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8 - Exemplary Tales

from PART III - NEW IDENTITIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

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Summary

It's the time when African filmmakers give up systematically being a mirror for their space and their people, a condition which had long been necessary for a reappropriation and decolonisation of thought. It was no longer time just to denounce the mimicry and corruption of the elites. If the established order is to be changed, there is a need for solid values: they explore their culture and, to illustrate the need for social change, they plunge into pure fiction.

Olivier Barlet

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
African Filmmaking
North and South of the Sahara
, pp. 122 - 140
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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