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Certain Tendencies in Contemporary Auteurist Film Practice in Africa

2015; University of Texas Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2015.0011

1527-2087

Aboubakar Sanogo,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

Certain Tendencies in Contemporary Auteurist Film Practice in Africa Aboubakar Sanogo (bio) African cinema is undergoing a number of important changes that might go unnoticed by the occasional observer. While the advent of Nollywood has arguably had a seismic effect on the map of African cinema—offering an alternative mode of production, distribution, and circulation; alternative modes of address and new forms of affects, generating and sustaining audiences across Nigeria, Africa, the diaspora, and indeed the world—often displacing the hegemony of Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong cinemas—it is by no means the only major development in contemporary African film practice. Indeed, there have also been in recent years less spectacular yet significant developments in the auteurist tradition (for a long time the default setting for African cinema) that deserve our full attention. These include the diversification of avenues for the making of films in Africa, the premise of a return of the state as an [End Page 140] enabler of the cinema, and finally a prospective textual practice articulated around the concept of engagement. Together these three elements represent the promise of compelling futures for film practice on the continent. In the past few years, there has been a multiplication and diversification of avenues for the making, exhibiting, and reception of auteurist cinema in Africa, including the proliferation of workshops, training facilities, and film schools, along with partnerships that have produced new routes and new links with institutions, structures, and circuits in Africa, Europe, the Americas, Asia, and beyond and have opened in unprecedented ways horizons of fabrication and modes of experiencing African cinema. It is a truism that relationality was always embedded in the DNA of the auteurist tradition in African cinema, which was never simply face-to-face with itself but was always also in conversation with other traditions: neorealism, the French new wave, the montage school, African American cinema, Satyajit Ray, Ozu, Solanas and Getino, Pereira dos Santos, Tarkovsky, Parajanov. Similarly, at the level of production, the auteurist tradition has frequently interacted (often in an uneven and asymmetric manner) with forces outside of the continent that enabled its existence. While these initially included such institutions as the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, La Francophonie, and the European Union, among others, in recent years other countries and institutions have started to intervene in the field, including Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, as well as various production funds from international film festivals, including Berlin, Rotterdam, Locarno, and Dubai. For a long time, however, the Hollywood tradition was, overall, glaringly absent from this roll call. The groundbreaking yet unfortunately short-lived Africa First experiment gave brief institutional form to the relationship between auteurist African cinema and Hollywood (or perhaps more accurately, Indiewood).11 Initiated by Completion Films founder Kisha Cameron Dingle, who was associate producer on Raoul Peck’s HBO-produced Sometimes in April (2005) and on Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), Africa First sought to open up a space whereby African cinema and the Hollywood film industry could enter into a productive conversation.2 It was created as a result of a series of conversations between Cameron Dingle and Focus Features’ then-CEO James Schamus, noted, among other things, for his long-standing screenwriting and producing collaboration with Ang Lee on such films as The Ice Storm (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and Brokeback Mountain (2006).3 [End Page 141] Located in New York City, and housed at and funded by Focus Features (the art-house division of NBC/Universal), Africa First was a project that from its inception in 2008 sought to produce first-rate short fiction films from Africa by discovering or enabling film directors early in their careers.4 Deliberately inscribing itself in an art-cinema context, cultivating a sense of cool cosmopolitanism, and invested in global auteurist cinema discourse, Africa First sought to produce and make available films for the film festival, museum, and college and university circuits.5 Functioning on the basis of an open call for projects, and sometimes recommendations, Africa First operated through a strict yearly selection of five projects from more than one hundred submissions and invited the directors selected to take part in a “Summit Weekend” in New...