Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dossier 1: Key Dates in the History of African Cinema

2021; Indiana University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/blackcamera.12.2.24

1947-4237

Barlet, Forest,

African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues

Dossier 1:Key Dates in the History of African Cinema Olivier Barlet and Claude Forest Click for larger view View full resolution Figure D. Ousmane Sembène (left) and Sarah Maldoror (right) at FESPACO. Image courtesy of FESPACO. [End Page 406] 1896–1954: Cinema in the Colonial Period As soon as the cinematograph was invented, operators were sent to Africa and all over the world to bring back distant and unusual images. In Africa as elsewhere, screenings were a great success and quickly became widespread, first in mobile form. Colonial cinema combined exoticism, ethnocentrism, and propaganda (nature versus culture, savage versus civilized, group versus individual, belief versus science, etc.), and the films shown to local populations came essentially from the North. However, an industry began to be set up in certain countries, notably in Egypt and South Africa. 1895 On-screen projections of "animated photographic views" by the Skladanowsky brothers in Berlin in November and by the Lumière brothers in Paris in December. Discovering the world. Une femme ouolove, by Félix Regnault (France), on a Senegalese potter: the documentation of behaviors. From 1908 onward, Albert Kahn reports on the cultures of some sixty countries. 1896 Lumière operators shoot short films in Africa. Projections in South Africa and Egypt. 1897 Screenings at the Lumière Cinema in Tunis by Albert Samama Chikly. Screenings in Morocco. 1900 Screening of the Lumière brothers' L'Arroseur arrosé in a circus in Dakar. 1903 Screenings in Nigeria. 1910 Independence of South Africa and first film (silent, now lost), The Great Kimberley Diamond Robbery / The Star of the South (15 min., director unknown). 1911 Eight cinemas in Cairo, three in Alexandria. 1914 Seven "theater-cinemas" in Algiers, twelve theaters in 1920, forty in 1939. 1916 African Film Productions is founded by the American businessman Isadore W. Schlesinger, who also set up Killarney Film Studios in Johannesburg, produces thirty-seven fiction films in South Africa over the next six years. 1918 Tarzan of the Apes, by Scott Sidney (86 min.), makes a turnover of $1.5 million in the United States. 1921 Denouncing the daily workings of colonialism, the novel Batouala, by Martinican René Maran, wins the Prix Goncourt but is banned in Africa. L'Atlantide, by Jacques Feyder (163 min.), adaptation of Pierre Benoit's novel, is a huge hit: mystery versus white male force and impossible interracial love as key elements of colonial cinema. Remakes in 1932 (Georg-Wilhem Pabst), 1947 (Gregg G. Tallas), 1961 (Edgar G. Ulmer), 1972 (Jean-Kerchbron and Armand Lanoux), etc. 1922 First Tunisian short fiction film: Zohra, by Albert Samama-Chikli (35 min.), a tribute to the Bedouins. Independence of Egypt, which becomes a kingdom. 1923 First short fiction film Barsoum Looking for a Job, a comedy by Mohamed Bayoumi (12 min.), promoting tolerance between Muslims and Copts. First experimental radio broadcast in Johannesburg, South Africa. 1924 Commissioned by Citroën, Léon Poirier shoots La Croisière noire (70 min.): from Timbuktu to Madagascar by half-track truck. A huge success. The empire is growing in importance. Cinema theaters in Casablanca, then in Rabat. 1925 Marc Allégret shoots Journey to Congo (94 min.), on the beauty of Black peoples, in collaboration with André Gide, who publishes a book of the same title, an indictment against colonial exactions. 1930 Seven hundred fifty-five cinemas in Africa. This number would rise to 1,683 in 1951, then 2,168 in 1960, mainly in North Africa. First adaptation of an Egyptian novel: Zeinab, by Mohamed Karim, based on the populist novel by Mohamed Hussain Heykel Pacha (talking version in 1952, 120 min.). 1931 Nigeria's Health Propaganda Unit, a mobile educational cinema test, supervised by William Sellers, established. 1933 Inauguration of the Majestic in Algiers, the largest cinema in Africa with thirty-five hundred seats. Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment (BEKE): test of traveling educational cinema with commentator-translators, supervised by L. A. Notcutt and G. C. Latham. 1934 France: the so-called "Laval" decree aimed at controlling musical and cinematographic works recorded in French-speaking West Africa. In Itto, by Marie Epstein and Jean-Benoît Levy (117 min.), on military medicine and the battles between colonialists...