African Documentary Research Articles

New Perspectives on West Africa and World War Two

Abstract Focusing on Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria and the Gold Coast (Ghana), this article analyses the historiography of World War Two, examining recruitment, civil defence, intelligence gathering, combat, demobilisation, and the predicament of ex-servicemen. It argues that we must avoid an overly homogeneous notion of African participation in the war, and that we should instead attempt to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, as well as differentiating in terms of geography and education, all variables that made a significant difference to wartime labour conditions and post-war prospects. It will show how the existing historiography facilitates an appreciation of the role of West Africans in distinct theatres of combat, and examine the role of such sources as African war memoirs, journalism and photography in developing our understanding of Africans in East Africa, South and South-East Asia, and the Middle East. More generally, it will demonstrate how recent scholarship has further complicated our comprehension of the conflict, opening new fields of study such as the interaction of gender and warfare, the role of religion in colonial armed forces, and the transnational experiences of West Africans during the war. The article concludes with a discussion of the historical memory of the war in contemporary West African fiction and documentary film.

From ‘exorcism’ to engagement: the private sphere of perpetratorship in twenty-first century South African documentary film

ABSTRACT Documentary film is one way people attempt to grapple with the aftermath of mass atrocity; most commonly, this has been done via victim-centric narratives. The twenty-first century has seen a shift in documentary film to also include but the perspective of the perpetrators of mass violence. In South Africa, this shift has temporally paralleled the country’s budding democracy, as well as the corresponding legacy of violence left by the apartheid regime. This article examines five South African focused documentaries using a framework which allows an exploration of the private and interpersonal aspects of perpetratorship, noting that the country’s official political process and vehicle for nation-building (namely, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) could not tell the whole story in its prescriptive and public nature, as well as in its temporal immediacy. Thus, this article is considering the role of perpetrator-focused documentary film within the South African social landscape, specifically the long-term and informal processes which may lead towards a potential for interpersonal reconciliation.

Elements of Post-Katrina African American Documentary Film

Elements of Post-Katrina African American Documentary Film

Complex Realism: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Emergence of West African Documentary Film

Complex Realism: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Emergence of West African Documentary Film

Affective return: anachronistic feeling and contemporary South African documentary form

ABSTRACTThis paper turns to the critically entangled terms of form and feeling as a basis for exploring post-2012 South African protest and visual cultures. Against the backdrop of a newly ascendant political vernacular characterised by the reluctance to dichotomise emotion and reason in negotiating the terms of contemporary dissent, I examine specifically how the consequences of political disenchantment are affectively negotiated in and through documentary form. Films such as The People Versus The Rainbow Nation Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me Miners Shot Down and Strike a Rock have recently come to exemplify what Rob Nixon calls “the versatile possibilities of politically engaged nonfiction”. Taking Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me and The People Versus The Rainbow Nation as case studies, I trace the historicity and aesthetic structures embedded in those aspects of the post-2012 South African documentary image that might be said not only to move viewers, but to be constitutive of each film’s formal arrangement. The films convey the entanglement of documentary intelligibility and feeling in ways that are particularly pertinent to making sense of the contemporary South African “liberation reimagined”.

African Documentary Film: Jean Marie Teno and Hybridism in Afrique, je te Plumerai

Documentary film has been known for its capacity to interrogate issues of social, economic, cultural and political significance, but this interrogation has been at headlocks with African governments who use the documentary genre as showcasing and praising tool. This article examines the utilization of documentary films in Africa by African governments such as Tanzania, and by independent African filmmakers such as Jean Marie Teno. Jean Marie Teno’s film “Afrique, je te Plumerai” is examined and its role in the struggle for social, political, economic, and cultural emancipation of the Cameroonian, thus African people is revealed. Through the use of distinct mixed modes of cinematic address, Teno has created a hybrid documentary genre that invites and calls for a diversified filmic style that allows for self-expression, new images, and voices. Teno has created an African documentary film that juxtaposes two distinctive traditions; African oral narrative tradition and Western filmic technique to shake the African people to action. By artfully combining contemporary images with archival film footage, discontinuity narrative structure and fictionalized images the film challenges perspectives and offers viewers a far greater understanding of both history and present condition of misuse of political powers. Teno has pushed the envelope of documentary genre further and African documentary furthest.

Anxiety As Cinematic Sensation: History and Form in African Documentary Film

Anxiety As Cinematic Sensation: History and Form in African Documentary Film

Documenting the Black Ballerina in A Ballerina's Tale: The Limits of Celebration

Writing in 1999, Phyllis Klotman and Janet Cutler argue in Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video for the importance of documentary films by and about African Ame...

A Thousand Suns: Traversing the Archive and Transforming Documentary in Mati Diop's Mille Soleils

This article explores the aesthetic and political implications of the 2013 experimental short Mille Soleils (A Thousand Suns) by the Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop. Placing it within the specific context of Djibril Diop Mambety's legendary 1973 feature, Touki Bouki, which it references directly, the article reveals how Diop (Mambety's niece) crafts an urgent, sensuous, and highly original form of documentary fiction that draws on, and extends, the historical impurity of African documentary. By plugging into the rich intertextual imaginary of cinema and engaging poetically with notions of found footage and the everyday (including that of Touki-Bouki's main actor, Magaye Niang, still living in Dakar forty years later), Mille Soleils, as Williams argues, produces an inclusive wide frame open simultaneously to the personal and historical, social and political. In the process, it both projects a new vision of documentary form and reconceives the very nature of the archive in African cinema.

Social documentary and personal investigations in contemporary South African photography: Tracey Derrick’s “One in Nine” series

A shell of white gauze floats against a split background in Tracey Derrick’s 2009 photograph, Inhabit – Habergeon – middle English, piece of armour to protect the neck and chest (Inhabit), both autonomous and materially frail. The shadowed wall lifts the calcified gauze towards the viewer, as its lithe body hovers above the vertical divide that separates light from dark. This position apart from the edge may be read as a passage missed or overcome. A year of invasive treatment following her diagnosis of stage two breast cancer in March of 2008 led South African documentary photographer Tracey Derrick to create a photographic series that combines her humanist sensibility with personal reflections on illness. Derrick represents meditations on her trajectory through illness in “One in Nine: My Year as a Statistic,” a collection of reposeful digital colour photographs – including Inhabit – that features the cast Derrick made to obtain accurate measurements for her prosthesis. This body of work complicates a widely held assumption that post-apartheid photography in South Africa focuses more on the individual than collective societal issues. Derrick’s unusual series warrants methodological treatment that attends to the complex ways in which the visual vocabulary and concerns of apartheid-era documentary photography overlap with the personal explorations associated with post-1994 photographic production. In this paper, I utilise socio-historical, psychoanalytic and phenomenological readings of Tracey Derrick’s photograph and “One in Nine” series to elicit an interpretation of the image and series as statement of agency within a metaphorical battle against an invisible, yet pervasive disease. By reading Derrick’s photograph through these theoretical lenses, I reveal her image to be a metaphoric assertion of tenacity and Derrick’s agency, and highlight the areas of overlap between Derrick’s documentary practice and her more personal “One in Nine” project.

Looking in, looking out: the self-reflexive mode of representation in a selection of contemporary South African documentary films

The conventions of mainstream modes of film-making have been established through years of film-making practice and have become so widely used that they have become virtually invisible to audiences. This approach, referred to as the continuity system, entails maintaining spatial, temporal and action continuity and sustaining the illusion of the fourth wall. Self-reflexivity entails the breaking of the conventions of continuity editing through the inclusion of cues within the film that foreground the process of construction. The presence of the film-maker is therefore acknowledged, and consequently also her subjectivity. The consequent awareness that what is being watched is a film distances the audience emotionally and encourages intellectual engagement with the film. Though diverse in type and subject matter, the recent documentary films Afrikaaps (2010), Imam and I (2011), Porselynnkas (2011) and Sea Point Days (2008) have all been encoded using the self-reflexive mode of representation. Self-reflexive devices found in these films include inclusion of the director in the film, conspicuous cinematography and editing devices, and structuring strategies.

The appeal of hybrid documentary forms in West Africa

Once political independence was achieved at the beginning of the 1960s, sub-Saharan African documentary filmmakers became guardians of colonial memory, preserving the past and transmitting its cultural heritage. They also documented the new historical path of their countries, working with the rudimentary means at their disposal, outside a developed film industry. The stakes were high and the obstacles real: the onus was on this first generation of African documentary filmmakers to visually articulate their cultures but with little or no trained personnel nor equipment. Cultural denigration had been one of the principal components of the policy of assimilation implemented by the French imperial regime in Afrique Occidentale Francaise. Whilst cultural nationalism reigned supreme upon the transfer of power, the statesmen at the helm of these fledgling independent states soon fell prey to using documentary cinema to propagate overly flattering images of their feats. An atmosphere of auto-congratulation quickly prevailed and this genre was condemned to being the chosen means to propagate state ideology. One may note that has often been considered the most appropriate form to express the vision of several filmmakers at key moments of African cinema. For example, Afrique sur Seine (1955), Borom Sarett (1963) and Lettre paysanne (1975), all docu-fictions, represent respectively the first film made by an African filmmaker (albeit shot in France), the first African short film, and the first feature length film directed by an African woman. What is it about this form that answers the formal and aesthetic needs of the filmmaker at a particular moment in time? The purpose of this article is to answer this very question by first exploring the different constituents of as their manipulation and modulation were determined by the role accorded to documentary as catalyser of change, engagement or education. I will then proceed to examine the previously mentioned Afrique sur Seine and demonstrate why was used to depict the trials and tribulations of immigrant life in Paris in 1955. Particular attention will be paid to the elaboration of a highly original and multi-faceted voice-over. Given the importance of ethnographic film in forging a Western gaze on Africa, I think it is worthwhile to explore another hybrid form: ethno-fiction. The latter results from the crossing of ethnographic, real and imaginary discourses, and I will study their application to the rural setting of Safi Faye's Lettre Paysanne. I will then evaluate the extent to which ethno-fiction confronts the ample Western ethnographic film canon whilst articulating a practical discourse destined primarily for the participants in the film through the scale of camera shots and their duration. The film Nationalite: immigre (1975) by the Mauritanian Sidi Sokhona will constitute the final ease study of this article. This lesser known documentary represents an audacious formal adventure that analyses the economic and political reasons that incite African immigrants to leave their countries to find themselves subsequently in precarious conditions in France. The interplay of different narrative devices, fictional and real, to denounce immigrant exploitation will be the focus of our analysis of this film. Before giving a brief history of documentary practice in Francophone West Africa, let us define the term docu-fiction, as mutations of the nomenclature are as numerous as its hybrid cinematic components. Docu-fiction is the generic term used to describe the various sub-categories of the cinematic flux between the imaginary and the real (docu-drama, mockumentary, etc.). Various combinations of the four basic components of docu-fiction determine its end appearance. These components are documentary form (voice-over, interviews, talking heads, etc.), documentary content (real people, places and events), fictional form (plot and the elaboration of characters) and fictional content (made-up characters, places and events). …

Spaces in Time

LE MOIS DE LA PHOTO A MONTREAL Montreal September 10-October 11, 2009 biannual exploration of contemporary photography known as Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal, while slightly scaled down for this eleventh edition, remains an example of strong curatorial focus and international exhibition possibilities. Curator Gaelle Morel organized twenty-four individual exhibitions and space interventions of artwork from thirteen countries including Canada, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, and the United States. This year's theme was The Spaces of the Image, and work explored the issues of scenography, mechanisms and staging in contemporary photography, and more. Several of the artists engage in a process of appropriation or destruction (or what Morel terms withdrawal), questioning elements of photography as both space and history. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige of Lebanon and Paris, for example, who exhibited several pieces, work in many media to explore the notion of latency. In Faces (2001), they redacted photographs taken from posters of martyrs in Lebanon. They restored parts of the faces of these men--weathered and diminished by time--returning an eye or a hint of a mouth, commenting on the public function of the gaze on private memory and forgetting. It is as if these men were fading in and out, sending a silent message from another world. In Circle of Confusion (2001), Hadjithomas and Joreige installed a large-format aerial view of Beirut in 3,000 fragments. Commenting on the lack of documentation of the history of the city, they invited gallery visitors to take one of the individual pieces, revealing a mirror behind, where those who are disassembling can see themselves taking part in the destruction. As the pieces are removed, the city becomes more fragmented and memory is challenged. Colombian artist Oscar Munoz's Aliento [Breath] (I996-2002) is a striking work also exploring the theme of disappearance, and also with the added dimension of interactivity. When viewers breathe on the metal disks mounted on the wall (which have been printed with a grease photo-silkscreen process), the faces of victims of political violence in Colombia (some named, some not) appear. These visages fade just as quickly, reminding us of the importance, and effort, of remembering Canadian Shelley Miller uses perishable materials to re-present vernacular objects. In Cargo (The Wealth of Some and the Ruin of Others) (2009), Miller recreated--in sugar--a motif of clipper ships using the aesthetic of traditional Portuguese blue-and-white ceramic tiles, referencing the sugar trade and slavery. After the piece, which won Contact Image People's Choice Award, melted as it weathered, it was replaced with a photograph that is scheduled to be on view until 2013. In Madone de Bentalha (2001-02), one of the most unique pieces on display. Pascal Convert of France transformed a photograph of a grieving woman taken after a massacre in Algiers in 1997 into a wax sculpture. A form of simulacra. Convert's life-size interpretation of what has been widely considered a modern Madonna image is accompanied by a video documentary explaining the history of the original image, exploring the nature of documentary truth in images of war and personal suffering. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Sound of Silence (2006), Chile-born Alfredo Jaar creates an immersive video installation exploring the life and death of South African documentary photographer Kevin Carter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of a starving young child in Sudan, a vulture hovering behind her. 8-minute video is text-based and silent, with Carter's shocking, singular image prefaced by a loud flash of light that critiques silence and personal and social culpability. As Jaar writes, No one knows what happened to that child but the image has a 12-digit reference number and is controlled by a large corporation owned by the richest man in the world. …

Producing African Disability through Documentary Film: Emmanuel's Gift and Moja Moja

The article examines two recent documentary films about disability and development; it argues that their seemingly fresh, inspirational narratives of disability and transnational assistance rely upon well-worn images of a crippled, needy Africa and its able, generous Northern counterparts. The disabled African documentary subject helps usher in development work with a sense of urgency in these films, leaving no time to question the way in which imperialism is reproduced within these projects. Through interrogating these seemingly benign 'overcoming' and 'friendship' stories and their celebrations of the virtues and privileges of the North, the authors glimpse the necessary role of Disability Studies in postcolonial theory.

HIV/AIDS in South African Documentary Film, c. 1990–2000*

Documentary film has historically been used as a medium of mass education on issues of social import. Although initially employed in South Africa for colonial propaganda, under apartheid the medium was used both to expose and resist state oppression. When the HIV/AIDS pandemic began in the 1980s, western film-makers harnessed the documentary format in order to foster awareness and challenge misinformation about the disease. This was also the case in South Africa, which saw the construction and perpetuation of numerous harmful myths about HIV/AIDS in tandem with rapidly increasing rates of transmission from the early 1990s. While government ineptitude meant that public education about the disease was severely lacking until the closing years of the century, numerous films were produced, often with corporate sponsorship, in order to educate the public about modes of transmission, prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS. This article analyses the content and meaning of these films, which provide important insights into the historical development of social perceptions of the disease. Born of the racially polarised and politically volatile climate of the 1990s, prejudicial and stigmatising images were presented in many of the documentaries under review. Racism and homophobia were particularly evident. Their verbal and visual depiction is discussed in the first section of this article. The responses of successive South African governments to the pandemic, alongside its evaluation in the documentaries, is the subject of the second section. Lastly, the portrayal of gender in these films is explored, with particular attention to the themes of female vulnerability and male recalcitrance. The article concludes with some general observations about the positive and negative aspects of the documentaries, their impact on public perceptions of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and the discourse that currently dominates HIV documentary films and programmes there

After Apartheid: 10 South African Documentary Photographers

After Apartheid: 10 South African Documentary Photographers

Reviews

Genre and Hollywood by Steve Neale. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Reviewed by Frank P. Tomasulo.Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video by Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler. Indiana University Press, 1999. Reviewed by Jacqueline Bobo.Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema by Matthew Tinkcom. Duke UP, 2002. Reviewed by Michael R. Schiavi.Bertrand Blier by Sue Harris. New York: Manchester University Press, 2001. Reviewed by Brigitte E. Humbert.Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators, and Foxy Chicks by Bill Osgerby and Anna Gough-Yates, eds. Routledge, 2001. Reviewed by Mary C. Beltran.France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema, edited by Lucy Mazdon. London: Wallflower Press, 2001. Reviewed by Valerie Orlando.A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy by Andrea Slane. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2001. Reviewed by Megan Williams.Cassavetes on Cassavetes, edited by Ray Carney. London: Faber and Faber. Reviewed by Todd Berliner.Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, edited by Alexandra Juhasz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Reviewed by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster.Science Fiction/Horror: A Sight and Sound Reader, edited by Kim Newman. British Film Institute, 2002. Reviewed by Anne Morey.Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media by Dina Iordanova. London: British Film Institute, 2001. Reviewed by Jerry White.Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster by Geoff King. I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2000. Reviewed by Murray Pomerance.Cutting-Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde by Joan Hawkins. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Reviewed by Kevin A. Morrison.Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema, edited by Kenneth S. Calhoon. Wayne State University Press, 2001. Reviewed by Tony Williams.The Ancient World in the Cinema by Jon Solomon. Yale University Press, 2000. Reviewed by Bernie Cook.Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire by Vijay Mishra. Routledge, 2002. Reviewed by Geetha Ramanathan.British Film Institute Film Classics, Volumes I and II. Edward Buscombe and Rob White, Eds., London: BFI, 2003. Reviewed by Wheeler Winston Dixon.Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture, edited by Peter Lehman. Routledge: New York, 2001. Reviewed by Jonathan Markovitz.

Africa Research Central: A clearing house of African primary sources

Research in the African humanities and social sciences presupposes an organised infrastructure of primary source materials - a network of archives, libraries, and museums where the raw materials of research are housed, ordered and safeguarded. For a variety of historical and contemporary reasons, the research infrastructure that scholars take for granted in northern countries is often weak and sometimes non-existent in Africa. Unequal north/south power relationships during and after colonialism have resulted in the scattering of a sizable portion of the African documentary and cultural heritage in collections beyond the borders of Africa. For the rich resources remaining in Africa, contemporary African development needs have sometimes put the creation and maintenance of an adequate institutional infrastructure toward the bottom of the list of national priorities. Africa Research Central is the response of two concerned academics to what we perceive as a worsening crisis.

Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video

Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video

Struggles for representation: African American documentary film and video

Struggles for representation: African American documentary film and video