AFRICA: Africa World Press Guide

AFRICAN CINEMA
Africa through an African Lens

Ukadike's laudatory assessment of the state of African cinema suggests that there is much to be learned about Africa and its peoples by studying films and videos produced by African filmmakers.

Three highly recommended books provide a solid foundation for understanding the development of filmmaking in Africa. They are Black African Cinema (Ukadike 1994), which offers an informed and readable survey of the history and development of cin ema in sub-Saharan Africa; Arab and African Film Making (Malkmus and Armes 1991), which complements Nwachukwu Ukadike's study by including North Africa in its coverage; and African Experiences of Cinema (Bakari and Cham 1996), an authoritat ive collection of documents, testimonies, and essays that address significant aspects of the experiences and challenges of cinema in various parts of the entire African continent over a broad timespan.

Clyde Taylor's opening essay on Africa in World Cinema since 1945 (Luhr 1987) presents a 21-page history of the development of filmmaking in Africa in the post-colonial period. Taylor's article, "Africa: The Last Cinema," is notable for includin g North as well as sub-Saharan Africa. Roy Armes also covers North Africa (the Maghreb, or Arab West) and sub-Saharan--or Black--Africa in his groundbreaking survey of film production in the Third World: Third World Film Making and the West (Armes 1987).

The history of Black Africa's cinema is given, in brief, in the translated text of a booklet in Cinemedia's French-language series "Cinemas of Black Africa": To Have a History of African Cinema (Bachy 1987).

For a concise overview of the subject see Nancy Schmidt's article, "African Filmmakers and Their Films," in African Studies Review (Schmidt 1994). Schmidt, who is Librarian for African Studies and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Indiana Uni versity, has compiled two authoritative and highly recommended bibliographies on African films and filmmakers:

• Sub-Saharan African Films and Filmmakers: An Annotated Bibliography (Schmidt 1988) and
• Sub-Saharan African Films and Filmmakers: An Annotated Bibliography, 1987-1992 (Schmidt 1994).

Schmidt's two bibliographies contain more than 7,000 entries of English- and French-language books, monographs, academic theses, articles, reviews, pamphlets, and other resource materials on filmmaking in sub-Saharan Africa. The more recent of the two bibliographies includes a reprint of an essay by Schmidt, "Visualizing Africa: The Bibliography of Films by Sub-Saharan African Filmmakers," that describes the nature and scope of printed resources on this topic.

Other noteworthy overviews and bibliographies include

• African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Diawara 1992);
• Black and Third Cinema: Film and Television Bibliography (Vieler-Porter 1991);
• Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (Cham and Andrade-Watkins 1988);
• Bibliography of Film Bibliographies (Wulff 1987); and
• "New Discourses of African Cinema," Iris (biannual magazine), spring 1995 (no. 18).

Region/country studies

Africa specialist Nancy J. Schmidt published a review of filmmaking in several African nations in African Studies Review 28, no. 1 (1985): 111-114, "African Filmmaking, Country by Country."

The thirty-first edition of the Variety International Film Guide 1994 (Cowie 1993) contains chapters on filmmaking in four African countries: Burkina Faso, Egypt, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

The Cinema in Nigeria (Balogun 1987) is an introduction to filmmaking in Nigeria by Françoise Balogun, wife of Ola Balogun, "one of Nigeria's most prolific filmmakers and an outspoken advocate of the development of a national film industry i n Nigeria" (in the words of Nancy J. Schmidt; see Schmidt's review article, "Recent Perspectives on Sub-Saharan African Filmmaking," in the second quarter 1989 edition of Africa Today magazine).

Filmmaking in South Africa is the focus of two studies: The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film (Tomaselli 1988) and Images of South Africa: The Rise of the Alternative Film (Botha and van Aswegen 1992). The co-autho r of Images of South Africa--Martin Botha--is a research specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria, South Africa, and is co-editor of Movies Moguls Mavericks: South African Cinema 1979-1991 (Blignaut and Botha 1992).

For region/country-specific information on filmmaking in North Africa see "Bibliography and Filmography," by Miriam Rosen and Barbara Shahin Batlouni, in The Arab Image in American Film and Television (Georgakas and Rosen 1989), and directories published by Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services (Berkeley, Calif.).

Biographies and filmographies

Françoise Pfaff's Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers (Pfaff 1988) contains biographical background on African filmmakers, along with lists and descriptions of their films. So, too, does Chambers Concise Encyclopedia of Film and Televisi on (Hunter 1991).

The 102-page Video Catalogue: Africa (Karlsson 1992) produced by the Educational Resources Information Service, draws on the database of the Media Resource Centre at the University of Natal, (Durban) to present a list of African-made films and v ideos on a range of subjects including natural science, performing arts, religion, social issues, and visual arts.

Catalogs and guides that contain lists of films from and about Africa include