Introduction

Raja Amari was born into a middle-class family in Tunis (her father was a civil servant and her mother designed children's clothes) in 1971. She studied French literature and civilisation at the University of Tunis I, before going on to study film at FEMIS in Paris, from which she graduated in 1998. She currently divides her time between Paris and Tunis. Before making her first feature, she worked as a film critic for various Tunisian film reviews, contributing, for example, articles to the early issues of Cinécrits on filmmakers as diverse as Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Raymond Depardon and Michel Khleifi, and on subjects ranging from the depiction of space in Tunisian films to the amateur film movement. Her stated preference (when asked in 2004) was for Italian and French filmmakers, Pier Paolo Pasolini having been an early influence. She added that she felt very close to the new French cinema, to young French filmmakers like François Ozon and Arnaud Despleschin: ‘It's not that they come out of the same school as me, FEMIS, it's more that I like the way they deal with their characters.

Introduction

Faouzi Bensaidi was born in 1967 in Meknès and, after completing his diploma studies of acting at ISADAC in Rabat, he spent a further period of drama study in Paris from 1990 onwards, first at the Institut d'Etudes Théatrales at the University of Paris III and then at CNSAD. He also did courses in various aspects of filmmaking at FEMIS in 1995. His long academic training allows him to be unusually articulate about the choices he makes when filming and the nature of his own mise-en-scène. But he also has wide practical and professional experience, having worked extensively in theatre in Morocco as both actor and director. On screen, he has had important roles in Nabil Ayouch's Mektoub (1997), Jillali Ferhati's Braids/Tresses (1999) and Daoud Aoulad Syad's The Wind Horse/Le Cheval de vent (2001). In addition, he has worked as co-writer and actor on the French director André Téchiné's feature Far Away/Loin (2001), a story of drug trafficking which was shot in Morocco. Bensaidi is very much a product of the Moroccan government's project to support younger filmmakers.

The Postcolonial Situation

Filmmaking in Africa by Africans is fundamentally a postcolonial activity and experience, and nowhere is this more the case than in the two contiguous but variously colonised geographical areas dealt with in this book. The first area comprises the North African countries forming the Maghreb: Tunisia and Morocco, which both became independent in 1956, and Algeria, whose independence was achieved only after a long and bloody war of liberation in 1962. The second area comprises the states formed south of the Sahara from the two giant colonies of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, which were divided at independence into the twelve separate countries now known as Benin (formerly Dahomey), Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), Chad, Central African Republic, Gabon and Congo. To this list we may add the two West African states which were formerly German colonies but had become French protectorates after the First World War: Togo and Cameroon. These two were granted their independence in 1960, along with all the other West African States apart from Guinea, which had proclaimed its independence in 1958. The two contiguous areas north and south of the Sahara together provide a continuous unbroken land mass of just under 11 million square kilometres (about 16.5 per cent larger than the United States).

Colonial Cinema

The cinema reached Africa at much the same time as it spread across Europe and the United States. There were film shows in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1896, in Tunis and Fez in 1897, Dakar in 1900 and Lagos in 1903. The initial impulse behind this worldwide spread was purely commercial: the desire to exploit to the full the commercial potential of what its inventors, like the Lumière Brothers, feared might be just a passing novelty. But as film narrative developed in length and complexity, the export of film took on a new significance. As Ferid Boughedir has observed: ‘Cinema reached Africa with colonialism. Its principal role was to supply a cultural and ideological justification for political domination and economic exploitation’. In many ways cinema succeeded in this role: ‘A native worker performs better when he believes that the representatives of colonial power are his betters by race, and that his own civilisation is inferior to that of the whites’.

Little one-minute films were also shot in Africa at the turn of the century, as the Lumière operators made a habit of shooting local ‘views’ (a comparatively simple procedure since Lumière's cinematograph was both camera and projector combined).

Introduction

Mahamat Saleh Haroun was born in Chad in 1963. He moved to France and studied first filmmaking at the CLCF in Paris and then journalism at the IUT in Bordeaux. He worked for five years in print journalism and radio before returning to filmmaking, working from a base in Paris (through his company, Les Productions de la Lanterne) and becoming a key figure in the Guilde africaine des réalisateurs et producteurs. In the Guild's first bulletin he defined his (and their) ambitions:

From the first Haroun has been a prolific and eclectic filmmaker. His early shorter films alternate between documentary and fiction and are in a number of media: 16mm film – Maral Tanie/La Deuxième épouse (1994, fiction); Beta SP video – Bord'Africa (1995, documentary), Sotigui Kouyaté, un griot moderne (1996, documentary), Un thé au Sahel (1998, fiction); 35mm film – Goï Goï le nain (1995, fiction), B 400 (1997, fiction).

Introduction

Dani Kouyaté (the name is sometimes spelt as Dany) was born in Bobodioulasso, in Burkina Faso, in 1961. Descended from one of the most celebrated families of griots, his father was the celebrated griot and actor Sotigui Kouyaté, who plays the leading role in Dani's first feature. Within traditional Mande society, with its three-caste structure of nobles, artisans and slaves, griots were ranked in the middle category, alongside blacksmiths and leather-workers, as men of the word. In a society without writing, their role was the preservation of memory and mediation between people and power. Given their control of verbal expression, as both historians and genealogists for their peoples, griots had considerable power and authority. Valérie Thiers-Thiam notes that, ‘The griot enjoys a great freedom of speech, he uses flattery and well as mockery; no-one, not even senior dignitaries, escapes the risk of hearing home truths and seeing himself ridiculed by a griot.’

Introduction

African filmmakers’ quest for autonomy in the 1980s is matched, notes Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, by ‘compelling experimentation’, which ‘enables us to appreciate African cinema as innovative and diverse’. Instead of directly denouncing the Westernisation and corruption of postcolonial African elites in realistically depicted stories of contemporary life, they choose instead to re-examine the roots of African culture and to draw inspiration from African oral story telling. Manthia Diawara has argued that there are three reasons for the this shift to a precolonial past: to avoid censorship, to search for precolonial African traditions that can contribute to the solution of contemporary problems, and to develop a new film language. In following this path, the new filmmakers also, and no doubt unexpectedly, created images of Africa that found instant success in the West, where their films won prizes at European festivals and received (comparatively) wide recognition and distribution.

Introduction

It is understandable that African filmmakers of the 1960s and early 1970s were largely concerned – after the long period of colonisation – to show Africa from an African perspective, to make their audiences see things anew by projecting the everyday realities around them onto the screen. In doing so, they were calling upon audiences to recognise their own social and historical situation. As the initial didacticism faded, the style of realism they adopted was close to that of the Italian neorealists, showing poverty in order to expose and create sympathy, rather than to incite action. In so far as there was a focus on the individual, it was largely in terms of a failure to adapt to the challenges posed by the wider clash of tradition and modernity. What is perhaps surprising is that this same stance persists largely unchanged into the present for the majority of African filmmakers. What the 1980s and 1990s brought were ways of deepening this basic realist approach by showing greater concern for the individual character and a more questioning stance, aware of political as well as social issues.

Introduction

This study is largely concerned with post-independence filmmaking in four adjoining areas astride the Sahara, all of which were colonised by the French up to the end of the 1950s or the beginning of the 1960s. Three of these – Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia – are independent states, and there is no critical problem in making general claims about them as unified contexts for filmmaking (though this is not to assume, a priori, that film production there constitutes a ‘national cinema’). To see the fourth area as a single unit is perhaps more controversial, since it comprises fourteen independent states in francophone West Africa south of the Sahara, all of which were either former French protectorates (Cameroon and Togo) or previously formed part of the two French supercolonies, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa (the remaining twelve). The unifying factor here is that most of the impetus and finance for filmmaking here has come from France, as part of the French government's policy of maintaining close cultural and economic links with its former African colonies. A further argument, which I hope will be shown to be correct by what follows, is that there is a unity linking filmmakers north and south of the Sahara, though these are generally regarded as quite separate worlds by Western, particularly US, critics.

Introduction

Born in Kiffa, Mauritania in 1961, brought up in Mali, trained at the VGIK film school in Moscow thanks to a Soviet bursary, and resident in Paris since the early 1990s, Sissako is the archetypal filmmaker as exile. He is very much the product of the European exile that foreign film school training entails. Though he tells us he read the militant theorists Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire when he was young (quoting the latter in the commentary of Life on Earth/La Vie sur terre), his film tastes are very Westernised. Asked about the films that have influenced him, he cites not his African forerunners, but Fellini's La Strada, Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev, Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul and Antonioni's The Passenger. Sissako's notion of African cinema also differs radically from that of the pioneers of the 1960s, for whom the notion of truly African voices in cinema was so important. Talking to an interviewer in 1995, Sissako said: