Cinema and Development in West Africa

Cinema and Development in West Africa. By James E. Genova. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 206; notes, bibliography, index. $70/£53 cloth, $25/£18.99 paper, $21.99/£16.99 E-Book.James E. Genova's Cinema and Development in West Africa seeks to understand postcolonial African cinema's relationship to cinema of colonial period. In that regard, it is somewhat unique, as few studies of African cinema are willing to acknowledge, much less explore, relationship between African cinema and European cinema. Although, of course, African cinema did not appear in a vacuum, and African filmmakers are not by any means unaware of other cinematic traditions, most critics and scholars of African cinema, for political and pragmatic reasons, have preferred to overlook African cinema's relationship to non-African cinemas, and instead to read, interpret, and explain African cinema through filter of traditional African forms, such as griotic tradition or influence of Yoruba theater. Genova's book not only asserts a fundamental relationship between European colonial and African post-colonial cinema, it asserts that it is precisely because first generation of African filmmakers knew and understood colonial cinema, and its place in colonial doctrine and practice that they sought to bring their revolutionary ideology and poetics to cinema.The book is organized into five chapters, with an introduction. The Introduction makes very clearly point I have made above, that African cinema was created into a very specific sociopolitical and economic context, and as such it appropriated certain characteristics from other global cinemas, particularly European cinema, and that it rejected or reworked certain other characteristics, and that acts of appropriation and rejection were a conscious project on part of African filmmakers seeking, for first time, to reclaim cinema for continent.The book's first chapter explores European colonial cinema, and particularly its place in broader colonial project, or what it terms the cinema industrial complex. It examines laws and political rhetoric surrounding French film production and distribution in colonial Africa, and political rhetoric and action governing film production and consumption, including such policies as they appeared in indigenat and Laval Decree.The second chapter treats colonial-era films about Africa and what Genova terms the colonialist regime of representation, through discussions colonial-era films, particularly Georges Regnier's 1949 screen adaptation of Robert Delavignette's Les Paysans noirs (Paris: Stock, 1931). …

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