From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa. Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering 'francophone' films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in 'anglophone' regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of 'lusophone' filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting 'new' African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties.
Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, "Black African Cinema's" analysis of key films and issues - the most comprehensive in English - is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Africa and the Cinema
Information and Entertainment Media in Black
Africa before the Arrival of Cinema
Some Early Contacts with the Cinema
Western Images of Africa: Genealogy of an
Ideological Formulation
Banishing the Exotic: Toward a Positive
Image?
2 Francophone Origins
General Trends and the Problems of Development:
An Overview
The Indigenous African Film Production
Med Hondo and Ousmane Sembene: The Schism
between Theory and Practice
3 Developments in Anglophone Film
Production
Working for the Decolonization of the
Picture
The Battle of the Frames: Film, Television, and
Bureaucracy
The Formation of Independent Cinema in Ghana and
Nigeria
Ghana: Contrasts in Ideology and Practice
Nigeria: Paradox of Mediocrity?
4 The Cultural Context of Black African
Cinema
Post-1970 and the Introspective Phase
Oral Tradition and the Aesthetics of Black African
Cinema
Film and the Politics of Liberation
5 New Developments in Black African
Cinema
Contours of an Emerging Trend: Toward a New
Cinema?
Narration, Transgression, and the Centrality of
Culture
Toward the Tradition and the Centrality of the
Paradigm
6 Conclusion: Whither African Cinema?
The Present Situation
The Question of Aesthetics
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
