Lindiwe Dovey

Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals

Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals offers the first scholarly exploration of the vital yet controversial role played by film festivals in curating particular versions of Africa, African film, African filmmakers, and African audiences. Drawing on fifteen years of Doveys work and field research, it takes us on a festive, historical tour, analyzing the curation of Africans at the world fairs, the contemporary curation of African film and African filmmakers at film festivals, and the proliferation of international film festivals across Africa today. Emphasizing the live potential of festivals, the book reveals the complex ways that festivals are co-authored by their organizers and participants, and makes a case for the subjective and contextual nature of aesthetic judgment.

African film and video: pleasure, politics, performance

This special issue aims to contribute to African film scholarship, popular culture studies, and broader cultural studies in four ways. First, the issue is one of the first publications to bring together scholars of African Cinema and scholars of African video film so as to encourage conversation and debate about the iconography, themes, histories, and production, distribution and exhibition contexts of African screen media (my term of preference for African audiovisual productions). Next, in specifically exploring the themes of pleasure, politics, and performance in African film and video, the issue emphasizes the dialectical relationship between pleasure and politics, and the fact that – in much African screen media – this relationship is expressed in performative ways. Beyond this, there is a historical dimension to all of the contributions to the issue, which allow for not only an awareness of the prequels and precursors to contemporary African artistic and cultural products, but also a deepening of institutional memory within the field of African screen media scholarship. And finally, the authors challenge Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s argument that ‘Despite the imbrication of “First” and “Third” Worlds, the global distribution of power still tends to make the First World countries cultural “transmitters” and to reduce most Third World countries to the status of “receivers”’ (1994, 30). All of the articles insist that, even in the face of such First World dominance, African artists have been consistently engaged in the creative transformation and ‘Africanization’ of foreign material; furthermore, many of the authors acknowledge new directions in which ‘Third World’ countries are both ‘receivers’ and ‘transmitters’ of culture. In bringing together African Cinema and African video scholarship, the issue has been inspired by Mahir Saul and Ralph Austen’s influential and stimulating ‘African Film’ conference, held in November 2007 at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. This conference provided the first forum for African Cinema and African video film scholars to encounter one another in a productive way. There was general agreement, at the conference, that African Cinema scholars have been slow to recognize and acknowledge the power of the video film phenomenon and the need to incorporate video film into their research and teaching. As a result, African Cinema scholarship has allowed itself to become trapped in ‘old, tired formulas deployed in justification of filmmaking practices that have not substantially changed in forty years’ (Harrow, 2007, xi). It is not so much that filmmaking practices and African film criticism have not changed, however. The problem has rather had to do with quantity. Only a small number of celluloid films has been produced annually in sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of post-apartheid South Africa) since the birth of African filmmaking in the 1960s. Similarly, critical responses to this African Cinema have proceeded at a slow pace. In contrast, today thousands of films are being produced annually on the continent (particularly in Nigeria) due to the rise of the video film industries since the 1980s. This sheer increase in the quantity of African films, no doubt enabled by technological advancements as well as the ingenuity of African video makers, has now provided the energy and impetus for new kinds of scholarly discussion and work. Technological advancements have also, importantly, enabled greater cinematic experimentation across the continent (see, for example, the work of Burkinabé director Boubakar Diallo, and new work discussed in a special issue of Journal of African Media Studies [2.1, 2010]). It is these developments that suggest that it is time for

African Jim: sound, politics, and pleasure in early ‘black’ South African cinema

This article offers a new take on the film African Jim (popularly known as Jim Comes to Joburg), the first feature-length entertainment film made with a black cast and specifically for black audiences in South Africa (in 1949). In contrast to earlier interpretations of the film, which focus predominantly on the films images, its problematic production context, and its patronizing narrative, we focus on and offer interpretation of the films aural/oral aspects. Through analysis of the ways in which the films black performers mobilize African languages and music as ‘hidden transcripts’ (a concept we borrow from James Scott), we argue that the film is invested with certain political subtexts that have not previously been acknowledged. These subtexts, we suggest, must have been all the more powerful at the time the film was made since, in this context, the political efficacy of music was vested largely in its ability to simultaneously convey pleasure and pain, and to be both uplifting and subversive, thus concealing its essential meanings from the white power establishment. In bringing to our rereading of African Jim a sense of the importance and specificity of sound and music in black South African culture of the late 1940s, we hope to show how virtually impossible it is to give a complete reading of the film while ignoring the films aural/oral components. This rereading also suggests that within film studies in general, and African film studies in particular, it would seem vital to acknowledge the need for more profound studies of the complex ways in which African soundscapes – African music and African languages – contribute to the multiple meanings of films that are made in this context.

Report on Film Africa: Celebrating African Cinema, 3–13 November 2011

As one of the 114 bodies ensconced in The Ritzy cinema in Brixton on a chilly, mid-November Saturday afternoon, watching the amber-toned, slightly scratched images of Sarah Maldoror’s film Sambizanga (1972) flicker into life on the screen, I felt an acute sense of historical time, of time passing. This palpability of time had two sources: my awareness of Maldoror’s presence, and the film’s rarity. Maldoror was sitting with us in the darkened cinema, watching these images that she had shot 40 years previously, as a young woman. Not faint of heart, this woman, who at the age of only 34 travelled to Angola to make a film about the war of liberation at the height of the conflict. The Ritzy audience was mesmerized by her tale of Maria, a passionate young woman who walks from her village to the capital Luanda, in search of Domingos, her activist husband who has been arrested by the Portuguese authorities. As Maldoror has said of the film, ‘I have no time for films filled with political rhetoric. . . . What I wanted to show in Sambizanga is the aloneness of a woman and the time it takes to march’ (1996, 46–7). Sambizanga immediately entered the annals of history, being the first feature film to be made in Africa by a female director, and winning the Gold Palm at the prestigious Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, Africa’s oldest film festival. This should explain why Maldoror was guest of honour at Film Africa 2011, which had a special focus on films made by and about African women. After the screening we held a question and answer session with Maldoror, who was also present at Film Africa’s closing ceremony, to present the inaugural Silver Baobab Award for Best Short African Film to the young Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni for her film Mwansa the Great. Time was also palpable at this ceremony; to witness these two extremely talented African women filmmakers, one old and one young, together, in the same space, was very moving and some spectators could not hold back their tears (see Figure 1). That audiences were able to watch a film as historically and cinematically important as Sambizanga with its maker, and to be able to talk to her about it afterwards, should explain, in a very basic way, why platforms for African Cinema, such as Film Africa, are needed. A Royal African Society event, in association with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Film Africa was a 10-day celebration of African film and culture that took place at five venues across London in November 2011: the sparkling new glass-and-chrome Hackney Picturehouse (for which Film Africa was the major launch event), The Ritzy, the Rich Mix in Shoreditch, Screen on the Green in Islington, and The Frontline Club in Paddington. We screened 51 films – feature-length fiction films, documentaries, shorts, and experimental films – from 26 African countries; welcomed 10 African filmmakers and actors to London to do post-screening discussions with audiences; were privileged to have 15 local experts provide contextualization

SOUTH AFRICAN CINEMA IN EXILE

In this overview article, I attempt to characterize a South African cinema of exile through a number of lenses. I begin by situating my study within general studies of cinema and exile before focusing on Hamid Naficy’s distinction between exilic and diasporic films and the notion of the “interstitial”. I use Naficy’s theories, as well as the words of South African filmmakers themselves, as a framework against which to measure South African exilic cinema (which I argue is constituted by films made both outside and within the country), showing that this cinema displays diasporic rather than exilic features. In tracing a South African cinema of exile from Come Back, Africa (1959), through Jemima and Johnny (1966) and A World Apart (1988), through to post‐apartheid exilic films, I argue that these films erode an insider/outsider dichotomy primarily through their alternative form, a subversive combination of documentary and fiction.

'Bergman in Uganda': Ugandan Veejays, Swedish Pirates, and the Political Value of Live Adaptation

In early May 2014, the Swedish artist Markus Ohrn premiered the first part of his project ‘Bergman in Uganda’ at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Belgium. The premiere involved a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s signature film Persona (1966), interpreted by a Ugandan ’veejay’ who goes by the name of Veejay HD. On two adjacent screens, Ohm presented viewers with Bergman’s film and Veejay HD’s face, as he translated the film into Luganda for Ugandan audiences, with Veejay HD’s words, in turn, translated into English subtitles. The festival blurb describes veejays as ‘a new kind of folk storyteller … people who work in makeshift cinema halls in slums and remote villages’ and who translate foreign films (mostly Hollywood blockbusters) for Ugandan audiences (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, 2014). It explains Ohrn’s motivation for initiating the ‘Bergman in Uganda’ project as one invested with irony, as a way of allowing ‘the European spectator to see how the African viewer looks at him’ and as a ‘confusing reversal that induces us to reflect on our own perspective’ (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, 2014).

Interview with Rasselas Lakew: ‘Tarifa African Film Festival’, May 2010

RL: Initially they were American films. I would say until 1976–1977, then the revolution was in full swing and with it came the Russians and their socialist propaganda via the television.We weren’t very excited about their documentaries revolving around the proletarians – but I think in retrospect I could say I learned a great deal from the Russian way of telling stories... The American films on the other hand were shown in the movie theatres, because that’s where the government made its money.

Film Africa 2012: Reflections

Film Africa, founded in 2011, is a 10-day festival of African cinema and culture that takes place in London in November. It is a Royal African Society event, in association with SOAS, University of...