Focus on African Films

Focus on African Films. Edited by Francoise Pfaff. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. 327. $24.95 paper. As Francoise Pfaff indicates in her introduction, this collection of essays is not intended to be a critical panoramic view of African cinema or an attempt at film taxonomy in the Far id Boughedir or Mathia Diawara vein. Rather, it aims at highlighting the new trends and developments occurring in the recent years, specifically how films have moved away from dichotomous representations of idyllic precolonial Africa on the one hand and the destruction and corruption of Africa and Africans by European values on the other. Interestingly, Pfaff's choice of "films" rather than "cinema" in the title is never problematized. Yet it represents a conscious choice that raises several questions as to how we view the field and teach the subject. This is a point that should have been addressed further. Part I (on re-examining "Official History") explores African filmmakers' renewed interest in bringing history to the screen and filling in some of the silences of the past. Robert Cancel's article "Come Back South Africa" on Apartheid captures the different stages of resistance and approaches by South African filmmakers. Samba Gadjigo delineates the new strategies introduced by Sembene vis-a-vis the representation of history. With Emitai, Ceddo, and Camp de Thieroye, Sembene produced a counter-narrative to both the usual Hollywood representation of history and the official Senegalese representation and popular memory of certain events of the past. Mbye Cham's article on recent narratives and representational strategies used in African feature films and documentaries completes this picture of a revisionary construction of history. In that respect, Joseph Gugler's essay raises a key issue about the rapport between fictionality and historical representations in African films and critics' responsibility to point out some of the discrepancies between the factual and cinematic representations. Part II (on the deconstruction of contextual space) is most compelling. It includes Pfaff's analysis of African cities as cinematic texts, Madeleine CottenetHage's exploration of images of France in Francophone African films, Kenneth Harrow's new take on Sembene's Xala, and Brenda Berrian's focus on Manu Dibango's soundtrack in Ceddo and what music enables Sembene to do. Cottenet-Hage analyzes the postcolonial implications of the choice of French space as the setting to several Francophone African films. Surprisingly, the issues of invisibility and assimilation for non-European immigrants, of blending into French society, are not really addressed, as for instance in her analysis of Le cri du Coeur. …