Francophone African Cinema

Figueira, D. V. F., photographer. *Baobab tree, Africa*.1900-1920. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

There is no singular Francophone African cinema. The use of French by so many African directors is a legacy of colonization, the spread of the early French filmmakers' art and equipment throughout the empire. Barring that commonality, directors from Morocco, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Democratic Republic of Congo, etc., reflect their countries' unique histories, tribal affiliations, languages, ethnicities, economies, and cultures.

Filmmaking by Africans began with Senegalese director Sembène Ousmane's 1961 feature La Noire de.../Black Girl. Before this, Europeans, such as those funded by the Lumière brothers, had turned the camera on Africans for European consumption. Directors made ethnographic films about colonies including Senegal, Algeria, the Belgian Congo, etc., which served mainly to justify la mission civilisatrice, the civilizing mission of colonization. Jean Rouch is an example of one of these ethnographic filmmakers, although one whose films became critical of colonial powers. (More information on Rouch can be found here.)

Africa was also forced into a passive filmic role when sites such as the Algiers Casbah served as an exoticized backdrop for films such as Pépé le Moko (1937, dir. Julian Duvivier) and Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs/Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1954, dir. Jacques Becker), denying Africans a say in the representation of their countries.

Nevertheless, Sembène changed this. He began his artistic career as a writer, inspired by his time as a dockworker and soldier. This part of his life imbued his work with empathy towards the downtrodden. In fact, many of his literary protagonists are working-class or poor people, tyrannized women, or those exploited by colonization and decolonization.

As his career unfolded, Sembène began to realize that due to the high rate of illiteracy in Africa, his work would be more effective in visual form, so he moved to film as a medium of social justice. La Noire de.../Black Girl, his first feature, is a French-language film based on the true story of a Senegalese housekeeper's suicide. It was followed in 1968 by Mandabi/The Money Order, the first film in Wolof.

Sembène's influence both in Africa and internationally paved the way for Nollywood in Nigeria, and encouraged other African filmmakers including Med Hondo (Mauritania), Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina (Algeria), Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Cameroon), Souleymane Cissé (Mali), Jean-Pierre Lledo (Algeria), Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia), Djibril Diop Mambéty (Senegal), Yamina Benguigui (Algeria), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso), Abedllatif Kechiche (Tunisia), Mwezé Ngangura (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Assia Djebar (Algeria), Mohamed Camara (Guinea), and Abderrahman Sissako (Mauritania), among many others.

After independence from France, soft power in the form of technical and financial assistance to African filmmakers lingered on the continent and kept France's influence alive in African cinema.

An example of this is the Consortium Audiovisuel Interational (CAI), which provided aid for the production of documentaries and newsreels, or the Bureau du Cinéma, which provided technical advice and funding. Ties such as these meant that the vast majority of African films made after colonial independence were Francophone. This was positive in the sense that it ensured African film output, but also meant that films deemed too critical of France were unlikely to receive aid or distribution.

French directors were not immune to this ideological censorship on the subject of Africa. Films critical of the French government and military, especially in regard to the Algerian independence movement, were often censored or not shown in France until years or decades later. Examples are Algérie en flammes/Algeria in Flames (1958, dir. René Vautier), Le Petit Soldat/The Little Soldier (1960, dir. Jean-Luc Godard), La Bataille d'Alger/The Battle of Algiers (1967, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo), and Camp de Thiaroye (1988, dir. Sembène Ousmane).

Despite economic and technical challenges, the African film world began to unite and build support for itself when the Tunisian actor/writer Tahar Cheriaa founded the Journées cinématographiques de Carthage/Carthage Film Festival.

In 1969, the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes/Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) followed and, to this day, supports African filmmaking, distribution, and exhibition. Soon after FEPACI, the Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou/Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), in Burkina Faso, followed in a similar mission. (More information on these festivals can be found here.)

Consult the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room collections for additional materials. For help locating more resources refer to the guide, African, Jewish, and Middle Eastern Studies: Digital Resources at the Library of Congress. The bibliography below lists films and resources covering Francophone African cinema in France.

Suggested titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog.

Films
Resources

The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo
Call Number: FCB 1034-1037 (ref print)
Published/Created: 1967
Views the revolution against the French in the city of Algiers from 1954 to 1962. Focuses on Ali la Pointe, a leader in the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale) who joins the movement in 1954 and dies with three comrades, including a child, rather than surrendering to the French in 1957.
Camp de Thiaroye by Ousmane Sembène
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1988
Camp de Thiaroye, based on a true story, deals with the dilemma of African troops in the French Army at the end of World War II. Many of the Senegalese had been abandoned by the French after Dunkirk, and placed in German concentration camps. The attempts to re-establish white oppression over these men after their repatriation leads to a full-scale rebellion.
Chez les Touaregs / Touaregs in Their Country by Pathé frères
Call Number: VRA 1878 (viewing copy)
Published/Created: 1908
Scenes of a Touareg village show the tribe's women, boys posing and fighting, two men fighting with sticks and wrestling, the tying of a turban, equipping and mounting the camels, the parade of a caravan, demonstrating an assault on a colonial courier, a "Fantasia" parade, horsemen riding toward the camera with their guns blazing, and a mother and child playing with a kitten.
Dakan by Mohamed Camara
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1997
The first feature-length African film dealing with homosexuality, Dakan is the story of Sory and Manga. It explores the challenges to their relationship by family and a society that considers their love taboo.
Emitaï : un film de Ousmane Sembene by Ousmane Sembene
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1971
Depicts the clash between French colonialists and the Diolas, a mystical African tribe, in the closing days of World War II. It is the women of the tribe who provide the first voice of resistance.
GUELWAAR : un film de Ousmane Sembène by Ousmane Sembène
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1991
A Catholic and strong defender of African self-determination was assassinated because his speeches were troubling to some. The morning of his funeral they found out that his body had disappeared...
Jaguar by Jean Rouch
Call Number: VAF 4255 (viewing copy)
Published/Created: 1967
Jaguar is a 1967 French ethnofiction film directed by Jean Rouch. Three men from Niger travel to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) for work.
Keïta! : l'héritage du griot / Keita!: The Heritage of the Griot by Dani Kouyat'e
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1994
Based on one of the most important works of African oral literature, the Sundjata epic. When a djéliba, a master griot or bard, arrives mysteriously at the home of Mabo Keïta to teach him "the meaning of his name," the boy and griot are inevitably brought into conflict with his Westernized mother and schoolteacher, who have rejected African tradition. The griot reveals to Mabo the story of his distant ancestor, Sundjata Keïta, the 13th century founder of the great Malian trading empire.
La Noire de ... Borom Sarret : deux films de Ousmane Sembène / Black Girl and The Wagoner: Two Films by Ousmane Sembène by Ousmane Sembène
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1965 & 1963
Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.

Borom Sarret is about a cartman, hard pressed for cash, who during a typical day makes no money, performs a few simply human services, worries about his horse, exhibits a callousness that seems quite reasonable and finally loses his cart after breaking a law left over from colonialism. - Criterion Channel
La petite vendeuse de Soleil / The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun by Djibril Diop-Mambety
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1998
A disabled Senegalese girl, Sili, decides to do a boys job and starts selling newspapers on the streets of Dakar. Sili does a great job but the boys are not happy, the story tells her battle about daring to imagine what she can be and not caring about what anyone else thinks.
Mossane by Safi Faye
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1996
In this powerful drama, a 14 year old girl in a rural Serer village girl finds herself torn between potential husbands. Mossane is an extraordinary beauty. She is in love with Fara, a young student, but she has been betrothed to another. She dislikes her rich fiancée, Diogoye, but he sends money and gifts to the villagers. Unable to follow her dreams and bound by tradition, Mossane takes action and tragedy ensues. Safi Faye’s beautifully shot film tells a universal story of love and loss, whilst offering rich insight into village life and Serer spirituality. - raifilm.org.uk
Sango Malo by Bassek Ba Kobhio
Call Number: Not Available
Published/Created: 1991
Sango Malo raises the issue of the choice between European and traditional values facing Africans. Malo is a young schoolteacher who challenges the headmaster's Eurocentric curriculum. Malo teaches literacy through the everyday words a farmer uses, and math by showing how a cooperative divides its profits. His students learn carpentry and farming, the kind of knowledge they will need to build strong, independent communities.
Wênd Kûuni / Le Don de Dieu / The Gift of God by Gaston Kaboré
Call Number: FCB 0731-0732 (ref print)
Published/Created: 1982
A mute foundling is raised in an African village by a weaver and his family. The mute regains his powers of speech only after a shock, then reveals his origins and reasons for dumbness.

Africa's Lost Classics by Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds.)
Call Number: PN1993.5.A35 A3725 2014
ISBN: 9781907975516
Published/Created: 2014
Until recently, the story of African film was marked by a series of truncated histories: many outstanding films from earlier decades were virtually inaccessible and thus often excluded from critical accounts. However, various conservation projects since the turn of the century have now begun to make many of these films available to critics and audiences in a way that was unimaginable just a decade ago. In this accessible and lively collection of essays, Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy draw together the best scholarship on the diverse and fragmented strands of African film history. Their volume recovers over 30 'lost' African classic films from 1920-2010 in order to provide a more complex genealogy and begin to trace new histories of African filmmaking: from 1920s Egyptian melodramas through lost gems from apartheid South Africa to neglected works by great Francophone directors, the full diversity of African cinema will be revealed.
African Film Studies by Boukary Sawadogo
Call Number: PN1993.5.A357 S29 2019
ISBN: 9781138579378
Published/Created: 2018
African Film Studies: An Introduction is an accessible and authoritative textbook on African cinema as a field of study. The book provides a succinct and comprehensive study of the history, aesthetics, and theory of Sub-Saharan African cinematic productions that is grounded in the field of film studies instead of textual interpretations from other disciplines. Bringing African cinema out of the margins into the discipline of mainstream film studies and showcasing the diverse cinematic expressions of the continent.
African Film Studies by Boukary Sawadogo
Call Number: PN1993.5.A357 S29 2019
ISBN: 9781138579378
Published/Created: 2018
African Film Studies: An Introduction is an accessible and authoritative textbook on African cinema as a field of study. The book provides a succinct and comprehensive study of the history, aesthetics, and theory of Sub-Saharan African cinematic productions that is grounded in the field of film studies instead of textual interpretations from other disciplines. Bringing African cinema out of the margins into the discipline of mainstream film studies and showcasing the diverse cinematic expressions of the continent, the book covers: Overview of African cinema(s) - Questions our assumptions about the continent's cinematic productions and defines the characteristics of African cinema across linguistic, geographic, and filmic divides. History of African and African-American Cinema - Spans the history of film in Africa from colonial import and 'appropriation of the gaze' to the quest for individuality. It also establishes parallels in the historical development of black African cinema and African-American cinema. Aesthetics - Introduces new research on previously unexplored aesthetic dimensions such as cinematography, animation, and film music Theoretical Approaches - Addresses a number of theoretical approaches and critical frameworks developed by scholars in the study of African cinema All chapters include case studies, suggestions for further reading, and screening lists to deepen the reader's knowledge with no prior knowledge of African cinema required students, teachers, and general film enthusiasts would all benefit from this accessible and engaging book.
Africa Shoots Back by Melissa Thackway
Call Number: PN1993.5.A35 T48 2003
ISBN: 0253343496
Published/Created: 2003
Filmmakers in sub-Saharan francophone Africa have been using cinema since independence in the 1960s to challenge existing Western stereotypes of the continent. In Africa Shoots Back, Melissa Thackway illustrates how directors working in a postcolonial context have produced these alternative depictions of African identity. She shows how memory and history have become central themes in African films and how local cultural forms have been integrated into the film medium. Interviews with eight African filmmakers enlarge Thackway's account of the new cinematic codes and previously silenced voices given life in African film.
Cinema and Development in West Africa by James E. Genova
Call Number: PN1993.5.A35 G46 2013
ISBN: 9780253010087
Published/Created: 2013-09-25
Cinema and Development in West Africa shows how the film industry in Francophone West African countries played an important role in executing strategies of nation building during the transition from French rule to the early postcolonial period. James E. Genova sees the construction of African identities and economic development as the major themes in the political literature and cultural production of the time. Focusing on film both as industry and aesthetic genre, he demonstrates its unique place in economic development and provides a comprehensive history of filmmaking in the region during the transition from colonies to sovereign states.
Cinema in an Age of Terror by Michael F. O'Riley
Call Number: PN1995.9.P6 O75 2010
ISBN: 9780803228092
Published/Created: 2010
Cinema in an Age of Terror looks at how cinematic representations of colonial-era victimization inform our understanding of the contemporary age of terror. By examining works representing colonial history and the dynamics of spectatorship emerging from them, Michael F. O'Riley reveals how the centrality of victimization in certain cinematic representations of colonial history can help us understand how the desire to occupy the victim's position is a dangerous and blinding drive that frequently plays into the vision of terrorism. Films such as The Battle of Algiers, Days of Glory, Caché, and recent works by Maghrebien filmmakers all exemplify, in different ways, how this focus on victimization can become a problematic perspective--one in fact seeking to occupy ideological territory. Their return of colonial history to our contemporary context, although frequently problematic, enables us to see how victimization is very much about territory--cultural, spatial, and ideological--and how resistance to new forms of imperialist warfare and terror today must be located outside these haunting images from colonial history. Although such images of victimization ultimately only return as spectacular acts that draw our attention away from the cyclical contest over territory that they embody, those images nonetheless have the last word.
Cultural Representations of Massacre by Sabrina Parent
Call Number: PQ3980.5 .P37 2014
ISBN: 9781137274960
Published/Created: 2014
In this book, Parent puts together a history of representations of the 1944 mutiny in Senegal. Combining firsthand analysis of the works and their intertextual interactions as well an external perspective, Parent engages with history, literature, film, poetics, and politics and highlights the importance of remembering the past.
Francophone African Cinema by K. Martial Frindéthié
Call Number: PN1993.5.A35 F75 2009
ISBN: 9780786439621
Published/Created: 2009-03-24
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.
Guelwaar : roman / Guelwaar: a novel by Sembène, Ousmane
Call Number: PQ3989.S46 G85 1996
ISBN: 2708706055
Published/Created: 1996
Based on the author's film of the same name. A comedy in which Pierre Henri Thioune (called Guelwaar, the Noble One), a pillar of the local Christian community, is buried in a Muslim cemetery by mistake.
Imaginary Spaces of Power in Sub-Saharan Literatures and Films by Alix Mazuet
Call Number: PQ3980 .I49 2012
ISBN: 1443838969
Published/Created: 2012
This collection of essays is unlike others in the field of African studies, for it is based on three very precisely delineated focal points: a particular geographical region, the sub-Sahara; specific modes of cultural production, literature and cinema; and a focus on works of French expression. This three-fold approach to exploring the relationships between power and culture in a non-Western environment greatly contributes to making this book unique from a variety of perspectives: African, Francophone and postcolonial studies, as well as cross-disciplinary, cultural, transnational and diasporic studies. Moreover, the book offers deft and innovative analyses that move beyond the rhetoric of crises on the African continent we so very often hear of, so as to present a critical reflection on the subject at hand that is specific to the sub-Sahara and at the same time intimately linked to global culture, economy and politics. The authors' three-fold approach also presupposes that disciplinary compartmentalization increases power conflicts in academia. If only in part, compartmentalization is the result of antagonistic and competitive relations between specialization and multidisciplinary education. This book is thus a modest attempt at presenting an alternative to excessively fixed and homogeneous academic frontiers while considering that disciplinary expertise remains a must. Keeping in mind that an increasing number of scholars in Anglophone Postcolonial studies and Francophone African studies have been attempting for quite some time now to open interstices and build crossroads that can better connect them to each other, keeping in mind that these scholars work at revealing mechanisms by which any antagonistic discourses can mix, influence, act upon or react to one another, this book seeks to take a constructive step in establishing enduring grounds for multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and transnational academic research and collaboration.
L'Afrique fait son cinéma : regards et perspectives sur le cinéma africain francophone by Françoise Naudillon, Janusz Przychodzen, Sathya Rao
Call Number: PN1993.5.A35 A378 2006
ISBN: 2923153650
Published/Created: 2006
While ethnographic cinema solidified the image of the African using out-of-date stereotypes, the news media banalized the suffering, famished African. Subverting these bleak clichés, fiction film opened the path for new interrogations on the relationship between image and memory in an African context. Traditional myths are revisited by modern novelistic and cinematic forms which, themselves, do not leave these encounters unscathed. In this sense, cinema is a place for interrogating these unprecedented terms of dialogue between tradition and modernity, orality and image in African cinema.
La lumière de Souleymane Cissé : cinéma et culture by Samuel Lelièvre
Call Number: PN1997.Y337 L45 2013
ISBN: 9782343002019
Published/Created: 2013
Tout en prenant en compte l'articulation entre esthétique et politique ainsi que le développement historique d'un cinéma africain en relation avec un contexte socioculturel singulier, ce livre explore Yeelen (La Lumière) de Souleymane Cissé dans toute sa richesse et complexité symbolique et de sens, en adoptant le principe selon lequel "expliquer plus, c'est comprendre mieux". [Publisher Description]
Le cinéma à son âge d'or : cinquante ans d'écriture au service du septième art by Ahmed Bedjaoui
Call Number: PN1993.5.A4 B43 2018
ISBN: 9789947393215
Published/Created: 2018
Le public algérien m'identifie en priorité aux émissions que je produisais et animais pour l'unique chaîne de télévision qui existait à mes débuts. Mais avant de présenter ma première émission en décembre 1969, j'avais déjà accumulé une dizaine d'années d'activité dans le cinéma, d'abord comme animateur de ciné-club, puis de critique dans la presse écrite. Hormis le premier "papier" datant de juillet 1967, j'ai classé ma sélection dans des sections consacrées au cinéma arabe, au film national, à la production des oeuvres du Tiers-monde et aux grands noms du cinéma mondial. Le présent ouvrage a pour but de rappeler l'extraordinaire histoire d'amour qui liait les Algériens avec le cinéma de qualité. Je ne crois pas un instant que cet engouement ait disparu. Le succès des festivals nationaux de cinéma montre au contraire que le public ne néglige aucune occasion de manifester son amour pour le septième art; à condition qu'on lui restitue des espaces de projection en nombre suffisant et en qualité, pour ne pas tomber dans le cercle vicieux de la rareté/désaffection. [Publisher Description]
Maghrebs in Motion by Suzanne Gauch
Call Number: PN1993.5.A35 G395 2016
ISBN: 9780190262570
Published/Created: 2016
Exploring films made in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria from 1985 to 2009, Suzanne Gauch illustrates how late post-independence and early twenty-first century North African cinema prefigured many of the transformations in perception and relation that stunned both participants and onlookersduring the remarkable uprisings of the 2011 Arab Spring. Through multifaceted examinations of key films by nine filmmakers - Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, Nacer Khemir, Nabil Ayouch, Lyes Salem, Nadia El Fani, Tariq Teguia, Faouzi Bensaidi, and Nejib Belkadhi - Gauch delineates the shiftingrelation of politics to film in the era of neoliberal globalization. Each work, she argues, taps the power inherent in cinema to destabilize patterns of perception and judgment while taking film's role as popular entertainment in new directions.Highlighting how each film taps into the mobility at the core of cinema to break through the boundaries that have long circumscribed filmmaking from North Africa, Gauch shows how this cinema continues to forge and reflect unexpected trajectories for itself and its audiences.
Men in African Film and Fiction by Lahoucine Ouzgane (Editor)
Call Number: PN1995.9.M46 M46 2011
ISBN: 9781847015211
Published/Created: 2011
Through their analysis of the depictions in film and literature of masculinities in colonial, independent and post-independent Africa, the contributors open some key African texts to a more obviously politicized set of meanings.Collectively, the essays provide space for rethinking current theory on gender and masculinity: how only some of the most popular theories in masculinity studies in the West hold true in African contexts; how Western masculinities react with indigenous masculinities on the continent; how masculinity and femininity in Africa seem to reside more on a continuum of cultural practices than on absolutely opposite planes; and how generation often functions as a more potent metaphor than gender.
Nationalist African Cinema by Sada Niang
Call Number: PN1993.5.A35
ISBN: 9780739149096
Published/Created: 2014
In the last decade, a certain discomfort, at times even impatience emerged among critics of African cinema. The onset of such uneasiness can be traced back to the demise of the liberationist discourse, to the questioning of the monolithic expression "African cinema", and finally to the critical exploration of various forms of visual narratives developing at a fast speed on the continent. Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations reexamines African cinema of the nationalist era within the context of contemporary major Euro-American film trends. It argues that the aesthetic diversification of African cinema can be traced as far back as the nationalist era.
Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics by Akinwumi Adesokan
Call Number: PN1993.5.A35 A34 2011
ISBN: 9780253356796
Published/Created: 2011
What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.
Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages by John Mowitt
Call Number: PN1993.5.D44 M68 2005
ISBN: 0816628904
Published/Created: 2005
Exploring several dimensions of the problem of "film languages," this volume engages the complications inherent in the study of the "other" and investigates the intricate relationship between postcoloniality, national identity, ideology, and filmmaking. Author John Mowitt establishes how Eurocentrism sustains both the concept of the foreign language film and the flawed initiative of multiculturalism. Using bilingualism and the concept of foreign film language, Re-takes pushes film studies beyond both linguistics and psychoanalysis to resituate is within the networks of global cultural communication.Through close readings of the bilingual films of Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane and Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjines, Mowitt articulates the poetics and politics of postcoloniality in the global cinematic field, and challenges film studies to reflect on the relation between its organizing analytical distinctions - national and foreign, textual and institutional - and its position within globalization.
Tropical Dream Palaces by Odile Goerg
Call Number: PN1993.5.A358 G64 2020
ISBN: 9780190089078
Published/Created: 2020
Many studies focus on film in Africa. Few, however, study cinema as a leisure activity: one that has influenced several generations and opened up spaces to dream, discuss or contest. Movie theatres offered a break from the daily routine, as places of escape and of education. Cinema was also potentially subversive, offering an alternative to colonial discourse. Tropical Dream Palaces seeks to trace this history in a West African context: of broadening horizons on the one hand, and of censorship and control on the other. It fills a historiographic void, following cinema's arrival in the region in the early twentieth century up until the Independence era, and also looking further afield to Central Africa and its different models. Goerg addresses questions of film distribution in colonial times; of screening venues, their implantation, spread and different categories; while also focusing on audiences, their gender or age; the acquisition of a film culture; and the impact of screening foreign images. Her book draws on extremely varied sources to paint a broad picture of this cinematographic landscape: archives, the accounts of African and European spectators or administrators, novels, autobiographies, the local press, interviews and iconography.
Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century by Mahir Saul (Editor); Ralph A. Austen (Editor)
Call Number: PN1992.934.N6 V54 2010
ISBN: 9780821419304
Published/Created: 2010-10-05
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.
West African Films at the Library of Congress (PDF, 96.7 KB)
A list of West African cinema (in several languages) from countries including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mali, and Senegal. Please be advised that the Library of Congress Online Catalog is not a comprehensive listing of our film holdings; we also utilize several internal databases and card catalogs, including an internal database known as MAVIS (Merged Audiovisual Information System). MAVIS cannot be accessed online. Note that this will likely be the case for many of the films listed here. Locating films requires a variety of strategies, including keyword searches of our various manual and online catalogs, searching our vertical files, and compiling title lists from secondary reference sources.
Xala by Sembène, Ousmane; trans. Clive Wake.
Call Number: PQ3989.S46 X313 1976b
ISBN: 0435901753
Published/Created: 1976
Sembène's novel deals with a self-satisfied, half-westernized black businessman who is suddenly struck down by the Xala, a curse rendering him impotent. While he desperately looks for a cure from witch doctors and soothsayers, his impotence becomes a mirror of the impotence of young African nations over-dependent on white technology and bureaucratic structures.

French & Francophone Film: A Research Guide

Francophone African Cinema