both worlds: colonial film policy and practice in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Critical Arts: A Journal of Cultural Study, 2(X) (1993), 11–42. 9. V. Wheat (2005) Where to view, rent, and purchase African feature films: Africa, Europe, the United States and Canada, in: Focus on African Films, pp. 273–303. 10. My translation. ‘Notre cinema ne pourra qu’enrichir le cinema mondial en révélant au reste du monde sa face la plus … noire et la moins connue’ (in: Afriques 50, p. 271).