Setting the stage for a critical encounter between Francophone African cinema and Continental European critical theory, this book offers a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of 16 Francophone African films, including Bassek Ba Kobhio's The Great White Man of Lambarene, Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Guimba the Tyrant, and Amadou Seck's Saaraba. The author invites readers to study these films in the context of transnational conversations between African filmmakers and the conventional theorists whose works are more readily available in academia. The book examines black French filmmakers' treatments of a number of cross-cultural themes, including intercontinental encounters and reciprocity, ideology and subjective freedom, governance and moral responsibility, sexuality and social order, and globalization. Throughout the work, the presentation of literary theory is accessible by both beginning and advanced students of film and culture. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

"This short encyclopedic book is destined to students who are interested in African Francophone Film and Cinema. The major contemporary African Francophone filmmakers and their films are treated her. The book discusses a certain number of themes as they are featured in African Francophone Cinema. The interface between cinematographic language and image is also studied. This study reflects the vibrancy of the emergent field of African cinema. Furthermore, the reading and interpretation of the aforementioned themes is a testimony toward the commitment of African filmmakers who re-visit and update a certain number of topics as well as explore new avenues, thus pushing further and further outward the boundaries of filmmaking in Africa." "Thus, many of the films analyzed in this book allow the reader to reflect on some contemporary issues that affect Africans and, at the same time, these films provide for entertainment, fun, and light humor. Thanks to the availability of these films, the African is at once educated and entertained. Beyond Africa, the themes embedded in African Francophone films help toward a letter appreciation and understanding of African Cinema."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume attempts to join the disparate worlds of Egyptian, Maghrebian, South African, Francophone, and Anglophone African cinema—that is, five “formations” of African cinema. These five areas are of particular significance—each in its own way. The history of South Africa, heavily marked by apartheid and its struggles, differs considerably from that of Egypt, which early on developed its own “Hollywood on the Nile.” The history of French colonialism impacted the three countries of the Maghreb—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—differently than those in sub-Saharan Africa, where Senegal and Sembène had their own great effect on the Sahelian region. Anglophone Africa, particularly the films of Ghana and Nigeria, has dramatically altered the ways people have perceived African cinema for decades. History, geography, production, distribution, and exhibition are considered alongside film studies concerns about ideology and genre. This volume provides essential information for all those interested in the vital worlds of cinema in Africa since the time of the Lumière brothers.

African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state. Beginning in 1969 the biennial Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), held in Burkina Faso, became the major showcase for these films. But since the early 1990s, a new phenomenon has come to dominate the African cinema world: mass-marketed films shot on less expensive video cameras. These “Nollywood” films, so named because many originate in southern Nigeria, are a thriving industry dominating the world of African cinema. Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century is the first book to bring together a set of essays offering a comparison of these two main African cinema modes. Contributors: Ralph A. Austen and Mahir Şaul, Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Birgit Meyer, Abdalla Uba Adamu, Matthias Krings, Vincent Bouchard, Laura Fair, Jane Bryce, Peter Rist, Stefan Sereda, Lindsey Green-Simms, and Cornelius Moore

New African Cinema examines the pressing social, cultural, economic, and historical issues explored by African filmmakers from the early post-colonial years into the new millennium. Offering an overview of the development of postcolonial African cinema since the 1960s, Valérie K. Orlando highlights the variations in content and themes that reflect the socio-cultural and political environments of filmmakers and the cultures they depict in their films. Orlando illuminates the diverse themes evident in the works of filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo (Senegal, 1977), Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (Angola, 1972), Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des femmes de Mont Chenoua (The Circle of women of Mount Chenoua, Algeria, 1978), Zézé Gamboa’s The Hero (Angola, 2004) and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu (Mauritania, 2014), among others. Orlando also considers the influence of major African film schools and their traditions, as well as European and American influences on the marketing and distribution of African film. For those familiar with the polemics of African film, or new to them, Orlando offers a cogent analytical approach that is engaging.

From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa. Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties. Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, Black African Cinema's analysis of key films and issues—the most comprehensive in English—is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.

Covering the rich film production of Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together films that might otherwise be divided by questions of race, gender, genre, period, or nation, in a valuable comparative study of a diverse corpus. Individual countries, film-makers, and films are treated separately in order to emphasize their specific identities or those which are represented in their films, and key films are examined within a well-developed historical context. Clearly written and accessible to the specialist and general reader alike, this informative book is a valuable reference source.