The Six Decades of African Film

The Six Decades of African Film Olivier Barlet (bio) We never write just one thing, we write what keeps us awake at night: how to relate history today? Kossi Efoui1 The 1960s: Mandatory Commitment O brothers, if our syntax is not a cog of freedom if our books still weigh on the docker's shoulder if our voice is not a guiding star to railway workers or shepherds if our poems are not the arms of justice in the hands of our people; O let us remain silent! —Jean Sénac2 On May 7, 1954, after eight years of combat in Vietnam, the French army was defeated at Dien Bien Phu. After Ethiopia, Liberia, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, and Guinea, the francophone African states gained independence in 1960, followed by Algeria and the remaining English-speaking states up until 1965. The Portuguese-speaking countries only gained Independence in 1974–1975, after armed struggle against the Salazar regime. Independence was not generously granted, but laboriously conquered through the determination of combative colonial subjects and anti-colonialists, in a combination of unrest, revolt, trade unionism, and the development of nationalist ideas. Writers had prepared the ground as they depicted the African continent's cultural wealth and denounced the colonial system. In 1921, Guianese René Maran denounced the wrongdoings of colonialism in Batouala, but still won the prestigious French Goncourt Literary Award. He did, however, lose his job as administrator in Oubangui-Chari. The 1930s negritude movement led by Senghor, Césaire, and Damas overtly asserted its demands in committed and proselytizing works and in a discourse that sought to extricate the continent [End Page 203] from the margins of history by exalting so-called "negro" values that drew on a spiritual and poetic approach to the world. In the 1950s, Camara Laye (L'Enfant noir / The African Child) introduced autobiographical fiction, while Mongo Beti (Ville cruelle / Cruel City) perpetuated the virulence of his predecessors. A discourse emerged that considered the exaltation of a precolonial Africa, monolithic in its unanimism, as a trap destined to perpetuate the heirs of colonial power. After Independence, Yambo Ouologem (Le Devoir de violence / Bound to Violence) thus opted for a spirit of insolence and highlighted African responsibility, while Ahmadou Kourouma (Les Soleils des indépendances / The Suns of Independence) probed the confrontation between traditional societies and the model of civilization imposed by the West. Until the 1960s, the 1934 decree introduced by Laval, the then Minister of the Colonies, made it obligatory for anyone wanting to shoot images in sub-Saharan francophone Africa to obtain authorization from the authorities. Africans only had access to ideologically loaded images of themselves produced by colonial filmmakers, ethnologists, and missionaries. The first African filmmakers thus had to fight the negation of their selves that these colonial images represented, in which Africans were the backdrop to stories that took place in spite of them, or were the "insects" that Ousmane Sembène and Med Hondo denounced. Their films were militant, but not banner-waving, as they were aware of the need to reach a public not taken in by slogans. Denouncing both obsolete customs and corrupt elites, their aim was to replace "civilization" with "progress," or in other words, to resist manipulation and backwardness. Their cinema aimed to decolonize the gaze and mentalities, reconquer its own space and images, but was also a cultural affirmation. Seeking to reappropriate and transmit the founding values of their new societies, their fictions readily adopted a documentary gaze. The same was the case in North Africa, which sought to eschew cinema's pre-independence Orientalist visions and restore its own sociology and culture. As the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco had, relatively speaking, respected Arab and traditional socio-educative systems, the pioneers' films there were less focused on ending assimilation than films in the former French department that had become Algeria. They all, however, shared the burden of rectifying the general amnesia surrounding colonial history and the liberation struggles. Omar Khlifi thus portrayed the insurrectionist events that led to Tunisian independence in Al Fajr / The Dawn (1966), and Algerian cinema focused on the liberation struggle with Patrouille à l'Est (dir...

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