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Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film, and: African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara

2007; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sub.2007.0036

1527-2095

Laurence M. Porter,

African studies and sociopolitical issues

Reviewed by Laurence M. Porter Michigan State University Armes, Roy. Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. 279; and Armes. African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pp. 256. For the last twenty years or so, film studies have undergone an intensely active period of consolidation. Hundreds of dictionaries, histories, and theoretical overviews of film have been published during this period, which has been especially noteworthy for gathering and preserving knowledge of filmmaking in former colonies around the world. Like medieval studies, for example, film studies is a demanding, multi-disciplinary pursuit: the critic must know something about history, culture, and sociology as well as film technology and the esthetics of a medium that employs several channels of communication simultaneously: sequential images, dialogue, voiceover, and nonverbal components of the sound track. The most productive researcher in Francophone film studies may well be Roy Armes, emeritus professor at the University of Middlesex in London.1 Armes's work deserves attention not only for its serious scholarship and wide range of insights, but also for the extraordinary popularity of Francophone studies today, and even more so because of the growing prominence of film in teaching younger generations whose experience with visual media increasingly exceeds their experience with literary texts. Roy Armes's informative, well-documented introduction to Postcolonial Images (1-9) graphically depicts how thoroughly French imperialism dominated the film industry in North Africa before Independence. During the interwar period, the colonial authorities closely supervised the production of films there. "Depictions of native life, accurate or not, were incidental to stories that reflected the worldview and mind-set of Europeans" (5, citing David Henry Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919-1939, Johns Hopkins UP, 2001, p. 16). In the French film Pépé le Moko (1937), which takes place in Algiers, no roles were offered to Arabs, and Arabs (belonging to several ethnicities themselves) are not even mentioned among the ten nationalities and ethnicities said to inhabit the Kasbah (5). Before independence, all but two Moroccan films had foreign capital, actors, and markets (6). After World War II, the French colonial state established film production and distribution centers in the Maghreb to offset the influence of Arab-Islamic independence [End Page 147] movements (7). Most of what was available to screen, however, came from the U. S.2 Armes continues his historical survey up until 2002 in the remainder of Part I, devoting one chapter each to the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. After independence, Armes explains, indigenous film directors in the Maghreb struggled against several compelling constraints. First, there was fierce competition from abroad. Moreover, unless they emigrate—the Algerian Assia Djebar being a noteworthy example—Maghrebi filmmakers have difficulty finding the funds to produce a film. Their governments, mindful of national prestige and desirous of preserving a flattering version of the national heritage, subsidize a few films, but such funding entails censorship. In Algeria between 1967-1984, filmmakers had to be state employees of the ONCIC, charged with dramatizing an idealistic nationalism that depicted flawless heroes united against all obstacles (8, 16). The use of Berber was banned in Algerian films (17). Dominant in Morocco, the private sector insisted on folkloric films that could appeal to tourists (18). Tunisia's state-owned film industry tried to go it alone, but in 1965 had to surrender to major foreign firms, and also made disastrous investments in obsolete equipment. Between the 1960s and 2000, silenced by poverty and censorship, indigenous Tunisian directors produced on average only two films a year. Some of these, nevertheless, were noteworthy. The Tunisians Abdellatif Ben Amman (Une si simple histoire, 1970; Sejnane, 1973) and Naceur Ktari (Les ambassadeurs, 1975) rework the motif of a disillusioning clash of cultures typified earlier by Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Senegalese novel L'Aventure ambiguë, and aggravated by repressive violence on the part of the French. The first women filmmakers...