Modernity and the African Cinema

Modernity and the African Cinema

Author: Femi Okiremuete Shaka

Publisher: Africa Research and Publications

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13:

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Providing an analysis of the implications of centuries of Euro-African contact and its effect on cinematic institutions in Africa, this book examines modern African film from the perspective of the global politics of subjectivity, agency, and identity construction.


South African National Cinema

South African National Cinema

Author: Jacqueline Maingard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1135124035

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South African National Cinema examines how cinema in South Africa represents national identities, particularly with regard to race. This significant and unique contribution establishes interrelationships between South African cinema and key points in South Africa’s history, showing how cinema figures in the making, entrenching and undoing of apartheid. This study spans the twentieth century and beyond through detailed analyses of selected films, beginning with De Voortrekkers (1916) through to Mapantsula (1988) and films produced post apartheid, including Drum (2004), Tsotsi (2005) and Zulu Love Letter (2004). Jacqueline Maingard discusses how cinema reproduced and constructed a white national identity, taking readers through cinema’s role in building white Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. She then moves to examine film culture and modernity in the development of black audiences from the 1920s to the 1950s, especially in a group of films that includes Jim Comes to Joburg (1949) and Come Back, Africa (1959). Jacqueline Maingard also considers the effects of the apartheid state’s film subsidy system in the 1960s and 1970s and focuses on cinema against apartheid in the 1980s. She reflects upon shifting national cinema policies following the first democratic election in 1994 and how it became possible for the first time to imagine an inclusive national film culture. Illustrated throughout with excellent visual examples, this cinema history will be of value to film scholars and historians, as well as to practitioners in South Africa today.


Migrating to the Movies

Migrating to the Movies

Author: Jacqueline Najuma Stewart

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-03-28

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 9780520936409

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The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban "land of hope" in the North. This richly illustrated book, discussing many early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, is the first detailed look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema. It investigates African American migrations onto the screen, into the audience, and behind the camera, showing that African American urban populations and cinema shaped each other in powerful ways. Focusing on Black film culture in Chicago during the silent era, Migrating to the Movies begins with the earliest cinematic representations of African Americans and concludes with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and other early "race films" made for Black audiences, discussing some of the extraordinary ways in which African Americans staked their claim in cinema's development as an art and a cultural institution.


Uplift Cinema

Uplift Cinema

Author: Allyson Nadia Field

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2015-05-22

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0822375559

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In Uplift Cinema, Allyson Nadia Field recovers the significant yet forgotten legacy of African American filmmaking in the 1910s. Like the racial uplift project, this cinema emphasized economic self-sufficiency, education, and respectability as the keys to African American progress. Field discusses films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes to promote education, as well as the controversial The New Era, which was an antiracist response to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. She also shows how Black filmmakers in New York and Chicago engaged with uplift through the promotion of Black modernity. Uplift cinema developed not just as a response to onscreen racism, but constituted an original engagement with the new medium that has had a deep and lasting significance for African American cinema. Although none of these films survived, Field's examination of archival film ephemera presents a method for studying lost films that opens up new frontiers for exploring early film culture.


Arab Modernism as World Cinema

Arab Modernism as World Cinema

Author: Peter Limbrick

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0520974336

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Arab Modernism as World Cinema explores the radically beautiful films of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, demonstrating the importance of Moroccan and Arab film cultures in histories of world cinema. Addressing the legacy of the Nahda or “Arab Renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century—when Arab writers and artists reenergized Arab culture by engaging with other languages and societies—Peter Limbrick argues that Smihi’s films take up the spirit of the Nahda for a new age. Examining Smihi’s oeuvre, which enacts an exchange of images and ideas between Arab and non-Arab cultures, Limbrick rethinks the relation of Arab cinema to modernism and further engages debates about the use of modernist forms by filmmakers in the Global South. This original study offers new routes for thinking about world cinema and modernism in the Middle East and North Africa, and about Arab cinema in the world.


Postcolonial African cinema

Postcolonial African cinema

Author: David Murphy

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-01-04

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1526141736

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This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines – film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies – in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. Structurally, the book is straightforward, though the aim is to incorporate diversity and complexity of approach within the overall simplicity of format. Chapters provide both an overview of the director’s output to date, and the necessary background – personal or national, cultural or political – to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director’s choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, or ideological stance. They also offer a particular reading of one or more films, in which the authors aim to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. This book thus constitutes a new departure in African film studies, recognising the maturity of the field, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon. Consequently, the volume should be of interest not only to specialists but also to the general reader.


Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora

Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora

Author: Anjali Prabhu

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-04-17

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 111858869X

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Analyzing art house films from the African continent and the African diaspora, this book showcases a new generation of auteurs with African origins from political, aesthetic, and spectatorship perspectives. Focuses on art house cinema and discusses commercial African cinema Enlarges our understanding of African film to include thematic and aesthetic influence Highlights aesthetic and political aspects including racial identity, women’s issues, and diaspora Heavily illustrated with over 90 film stills Features selected stills integral to the filmic analysis in full color Moves beyond Western-oriented analytical paradigms


Queer African Cinemas

Queer African Cinemas

Author: Lindsey B. Green-Simms

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-02-04

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1478022639

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In Queer African Cinemas, Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an environment of increasing antiqueer violence, efforts to criminalize homosexuality, and other state-sanctioned homophobia. Green-Simms argues that these films not only record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience; they highlight how queer African cinematic practices contribute to imagining new hopes and possibilities. Examining globally circulating international art films as well as popular melodramas made for local audiences, Green-Simms emphasizes that in these films queer resistance—contrary to traditional narratives about resistance that center overt and heroic struggle—is often practiced from a position of vulnerability. By reading queer films alongside discussions about censorship and audiences, Green-Simms renders queer African cinema as a rich visual archive that documents the difficulty of queer existence as well as the potentials for queer life-building and survival.


Visions of Japanese Modernity

Visions of Japanese Modernity

Author: Aaron Andrew Gerow

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0520256727

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In this study, Aaron Gerow focuses on the early period in which the institutional and narrational structure of Japanese cinema was in flux, arguing that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defined. Both progressive critics of the 'pure film' movement and the more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema's informal exhibition contexts. Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure film movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the 'theft' of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representations of Japan in Western films by exporting a Japanese cinema 'reformed' to emulate the international norm.