7 - Experimental Narratives
from PART III - NEW IDENTITIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
Summary
Although the pioneering films tell important stories, their points of view and their originality in general are what makes them uniquely African. The points of view taken by the younger directors break the mould of traditional paradigms and allow new ‘revolutionary’ forms of expression and interrogative models of narrative patterns and aesthetic orientations to proliferate, thus challenging entrenched notions of cinematic orthodoxy.
Nwachukwu Frank UkadikeIntroduction
The situation facing the new African filmmakers is very much akin to the predicament which Réda Bensmaïa, from a Maghrebian perspective, attributes to contemporary Algerian writers: ‘Under today's postmodern conditions, it is not geographical or even political boundaries that determine identities, but rather a plane of consistency that goes beyond the traditional idea of nation and determines its new transcendental configuration’. To help define this new relationship between artists and their national context, Bensmaïa coins the term ‘experimental nations’, so named because ‘they are above all nations that writers have had to imagine and explore as if they were territories to rediscover and stake out, step by step, countries to invent and to draw while creating one's language’.
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- Information
- African FilmmakingNorth and South of the Sahara, pp. 109 - 121Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006