cinemas of the south

Adventures and Misadventures of African Cinema
By Olivier Barlet

Before the independence movements of 1960, Africans didn't have the right to make movies. And they didn't. Images of Africa were those of ethnographical films or colonial cinema. In appropriating cinema, Africans were able to substitute the external view of the ethnographer or colonial propagandist with their own view of themselves. Their space had to be taken back and their thought de-colonialised. The sweet wide shots of Safi Faye from Senegal of the African bush in Fad'jal end with people working: Africa is no longer a backdrop; it is a place of human activity. But it is also a place of conflict - modernity displacing tradition and the elite are copying the Western model and plant their power in corruption. The films of the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene or of Souleymane Cissé of Mali denounce them openly. In Africa there is no cinema industry or tradition and only strong personalities can make it by virtue of their determination. They can be counted on the fingers of one hand, like isolated and determined meteors, self-taught or products of film schools in Paris or Moscow.

They are almost all francophones. Unlike anglophones, they profit from the technical assistance of the Ministry of Cooperation that supports the emergence of art films as a cultural link with the old colonies. Their films are deeply political, but they don't make 'propaganda' films. By affirming its culture, Africa will be able to solve its present problems.

Ousmane Sembene

Rejecting a fossilised tradition and denouncing it each time the customs are alienating or obsolete; their films suggest replacing the colonial program of "civilisation", imported as a superior model by "progress" to anchor Africa in modernity. This means being rooted in reality: it is the body and soul of films. But emotion carried by the characters questions the proposition, opening the path to fiction, especially since the beginning of the 80s. It is no longer just about being the mirror of its space and its people and shaking traditions or denouncing the corrupted elites; the demand for social change by being open to ambivalence must be depicted. That will open the doors to success. In Africa, while a few companies dominate the market and distribute primarily American B movies or Indian films, African films are little seen due to poorly organised distribution. The experience of the CIDC (Interafrican Consortium for Film Distribution), created in 1979, will soon have no future. On the other hand, in a Europe that needs films from the South to manage the shock of cultures, the passion is enormous. These films break out of specialised festivals and Cannes acclaims a cinema that it discovers and then awards the Grand Jury Prize to Brightness (Yeelen) by Souleymane Cissé of Mali in 1987 and The Law (Tilaï) by Idrissa Ouedraogo of Burkina Faso in 1990.

Since then, however, we have been witnessing the radical decline of the success of African films. Faced with the menaces of the modern world, the "exoticisation" of the other" is out of place. We are turning away from a cinema that nevertheless is causing an explosion of new and passionate expression and which justly allows us to discover Africa without clichés. The image of Africa is forged by real-life visuals: it is miserable, violent, and desperate. We are turning away from the Lost Continent, and also from its cinema.

Nevertheless, those filmmakers who are hanging on to pursue their oeuvre, are producing a body of work that is diverse, original and deeply relevant in a disenchanted world and which distil a message of hope in spite of the difficulties of the present situation.(1) They are attempting to break the fossilized, exotic or miserable image of the forgotten continent in inviting us to see its complexities in making use of a new aesthetic.(2) Not only are established producers rolling out a major oeuvre that is scandalously absent from ciné clubs, but young filmmakers are appearing who are exploring new paths, daringly showing the intimacies of love and modern dramas and questioning the fixations of their elders. This does not prevent them from respecting them, since in its quest for values Africa is the place of respect for the past, but they do it without being attached to the past. Their impassioned search for independence, formal and financial, furthers first and foremost their desire to comprehend the world and to act as witness.

Idrissa Ouedraogo

Faced with prejudice from a colonial imagination that locks them in an obligatory, predefined "African-ness", they take as subjects for their films what 'everyman' experiences in his life, putting characters into their films who are human first and African second, and therefore are of interest to the whole planet as an alter ego (a "similar other") and not as a tear-producing curiosity.

This post-colonial generation is therefore positioned more in world cinema than being forced to produce films clearly destined for the African public, in the same way that the Togo writer Kossi Efroui affirms that, "the work of an African writer should not be framed in the folklore images that are drawn from his origins."

The spread of digital technology gives a multitude of young amateur video makers the possibility of creating images without outside help which they seek to diffuse outside of their circle of friends. They are in competition with an established system called "African cinema" where producers who have become established through festival and critical recognition build an art film catalogue, but not without great difficulty. Films that are produced without external means, arising from the simple synergy of local means and through engaging willing volunteers are entering into a territory that up until now has been the preserve of a few privileged people with admirable will and determination.

These young people are questioning in a radical way the necessary subjugation of the filmmaker to western subventions for aid in production, with the European Union and the Agence intergouvernementale de la Francophonie having joined the CNC, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for giving assistance in producing films from the South. A popular cinema is appearing without foreign aid, under sometimes dubious professional conditions, which is meeting with great success in certain countries (Senegal, the Ivory Coast, etc.). Since 1992 Nigeria has been an example of phenomenal production without equal: more than 1200 long features per year! Lagos has replaced Bombay and is progressively widening its sphere of distribution to other African countries where it is rolling over all other types of cinema. Dubbing in French allows it to also reach francophone countries. With rare exception, here we find the same formatted reproduction as in Indian films. Just like Bollywood, Nollywood responds to the expectations of its public in force with urban action films and sentimental comedies. Nigerian films rework the anxieties of a society confronted by violence and the growing importance of occult forces and money in replaying aspirations for upward social mobility and eternal stories of romance and jealousy.

Souleymane Cissé

Video is thus replacing a cinema in disaster. One can barely count twenty cinemas worthy of being called such in the francophone countries of sub-Saharan Africa.(3) African films are rarities, with lukewarm public success unless it is the film of a fellow countryman. On the other hand, the passion for pirated American films imported from Thailand and sold on the street is enormous. In the absence of public assistance, the owners of movie theatres prefer reselling to supermarkets or churches rather than taking a loss. In anglophone countries, there is the same tendency to close large theatres, with South Africa being the exception. Ster Kinekor operates 360 screens and Nu-Metro 250, with multiplexes of up to fifteen theatres.

Today it is vital that cinema does not exhaust itself because of its invisibility in the South and the misinterpretation it suffers in the North. It is invisible in the South because these works no longer have anywhere to be shown. The misinterpretation in the North persists due to the rejection/fascination that characterises attitudes toward Africa and(4) because contemporary African expression is only validated when it is meant, "to enrich Western art, considered too cerebral, by bringing in new blood,"(5) according to Henri Lopès, who said about francophone literature that it is, "the language of Sévigné with black balls."

It is not regeneration or cross-fertilisation that the West needs, but rather to welcome African cultural expression as an autonomous proposal of a new imagination, which could even guide the shake up of our world.

Olivier Barlet
© FIPRESCI 2006

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