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African Cinema:
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
By Hassouna Mansouri

African filmmakers either have to adapt to the art film standards of Western sponsors or submit to the commercial dictates of the globalized market. Jean Rouch once said: "I am against national cinema. What counts is world cinema." This is how the position of African cinema today should be conceived, argues Tunesian film critic Hassouna Mansouri.

First, there is an historical mistake. To consider African cinema as 'the expression of a tension' between Africa and the Western World ? the colonized and the colonizer ? would be reductionist. If there is a tension, it is that of a birth, or a re-birth, of a mutating world. "Historically", wrote Tahar Chikhaoui, "the amazing developments of the New Waves in film (in France, Great Britain, Latin America, some Eastern countries) is very much related to a movement of intellectual and ideological questioning of the mental structures and the political systems inherited from colonialism." For Western cinema the sixties were a moment of renewal. In Africa, it was only a birth. The young and new cinema in Europe inspired a brand new cinema in Africa.

African cinema was born at a moment when Western literature and film questioned everything that had been built. "Since Marienbad maybe", writes Jacques Binet, "the directors as well as the audience no longer know where to go." One thing was certain: the institutional way of representation had to go. Truffaut supplanted spectacular cinema and the overly stylized quality cinema with the cinema of language. Bazin did away with ostensible signs brutalizing the ambiguity of reality. Leenhardt attacked the pseudo-syntactic apparatus cherished by the old theoreticians. And Astruc traded pure intrigue cinema in for the flexible expression of cinema-writing. This refusal of the 'institutionalized' grammar, as No?l B?rch put it in Praxis du cinema, pointed the way to the new African cinema. But it also functioned as an invitation for a return to freshness, not only of nature and earth, but above all of culture.

The African filmmakers of those early days shared with their American counterparts an 'anxious take on the European models'. Nevertheless, Southern filmmakers did not and have not made a clean break with Western cinema by ignoring its history. They are forced to take it, so to say, 'en route'. But they do not have to adopt it entirely either, and certainly not slavishly. The cinema of the South does not come as an addition to world cinema. This definition as an addition is what prevents it from grafting. It comes not as a supplement but as a follower of the movement that passed through all artistic expressions in the sixties. The difference between North and South is one of degree, not of nature.

We have to consider that African cinema, especially in its early days right after independence, was part of the great enterprise of disalienation. As it grows the task does not become easier. African filmmakers have to face other challenges, in particular that of the historical rift between the West and the Third World, between the colonizer and the colonized. Furthermore, they are confronted, just like their Occidental colleagues, with the ogre called globalization, which threatens to flatten tastes. The Hollywood system keeps growing, forcing everyone, the Western independents as well the Southern directors, to play by its rules.

Southern filmmakers must unite with directors of all origins to fight the hegemony of easy consumed products and their means of global distribution ? video, television and especially the satellite dish and digital broadcasting. In the era of inevitable globalization, cinema, and the arts in general, are left as the only guarantee of diversity. Since the rise of globalization as an unavoidable force, cinema, and more generally the arts, have appeared as the only warranty of diversity, the soul and essence of human cultural heritage. We in the South are not the only ones under siege. European cinema is threatened not only in its traditional market, but even in its own territory. And this, in the end, affects the audience. Each and every spectator is a potential target for infection by complacent cinema.

The threat goes far beyond the North-South opposition. Northern countries, recognizing this global threat of levelling, have responded by financially supporting Southern filmmakers. The catch, however, is that this support mostly ends up with the makers of art films. It means that an effort is made to maintain the spirit of the auteur against the spirit of the industry, against the supremacy of the consumption state of mind. However, this led to the system of aid funds, which is not solely advantageous. Of course, it allows some Southern films to exist. But it also defines the boundaries to which all Southern filmmakers must restrict themselves. They are forced to adopt a Western view of Africa which is generally exotic. This leads to films essentially based on meanings and less emphasis on new forms. The themes are usually sociological, sometimes tending towards the folkloric.

African filmmakers thus find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Their freedom of choice is limited to only two options: either conform to Hollywood-standards and produce films with no personal expression, or stay in the margins of the art film dictated by European fundraisers. In both cases, there is a price to pay.

Hassouna Mansouri
(Translation: Grégory Valens/Edo Dijksterhuis)

This text is re-printed with kind permission of Hassouna Mansouri and of "De Filmkrant in Rotterdam", the daily festival edition of the Dutch film magazine "De Filmkrant".

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