African Unification Front
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OVERVIEW ON AFRICAN CINEMA
CINEMA IS CRITICAL FOR AFRICAN UNITY
The AUF is committed to the development of a progressive African film culture, which is an essential part of the democratic process. The AUF recognizes that cinema is important in effecting the African unification movement beyond the mere comprehending of social dynamics to their transformation. It is a vehicle for social change.
Understanding a movie is not essentially an aesthetic practice; it is a social practice which mobilises the full range of meaning systems within the culture. Visual education in Africa predates cinema. African civilization had advanced visual forms that predate cinema and which permiate the cultural expression of our society. Cinema is only a new variant on an already well-established milieu. However, the colonial occupation stiffled the visual and particiative education aspect of African culture, which has resulted in a neocolonial education regime devoid of a robust visual interaction.
The problem is compounded when one realizes that visual education is often undertaken by language departments, where teachers lack the necessary training and experience or are frankly contemptuous of anything appearing on film or videotape.
THE AFRICAN FILM FESTIVALS
The PanAfrican Festival of Film and Television of Ouagadougou FESPACO is biggest and oldest African film festival in the world, and takes place once every two years in Ougadougou City in Burkina Faso. It is attended by people from all over the world. The first Frontline Film Festival was first held in Harare in 1990. Other festivals that promote African film include the Weekly Mail and Durban Film Festivals; The Carthage film festival.
Nearly 70 countries are represented at every festival, and over twenty-thousand people attended the opening ceremonies in 2001. Digniatries and governments leaders from all over Africa attend FESPACO where free screenings of festival films are held each night in the Place de la Revolution. The Yennenga Stallion prize is given to the winners in the festival. Yennega was the favourite daughter of a legendary king of ancient empire of Ghana.
The battle over what is truly and correctly African cinema is always an issue at FESPACO, and it continues to act play a powerful role in the imagination of both filmmakers and audiences. Films of the African Diapora have a major impact in Africa. At FESPACO these films speak to continuities that are stronger than the differences of 400 years of separation.
Ougadougou's oldest cinema, is famous Cine Oubri, once designed with different seating for blacks and whites, under the colonial occupation...and now a symbol of African cinema's history.
There are many African film festivals around the world, that serve to present a multi-dimensional image of Africans that is sorely lacking outside Africa. Most of the times this is the only means available to people outside Africa to connect with the African experience in a way that is sharp contrast to the portrayal of Africans in western film and in the press. The African Film Festivals in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal have had a major impact in changing attitudes towards Africa and Africans, and have remained an important resource for American and Canadian film makers.
See: A Brief History of African Cinema
See: Distribution of Cinema Resources in the AU
THE CONCERNS OF AFRICAN FILM MAKERS
Africans remain deprived of African cinema because films have limited access to venues, and because distributors are contractually bound to foreign cultures. African cinema is an industry falsely separated from its consumers, the place to see it is the capitals and the television stations of Western Europe and America.
African filmmakers have not been able to show their films in Africa as a consequence of the monopoly of foreign distributors. Economic determinants, political constraints, aesthetic strategies and psychological processes are all factors that expalin the weakness of African cinema. Understanding filmmaking in terms of economics, especially with regard to distribution, tax incentives and subsidies, is important to finding resolutions. There is no doubt that distribution (with censorship as a kind of adjunct) is an absolutely fundamental issue in any discussion of the African film industry.
The industry should be under the economic control of the Film guilds, although the African Union should finance the industry. The use of tax incentives should stimulate large scale long term high grade film projects.
In addition to the problems inherent in films made by whites for black people, is compounded the problems of production, distribution and exhibition.
The value of cinema in raising debate and creating solidarity actions should not be dismissed.
Distribution is grossly skewed in terms of rich audiences with very few cinemas in shanty towns and rural districts. The Structuring of Popular Memories,
The film industry has four branches - production, distribution, exhibition, and criticism.
At this time oppressed Africans tend to think in the images of their oppression, and therefore tend to see themselves through the oppressor’s eyes. Authentic representation can only be created through augmentation of an independent community based African film industry.
The basic fact about African cinema to date is the way it has coped with the process of decolonisation; this applies as much to questions of national identity as to the organisational gains that African film industries have (or have not) been able to make.
between the need for films with local themes (which do not generate finance) and an international reputation (to recover costs), between government assistance and government control, between international aid and international dependence, between American domination of the market and the need for regional distribution, between nationalisation of the industry and critical independence, between the African elites and the mass audiences, between the stereotypes of Western cinema and the need to “naturalise” African images.
The African Union must adopt strategies and policies to construction the African film industry. Poor condition of production equipment, maintenance difficulties, including dependence on foreign industrial markets; bureaucratic anomalies and sheer mismanagement by film producers.
The ambiguous and ambivalent relation between dependence on foreign aid and the opportunities offered by foreign resources is a constant (and unresolved) dilemma in Africa, it seems. Large regional distribution networks are a partial solution, though audiences still seem not large enough to enable producers to recover costs. Another alternative is the various forms of import levies or tax incentives or concessions.
A third alternative stressed in the book - as an attempt to counter the effects of small audiences and the unreliability of financing - is to use more modest equipment, especially Super 8.
One of the most successful distribution and exhibition companies in Africa is a semiprivate company in Senegal, the Sociètè internationale de distribution et d’exploitation cinèmatographique (SIDEC), while the most successful filmmakers in Africa rely entirely on independently raised local and international capital.
International recognition and distribution are becoming increasingly desirable means of recouping costs and the most effective way of entering this market, it seems, is with 35mm films which have high production values.
The principal characteristic of African is really not so much where it is made, or even who makes it, but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays. As such, African cinema is as much an aspect of the process of decolonisation and transformation.
The Fèdèration Panafricaine des Cinèastes (FEPACI) was established in Algiers in 1969 quite specifically “to use film as a tool for the liberation of the colonised countries and as a step towards the total unity of Africa” and it actually sought affiliation with the OAU. FEPACI gradually refined its theoretical and, more specifically, its political position. At first “The commitment to the liberation of Africa meant for the filmmakers the creation of an aesthetics of disalienation and colonization” and the organisation was even able to challenge the extremely powerful French distribution monopolies.
By 1982 FEPACI had to reassess the role played by governments in film activities as their economic policies were obstructing the growth of national industries. At the same time there were proposals that filmmakers go beyond the idea of national cinemas to promote inter-African co-operation with the resolution that “the funds that go into producing African films, whether they are national, regional or inter-African films, should come from the twin sectors of distribution and exhibition, not from the government budgets.
These problems have to do with inadequate production facilities, unorganised distribution and exhibition, equipment maintenance and government control. The problems are mainly structural; there seems to be no difficulty with the concept of a “national cinema” in principle. Historical accounts of national cinemas have too often been premised on unproblematised notions of nationhood and its production. The search for a stable and coherent national identity can only be successful at the expense of repressing internal differences, tensions and contradictions...”
Africans see more American, French, Indian and Arab films than they do African films - The “nation” is also capable of highly distorted representation if it is defined too exclusively, as I tried to show in a brief account of our own expensive and disastrous “National” Film Board.
Films directed by Africans in the former French colonies are superior, both in quantity and quality, to those by directors in other sub-Saharan African countries formerly colonised by the British, the Belgians and the Portuguese. Eighty per cent of black African films are made by Francophone Africans.
CINEMATIC NEOCOLONIALISM
Furthermore, there is racism operating in the film industry. The system favours big-budget blockbusters, favours groups with economic power and discriminates against those without it. Hollywood, with easy access to African distribution circuits, emphasise production values which are difficult for African film to imitate and are often inappropriate to African concerns. At the same time, economic neo-colonialism and technological dependency raises film making costs in Africa, where imported films, cameras and accessories often cost two or three times as much as in the rest of the world.
Film requires an extensive industrial infrastructure (economic, technological) and resources (local and international).
the aesthetics of liberation, cultural reconstruction, social transformation. misplaced production values convert the anguish into glossified kitsch; the social ideals implied in ; invite critical exploration and engagement
AFRICAN FILM RESOURCE CENTRES AROUND THE WORLD
Only a few universities and libraries around the world have even a limited collection of African film. The films are usually hard to come by and also they are expensive. Most major cities around the world have a festival of African film, the most important of which is FESPACO in Burkina Faso. In Europe African film has more play than in North American cities. There are several festivals all across north America that are run by Africans and that feature African films. New York, Montreal (Vue D'Afrique), Chicago (International Black Panther Film Festival), Vancouver (African Film Festival), Memphis (Young Memphis Black Writers Festival), etc,.
FILM RESOURCES IN The AFRICAN UNION
Film Resource Unit, Johannesburg
Mayibuye Centre, University of the Western Cape
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