Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Africa South of the Sahara
employing Africans as technicians and actors. Les maîtres
fous (The Mad Masters, 1955), arguably his most famous
film, depicts a ritual of possession among the Hauka sect in
Ghana. The Nigerian filmmaker Oumarou Ganda (1935–
1981) acted in Rouch’s Moi, un noir (I, a Black Man,
1958) before going on to direct Cabascabo (Tough Guy,
1968), Saitane (1972) and L’Exilé (The Exiled, 1980).
Rouch’s influence on Africans has been controversial:
some credit him with advancing the careers of many
African filmmakers and exposing them to the techniques
of cinéma direct, while others condemn him for exoticizing
Africa. Other ethnographic-based films include the
Vietnam-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982)
and Naked Spaces: Living Is Round (1985), in which she
challenges Western anthropological views of Africans.
Filmmaking in Africa south of the Sahara has been
marked by several major trends over the past fifty years.
Following independence, many films of the 1960s and
early 1970s emphasized the notion of rehabilitation
and reaffirmation of the validity of African traditions
and institutions, which had been devalued during colonialism.
Furthermore, filmmakers attempted to rebut negatively
marked representations of Africans in Hollywood
films like King Solomon’s Mines (1950), Mogambo (1953),
and Roots of Heaven (1958), or the portrayal of Africans
as naturally subservient and therefore deserving of the
West’s protection and benevolence in films like the
British production Sanders of the River (1935).
Not surprisingly, there has been much debate among
African filmmakers concerning appropriate modes of
representing African cultural identity. In the 1970s, films
such as Le bracelet de bronze (The Bronze Bracelet, Cheikh
Tidiane Aw, 1974, Senegal) and Pousse-pousse (Pedicab,
Daniel Kamwa, 1975, Cameroon) were condemned by
members of FEPACI for being too openly commercial
and less committed to an overt critique of neocolonialism.
Others, such as the films of Sembène, Mahama Johnson
Traoré (Senegal), and Med Hondo (Mauritania), were
praised for following a pattern that veered away from
Western traditions: their primary audiences were deemed
to be in Africa, the language of their dialogues was
African, the location of their shooting often a typically
rural African setting, and their intent didactic. The
refusal of a Western aesthetic model led to the emergence
of a style known as African cinematic realism, featuring
cinematic grammar that emphasized social space and
narratives focused on episodic plot structures.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, other styles began
to emerge that were more experimental or that blended
genres. Med Hondo’s groundbreaking Soleil O (O Sun,
1969, Mauritania) draws on Brechtian theater, while
Djibril Diop-Mambéty’s surrealist Touki Bouki laid the
ground for subsequent hybrid narratives such as La vie
sur terre (Life on Earth, Abderrahmane Sissako, 1998,
Mali) and Heremakono (Waiting for Happiness, 2002,
Mauritania), in which dialogue is minimal and the
images themselves tell the story.
Censorship has been an issue of concern for African
filmmakers since the early days. As early as 1934, the
French colonial authorities instituted the Laval Decree,
which prohibited the production of any anticolonial
films in the African colonies. Some early cases of censorship
include the French filmmaker René Vautier’s condemnation
of French colonialism in Afrique 50 (Africa 50,
1950), which earned him a year in prison, and Alain
Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les statues meurent aussi
(Even Statues Die, 1953). Many other filmmakers have
endured forms of censorship for a variety of reasons ranging
from political (Ousmane Sembène’s La noire de . . .
and Pierre Yameogo’s Silmandé [Whirlwind], 1998) to
religious (Karmen Geï, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, 2001) to
sexual (Visages de Femmes [Faces of Women], Désiré
Ecaré, 1985),whichwasthefirstfilmtobeprohibited
in Ivory Coast for its sexual content (Ukadike, p. 213).
By the 1990s, filmmakers began crossing borders,
forming more production partnerships between Africans
and striking north-south partnerships or coproductions.
African cinema south of the Sahara is now marked by a
diversity of approaches, including nonchronological
storytelling, as in Diop Mambety’s Hyènes (Hyenas,
1992, Senegal); popular culture forms, as in Twiste à
Poponguine (Rocking Poponguine, Moussa Sene Absa,
1993, Senegal); and fragmented dream structures or memory
constructions, as in Asientos (François Woukoache,
1995, Cameroon), and Abouna (Our Father, Mahamat-
Saleh Haroun, 2002, Chad). The Burkinabé
filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo (b. 1954) insists that ‘‘it’s
the diversity of ideas, of opinions that will lead to the
creation ...of thriving African cinemas’’ (Thackway,
p. 28).
From the mid-1990s onward, filmmakers south of
the Sahara have been developing new aesthetic and narrative
strategies best suited to communicating increasingly
complex sociopolitical cultural contexts. Films
such as Dakan (1997) by the Guinean Mohamed
Camara, Woubi Chéri (1998) by Philip Brooks and
Laurent Bocahut (France/Ivory Coast), and Nice to Meet
You, Please Don’t Rape Me (Ian Kerkhof, 1995, South
Africa) explore issues of homosexuality in urban African
settings, whereas Clando (Jean-Marie Teno, 1996,
Cameroon), Keita! L’heritage du griot (Keita: Voice of the
Griot, Dani Kouyaté, 1995, Burkina Faso), Sissoko’s
Guimba the Tyrant (1995, Mali), and La nuit de la vérité
(The Night of Truth, Fanta Régina Nacro, 2004, Burkina
Faso) challenge issues of political tyranny, abuse of power
and privilege, and the resistance to these excesses in
56 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM