African Filmmakers Research Articles

A Ghost is Disturbing Africa: The Evolution of Black Consciousness from Masks to Ghosts in Contemporary African Cinema

From 1960s to the present, colonial, postcolonial, social problems and migration have been among the dominant themes of Sub-Saharan African cinema. Today, among the sub-Saharan African filmmakers who grew up in the diaspora and shot their first films in their continent, there are those who use the sixty-year-old theme of African cinema by associating the place and characters with the ghost theme in their films. Mati Diop who was born in Senegal, living in France and Mario Bastos who was born in Angola but professionally trained in USA transform their cities into a dystopian universe through the ghost phenomenon and establish national allegories through their films Atlantique (2019) and Air Conditioner (2020). Although the relationship between time and space in these films is arranged in accordance with realistic codes, the extraordinariness of the narratives makes the current political and social inequality visible. It is also seen that African filmmakers who grew up in the diaspora did not put political inequality into a single cinematic genre, they try to hybridize it. In the study, the descriptive analysis method was used within the notion of Jacques Derrida's hauntology concept to analyse whether there is a parallelism between the political discourse of films and film type, which are hybridization strategies directors apply. It has been seen that the films show situations such as income injustice and inequality in the post-colonial period based on basic principles borrowed from science fiction and horror cinema.

Toxic Masculinity, Rage, and Activism in Chile and South Africa

In this videographic essay, I juxtapose two feminist responses to patriarchal violence and highlight their similarities by drawing from the insights of Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato. I compare the performance “A rapist in your path” (2019) by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis with the documentary The People vs Patriarchy (2018) by South African filmmaker Lebogang Rasethaba and producer Jasmyn Asvat. Both works emerged within the context of the global #MeToo movement and attest to the ubiquity of gender inequality, rape culture and the creative outrage fueling societal transformation. The form of the video essay uses visible grid lines and text on screen to denormalize structures of patriarchal power and prompt viewers to critically think about the intersections of oppression and resistance. I take cues from Barbara Zecchi’s audiovisual language of the multiscreen that keeps audiences alert to challenge the naturalized mechanisms concealed by dominant patriarchal cinematic language.

Questions of identity and global visibility: French funding in Latin American and Maghrebi cinema

This article examines the relationship between French film funding and the regional cinemas of the Southern Cone of Latin America (Cono Sur) and the Maghreb. Since the 1980s, France has steadily increased its support of filmmakers in francophone regions, expanding its funding of organizations and financial aids like Fonds Sud (now Aide aux cinémas du monde) and Fonds Image de la Francophonie in order to promote francophone filmmaking throughout the world. In the cases of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay) and the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), the opportunities provided by French funding and the interest in co-producing global cinema coincides with a rise in local productions within these regions. A French co-production status also promotes the global visibility of other national cinemas. Yet the discourse surrounding the types of narratives shown in French co-productions and the ways in which filmmakers are limited by funding stipulations highlights an ongoing issue that filmmakers from the Southern Cone and the Maghreb face when accepting France’s financial support. The combination of France’s global financing of films and the expanding interest in Southern Cone and North African cinema establishes a complex relationship around French funding institutions, francophone regions (as well as their relationships to the term “francophone”), and identity within an increasingly globalized film space. By examining the history and current state of these regions’ cinemas, as well as their relationships to France, this article analyzes the positive and negative effects of France’s history in financially shaping the national (and regional) cinemas of southern Latin America and the Maghreb, the current landscape of Southern Cone and North African filmmaking, and the possibilities for change in transnational filmmaking in the future.

Mobile Film Festival Africa and Postcolonial Activism

This paper enters into a debate of how new and potentially more accessible technologies might affect freedom of expression for heretofore disenfranchised peoples and postcolonial social and political development. This essay examines short films produced on camera phones by amateur African filmmakers for one of the many existent mobile phone film festivals: Mobile Film Festival Africa held in 2021. Mobile Film Festival, an annual and international festival of short-length movies, was founded in 2005 based on the principle “1 Mobile, 1 Minute, 1 Film”. Because of the highly destructive mining in Africa required to obtain the minerals necessary for mobile phone production, because of the Western narratives of progress mobile phone sales build upon, and because of the fact that mobile phones are instruments of capitalism that largely feed big Western countries, mobile phones are themselves tools of neocolonialism and digital colonialism. Thus, a film festival that markets itself as a means of social progress but that relies upon mobile phones in Africa provides an interesting and quite complicated case study. Two of the award-winning films from this festival recognize in different ways the complicated relationship between mobile phones and postcolonial activism.

The Gendered Contribution of Neria to the Repertoire of African Filmmaking

The Gendered Contribution of Neria to the Repertoire of African Filmmaking

Film Review: Atlantis (2021)

Abstract: The article is a review of Atlantis , which was produced in 2021 by renowned South African filmmaker and academic Meg Rickards. The film featured prominently at the African Movies Festival in Manitoba, Canada in September 2022, where it was the opening film. It was greeted by a diverse audience of Africans in the diaspora, particularly Nigerians, Cameroonians, Malians, as well as South Africans who lived in Winnipeg. The review focuses on the issues of gun violence, gangsterism, family deceit, local crime and female defiance, and how Rickards continues to rely on canonized literatures as her major source of inspiration. The film further establishes Rickards's reputation as one of the most significant and successful filmmakers in South Africa's contemporary film industry.

Scriptwriting with AI: A comparative analysis of ChatGPT and human-crafted short-film scripts: A South African perspective

Following the release of the ChatGPT chatbot in 2023, by OpenAI, this research project conducted a comparative analysis between a short-film script generated by ChatGPT-3.5 and one crafted by a human scriptwriter, both tasked with creating South African-based scripts focused on African aesthetics and storytelling techniques. While ChatGPT proved efficient in generating scripts, it was primarily programmed by non-Africans and thus cannot produce authentic South African experiences in its narratives. The platform is useful for African filmmakers as a tool to assist them with formatting, structure, enhancing conflict and improving action descriptions. ChatGPT is not autonomous and cannot produce creative work like humans can. It generates scripts based on programmed narrative models such as the three-act structure, the Hero’s Journey and Freytag’s Pyramid. While African writers are encouraged to use these platforms for brainstorming and structuring, the core of the story and its authenticity will come from the human screenwriter.

The post-heroism of Stuur Groete aan Mannetjies Roux and Verraaiers

There is much scholarship on the linkages between Afrikaner nationalism and South African (Afrikaans-language) filmmaking. Within the context of a sustained post-apartheid renegotiation of Afrikaans or Afrikaner nationalism in the popular imagination, in this article we argue that two feature film historical dramas from the production company Bosbok Ses Films, Stuur groete aan Mannetjies Roux (2013) and Verraaiers (2013), resonate thematically and aesthetically with Thomas Elsaesser’s notion of post-heroic cinema. While a number of pre-1994 Afrikaans-language films celebrated Afrikaner nationalism as personified in the figure of the hero, this article positions and uses Elsaesser’s post-heroism as a critical lens through which to demonstrate the ways in which these two films call attention to a post-hero whose actions and behaviour (often inadvertently) renders a productive renegotiating of the hero figure within a post-apartheid cinematic context. To supplement Elsaesser, we also draw on Johan Degenaar’s writing on political pluralism. In this article, we find that an Elsaesserian post-heroic approach to the two films allows the following constitutive components of post-heroic cinema to surface: atemporality as opposed to linear narrative time, parapraxis (productive failure) as opposed to traditional iterations of heroic acts and valour, and conceiving of the film screen as a surface in flux as opposed to the screen as a mirror. The article’s contribution to existing scholarship on contemporary Afrikaans-language cinema is three-fold: it is the first to utilise an Elsaesserian approach to Afrikaans film and as such to foreground and investigate the figure of the post-hero, it provides a critical account of two independently-made feature films that remain under-researched in current South African film scholarship, and it contributes to discourse around the ways in which popular media inform and respond to the renegotiation of Afrikaans (or Afrikaans) identity.

Special Effects and the Making of Pseudo-Monsters in Nollywood Zombie Films

Horror movies are artfully constructed to simultaneously elicit fear and thrill audiences. They essentially integrate gory, frightful and obscene creatures (notably the living dead, the undead, paranormal beings and aliens), as well as scary or terrifying scenes all designed to build the fear appeal or the fight-or-flight response. The mobilization of such scary scenes and creatures always entails the use of relevant, realistic – and professional-quality – costumes, make-up, special effects and editing among other technical tools. These tools are generally extremely exorbitant and not affordable to small-budget African filmmakers like the majority of Nigerian videastes who most often rely on very meager resources to produce their movies. In effect, the inability to lay hand on professional-quality make-up and special effects causes most Nigerian video filmmakers to rely on sub-standard tools which do not always actualize the aesthetic and fear appeal expected in a horror film. This scenario could well be illustrated using the way monsters and apocalyptic scenes are treated in most Nollywood zombie movies. In such movies, the leverage of sub-standard and grotesque make-up and special effects most often leads to the creation of pseudo-zombies which, instead of instilling fear and the fight-or-flight response, are susceptible to baffle or amuse film viewers and critics.

The African as Compared to European and American Film Adaptation: Some African Techniques of Film Adaptation from Novels

Adaptation study is a sub-branch of comparative literature that makes the bond between literature and cinema. Both literature and cinema are two different media and each has its own language to convey meaning. This article studies the African techniques of film adaptation from novels such as <i>Half of a Yellow Sun</i> by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Biyi Bandele’s film in 2013 with the same title. With the advancement of technology, people are gradually shifting from the culture of reading novels to that of watching adapted films, which becomes a problem, as it tends to affect their knowledge of that particular text. Thus, how does the African filmmaker, as compared to other European and American filmmakers, leave from the novel to the film? The hypothesis to this question is that there is a number of pure African techniques that the filmmaker uses in the adaptation of the novel such as editing, sound, modified scenes, excluded scenes and invented scenes. The elements of this study are analysed using the Film Adaptation Theory based on Linda Hutcheon approach and the Film Analysis Method, which is a pure qualitative method. The findings of this study show that, the visual and aural techniques used by the filmmaker are all involved to create a film with a new vision having specific effects on the audience. There is therefore a difference between a novel and a film so; depending solely on the film adaptation to get the meaning embedded in the novel is erroneous.

Orúnmìliàn Film-Philosophy

This article discusses a relationship between the philosophical praxis of Ọ̀rúnmìlà and aesthetics of Èjìgbèdè Ẹ̀kú (i.e., the costume of the living and the costume of the dead) in Saworoidẹ (dir. Túndé Kèlání’s, 1999). I construct the Yorùbá/Ọ̀rúnmìlà philosophical method of Èjìgbèdè Ẹ̀kú in the contemporary Nigerian narrative film as case study of how contemporary African filmmakers, like their oral artiste counterparts, continue to articulate their inherited traditions via cinematic storytelling. In doing that I draw on what I call the Ọ̀rúnmìliàn “parable of Eégún” (masquerade) to establish what I designate the philosophical/therapeutic questions of Èjìgbèdè Ẹ̀kú; and thus, argue that Èjìgbèdè Ẹ̀kú gives “presence to non-presence” so that the living/present can dialogue with the dead/past as a way of healing, re-moralizing, and/or decolonizing the living through cinematic storytelling. I conclude that Ọ̀rúnmìliàn film does not solely rekindle, and teach us, a valuable aesthetic practice of self-reflection or self-reevaluation but also decolonize and de-westernize film-philosophy

Archiving Africa: Notes for the Contemporary African Filmmaker

First presented as a keynote at the 8th I-Rep International film festival in Lagos, Nigeria, in March 2018, this paper triangulates the links between processes of archivization, African filmmaking, and activist cultural work. The central task I set for myself in the paper is to answer the question, why should the African filmmaker be interested in archives and processes of archivization, especially in the age of digital media and the politicization of culture? By “archives,” I am referring to the artefacts generated for the filmmaker in the form of historical traces in the public domain and the texts s/he creates in the form of cultural narratives. Drawing links between archival work, film-making and the politicization of culture, I argue for a recognition of the strong relations between culture, politics, and social transformation, and submit that an awareness of how these three realms are interconnected should occupy the interest of the modern African filmmaker. Part of the wider argument I make about the potential of archives as a narrative resource in African filmmaking is to nudge contemporary African screen media producers to embrace what Hal Foster refers to as “an archival impulse at work internationally in contemporary art” in which art functions to reinvent archives from mere “excavation sites” into “construction sites” for counter narratives and memory.

The Survival of Big-Screen Cinema in South Africa

South African filmmakers who were marginalized from the film industry under apart-heid are today making feature films but primarily for the small screen. The few making theatrical films for cinema face massive systemic challenges to produce and get their films to market, in particular filmmakers of color and especially those on the margins of race, gender, and sexual orientation. By referring to developments in Nigeria and by analyzing historical and contemporary developments in the South Korean film industry, some practical propositions are presented in this paper in relation to content creation and the expansion of the big-screen cinema infrastructure to transform and grow South African cinema.

Memory and/in the mirror: FESPACO, a platform for a global Africa?

The cinema as a medium and an art form has been a major consideration in Africa’s struggles against colonialism. These struggles, which encompass aspirations to establish Africa’s cultural and political autonomy in the postcolonial era, are ongoing. Marking the 26th edition of the Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television (FESPACO) therefore was considered as an important opportunity for reflection. More so, the occasion was taken as a call to re-engage with the challenge of shaping and transforming ‘the Continent’s greatest cultural event’ for the future. The 2019 festival was launched around the colloquium theme: ‘Confronting our memory and shaping the future of a Pan-African cinema in its essence, economy and diversity’. This article begins with an account of the colloquium and reflects on the knowledge production dimension of the festival, which has been a core component of FESPACO’s identity and existence. It also seeks to situate the event of the 50th anniversary in a continuum of critical discussions about the festival, its past, present and future, and in relation to the seminal aspirations of African filmmakers for an African cinema, its challenges and opportunities.

‘Significant errors of fact’? A response to Simon Bright on nationalism, colonialism and anti-essentialism in Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts

This response article addresses the misinterpretations, misrepresentations and disparagements of my research by filmmaker Simon Bright. Drawing from my book, Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts, which is rooted in my doctoral research conducted in 2001, this response aims to rectify factual errors and clarify the nuanced arguments that were misread by Bright. While acknowledging the importance of continuously reshaping and reforming identities, as highlighted by both Bright and myself, this response underscores that my book primarily focuses on the process of identity formation rather than treating identity as a fixed entity. I emphasize the potential overlaps in our perspectives and call for a collaborative approach that builds upon existing scholarship. My response aims to foster a productive dialogue and invites Bright and other filmmakers to contribute further to the transnational history of Southern African filmmaking. By drawing on their years of experience, it is my hope that future works on this subject will enrich the field, serving to enhance and expand upon existing scholarship rather than detract from it.

Memoir and media: Anant Singh’s personage in contemporary South Africa

Anant Singh is South Africa’s most prolific film producer. The publication of his memoirs in 2021 occasioned an assessment of this genre in relation to published scholarly research and some other biographies and autobiographies written by contemporary South African filmmakers, radio and television broadcasters. This article mobilizes the Singh story as a framing window through which to make connections with other such works, including studies on the media industry itself, from the early 1980s to 2021. Where autobiographies rarely offer self-reflexive analyses, this article attempts to facilitate a dialogue between different media personalities while simultaneously excavating some hidden transcripts that themselves cast some light on professional practices. The article sketches some of the underlying structural conditions within which the various commentators had to work and on which they comment anecdotally, here examined as latent illustrations of their lived experience.

Tracing Cinema as Anticolonial Resistance through the Archives of "Présence Africaine"

This article considers the relationship between the journal Présence Africaine, and cinema as a vehicle for anticolonial thought and practice. Drawing upon archival research on the writings of Paulin Vieyra, the article explores the continued resonance of his work today, whilst also problematizing the historical silencing of Francophone African women filmmakers.

5 - Sociopolitical Representations in African Cinema: Paulin S. Vieyra, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Eddie Ugbomah and Ola Balogun in the Footsteps of Ousmane Sembène

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This article discusses the innovative ways in which African filmmakers Ousmane Sembène, Paulin S. Vieyra, Djibril Diop Mambéty Eddie Ogbomah and Ola Balogun offer sociological insights into, and cultural representations of, African contemporary postcolonial societies. These filmmakers are able to highlight the breadth and depth of the undercurrents of hopes and impediments in Africa. Their themes include social justice, slavery, alienation, the advent of Islam and Christianity (upsetting the traditional beliefs and cosmogony in the process), military rule, tradition and modernity, Pan- Africanist ideals, the importation and imposition of the Western political system into Africa, and loaded concepts such as democracy, just to name a few. Ogbomah underscores the many travails that obtain in postcolonial Nigeria, the most salient being the ruthless corruption in the natural resources sector, primarily crude oil. These filmmakers try to offer a solid foundation on which modern Africa can, firstly, midwife the revival of a genuine indigenous model of economic development. Secondly, these filmmakers, each in his own peculiar style, provide artistic tools which can continue to support the development of a socially conscious and intellectually robust cinematic tradition in Africa.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Samba Diop, Ph.D., Research Scholar, Department of Linguistics &amp; Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. Email: sbkdiop@yahoo.co.uk&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Female Representation in Select Films of Frank Rajah Arase: Evidence of Male Chauvinist Tendencies in the Ghanaian Film Culture

There has been constant resonance of feminine image misrepresentation in most narratives since the (re)invention of video-films in Nigeria, Ghana, and indeed across the African continent. In spite of the binary struggle between the (presumed) chauvinist filmmakers and their feminist counterparts, masculinity always (re)emerges in new forms or topoi to dominate femininity. Consequently, there seems to be a paradigm shift on the (mis)representation of women that reinforces Laura Mulvey’s sexual voyeuristic objectification of the feminine gender as reflected in near-nude costumes as well as sexually larded scenes that are common sights in African films, particularly those from Ghana. Employing the historical-analytic and observation methods, this article examines three selected films: The Maid I Hired (2010), Why Did I Get Married? (2007) and To Love a Prince (2014) by Frank Rajah Arase (FRA), an African filmmaker of Benin (Edo) extraction who largely operates in the Diaspora, to foreground and highlight the voyeuristic imprints in Ghanaian films (Ghallywood), which tend to demean the feminine gender in the context of African culture that hegemonizes the male folk.

Towards a Marxist Biocentric Climate Justice Theory of African Cinema

African cinema after colonialism examined issues on politics, polemics of gender, morality, historical reconstruction, resuscitation of cultural values and so on. All of the above were the pivot on which postcolonial African films were hinged. The rise of environmental consciousness in the 1980s through the 1990s championed by William Rueckert, Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm and Adrian Ivakhiv’s Bio- centrism created spaces for the African filmmaker’s search for climate justice with the medium of his art. It is pertinent to note that traditional African societies were ecocentric precursory to their encounter with the West. This Biocentric nature of indigenous Africa, the dislocation of the continent by capital- ism and the effect of climate change on the continent made it easy for the African creative artist and filmmaker to venture into the ecological film enterprise. Laden in some of these films are the socio- economic, political and environmental thoughts of Karl Marx, Ali Mazrui, Omafume Onoge and William Ruekert. Despite the above, there abounds a dearth of holistic environmental theories that bridges the economic, political and environmental Humanities. To this end, I propound a Marxist Biocentric Climate Justice theory which encapsulates political, economic and environmental processes. I adopt content analysis method to situate Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s Why Poverty? Stealing Africa (2012) and Orlando Von Einsiedel’s Virunga (2014) in the context of the theory being propounded.