Reel Resistance: The Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno by Melissa Thackway and Jean-Marie Teno (review)

Abstract

Coauthored by film scholar Melissa Thackway and filmmaker JeanMarie Teno, Reel Resistance: The Cinema of JeanMarie Teno is almost a sequel to Thackway’s Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in SubSaharan Francophone African Film (2003), which sees subSaharan Francophone African cinema as a countercinema responding to the West’s colonial portrayals of Africa.1 It exhibits Thackway’s personal “claim and embrace [of] the subjectivity and proximity of [her own] critical gaze and position” in the selection of content for analysis.2 The book focuses on the documentary genre and specifically on the work of Teno, an “unconventional free spirit,” as Thackway describes him.3 Inspired by the “father of African cinema,” Ousmane Sembène, Teno desired for his films to be “political in form and content . . . a tool for liberation.”4 He describes his “romanesque” approach to filmmaking as an essential “Other” method to deconstruct Western mainstream cinema’s colonial representations and “readymade narratives” of Africa.5 As a Camer-