The FEPACI and Its Artistic Legacies

The FEPACI and Its Artistic Legacies Sada Niang (bio) The presentation, criticism, and contextualization of African cinema have traditionally started with the African experience of modernity. In his 1992 African Cinema: Politics and Culture, Manthia Diawara located the emergence of African cinema, its liberation narratives, and realist aesthetics in a desire to rebut the reductions of the colonial past, Frank Ukadike in his most comprehensive Black African Cinema unveils the inventive imagery of colonial cinema and film.1 In subsequent chapters, drawing on the writings of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Frantz Fanon, and various other theoreticians of the colonial experience, Ukadike devises an analytical grid for films made by Africans from various regions of the continent. Both Joseph Gugler and Melissa Thackway insist on the need for African filmmakers of the 1960s–1970s, to renew the identity constructions of their peoples.2 Lastly in his Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture, Politics and Theory, K. Martial Frindéthié revamps the dominant features of this historical approach before thematically analyzing the films of Sembène.3 Almost inevitably, the theoretical framework of these studies rests on one of the single most important historical experiences of the continent: its domination by the West starting in the early twentieth century. Whereas Nationalist African Cinema duly acknowledges the validity and the contribution of such studies, it also proposes to widen the context of the emergence of African cinema by highlighting its connection with Latin American filmmakers and its situational solidarity with World cinema at large.4 For as much as the first generation of African filmmakers crafted "a cinema of revolt against colonialism, and then against neocolonialism, dependency and eurocentrism" they also inscribed their creation within a vast movement of contestation against colonial domination in Africa, dictatorial regimes in Europe, Latin America, and conservative politics in Canada and the United States.5 At the same time and as Roy Armes points out, most of these filmmakers were part of an emerging African elite, were trained overseas in some of the most prestigious film schools in the West and, as such, displayed particular sociological traits which will influence their creative tendencies: [End Page 176] The elites that emerged under colonialism at virtually all the key points of interaction between traditional societies and the West are historically unique in terms of their Westernization. They owe their power neither to initial wealth … nor to direct involvement in production or even ownership of the means of production. … These elites are also the stratum through which "the ideological, moral and philosophical traditions of Western civilization have been transferred, at least superficially to non-Western societies.6 The vast protest movement that galvanized most filmmakers of the continent started in the 1950s. Early in his Postcolonial African Cinema, Ken Harrow captures perfectly the mood and the series of events that framed the period: The time was the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time of the struggle of the end of colonialism and for independence. It was a time that defined its values around the works of Fanon, Memmi, Cabral; around the war of Algeria, which accounted for the great importance that came to be attached to the Battle of Algiers (1965) as a signature piece of revolutionary filmmaking; around Marxist analyses of class struggle and imperialism; around the solidarity of the black struggle. It was a period that laid the foundation for the battle against neocolonialism that saw the onset of the compromised new leadership that introduced one party states, corruption and rule by force, thus betraying the struggle. After Senghor ascended to the presidency of Senegal, other African leaders espoused the rhetoric of Negritude, black independence or authenticity. … The project of the filmmakers was to expose the failures of their abusive authoritarianism. … The general feeling of the time was that we could not afford to indulge in sentimental, subjective explorations of individual sensibilities and personal relations, as in European New Wave cinema, while the larger questions of life or death import for the African community were at stake.7 The picture painted by Harrow here in broad brushstrokes is further completed by Roy Armes who identifies the 1959 "overthrow of the corrupt dictator Batista by guerillas under Fidel Castro...

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