The filmmaker-narrator as a reflection of/on postcolonial African cinema: Henri Lopes’s Le lys et le flamboyant (1997) and Assia Djebar’s La femme sans sépulture (2002)

Abstract

This study examines the way that the postcolonial African filmmaker is represented in the fiction of two major African writers and cultural figures: the Algerian author, historian and filmmaker, Assia Djebar and the Congolese author, Henri Lopes. The partly autobiographical and partly imagined filmmaker of authors such as Djebar and Lopes, is a complex figure of cultural and ethnic ambivalence, selfquestioning, and tentative self-awareness that reflects a continuing dialogue of cultural meaning and reinvention. This dialogue fuels these authors’ witness to the importance of African cinema to the exploration of new forms of community.