Passion of the Reel

Jean-Olivier Tchouaffe

Description

Highlighting the challenges faced by a nascent national cinema with limited resources, Passion of the Reel provides an in-depth analysis of the output of the Cameroonian film industry. Jean-Olivier Tchouaffe shows that, far from an empty receptacle for colonial legacies, Cameroon – and Africa – must move beyond their colonial legacies to focus on indigenous productions of meaning informed by traditional wisdom and ordinary Cameroonian life experience. Tchouaffe’s analysis sets the stage for a film-driven exploration of postcolonialism, social construction and modernization.

Acknowledgements

Part I: Native Context: The Battle for the Nation’s most Sacred Resources; the Palaver Tree, Mevungu and Colonial Cadavers

Chapter 1: Cinema and the Quest for the Right Transcript, Images and Sound

Chapter 2: Setting the Stage: On the Tenacity of the African Colonial Archives

Chapter 3: L’Etat C’est Moi! Desire, Power and Consumption in Cameroon

Part II: Notes on Major Cameroonian Film-makers

Chapter 4: Cameroonian Cinematic Pioneers

Chapter 5: Second Generation

Chapter 6: Cameroon Women in Film: Therese Sita-Bella, Florence Ayisi, Osvalde Lewat and Josephine N’Dagnou

Conclusion: Cameroonian Cinema and the Dance of the Ghosts

Bibliography

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Cinema of Africa
• General officer
• Art
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Electronic
• Digital

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783205646
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2015 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Cover image: Film still from Les Saignantes (2005). Courtesy of
Jean-Pierre Bekolo
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Claire Organ
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-564-0
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-563-9
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-564-6
Printed and bound by Short Run Press Ltd, UK
To my family, especially my mother Marie-Claire Tchouaffe, for all her unconditional love, acceptance, inspiration and gentle sweetness, my father Gilles Tchouaffe who pushes me to the art and the life of the brain, and my grandfather Jean Baptiste Tchouaffe for his support and love and for having instilled in me my love for cinema. To the many people in my life that I appreciate and love more than words can say. I cannot name them all but they live in my heart and soul.
Contents
Acknowledgement
Part I: Native Context: The Battle for the Nation’s most Sacred Resources; the Palaver Tree, Mevungu and Colonial Cadavers
Chapter 1: Cinema and the Quest for the Right Transcript, Images and Sound
Chapter 2: Setting the Stage: On the Tenacity of the African Colonial Archives
Chapter 3: L’Etat C’est Moi! Desire, Power and Consumption in Cameroon
Part II: Notes on Major Cameroonian Film-makers
Chapter 4: Cameroonian Cinematic Pioneers
Chapter 5: Second Generation
Chapter 6: Cameroon Women in Film: Therese Sita-Bella, Florence Ayisi, Osvalde Lewat and Josephine N’Dagnou
Conclusion: Cameroonian Cinema and the Dance of the Ghosts
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Unfathomably, thinking through my country’s cinematic archives, I felt the necessity to disclose that it became an ongoing negotiation between my own biography, archival research and the country’s transformations as they relate to notions of identity, gender, religion and modernity, embedded in shifting definitions of citizenship. The process of writing Passion of the Reel led to an indirect homage to my late father, Gilles Gauderic Tchouaffe, and my late mother, Marie-Claire Tchouaffe. Both deserve mentions for being part of the first generation of independent Africans who helped launch our country’s local experience with cinema. 1 Going through the cinematic archives of Cameroon brought back cheerful memories of their tireless contribution in reclaiming our much-maligned culture from centuries of colonization. Growing up in Cameroon, my parents helped make the country’s culture insightful and beautiful before my siblings and I ever grasped the meaning of it.
Through the late seventies and eighties, my father helped establish and run the film department in the Ministry of Information and Culture in Cameroon. He helped produce many films in collaboration with all major Cameroonian filmmakers studied in this book: Jean-Pierre Dikongue Pipa, Daniel Kamwa, Bassek Ba Kobhio, Jean-Marie Teno and Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Now I am proud that my father helped in setting the standards for the artistry and uniqueness of Cameroonian cinema.
He could not have done this without my mother’s unconditional support. For a person who did not even finish high school, my mother was blessed with grace and a keen intellect. She understood so well what was at stake. Passion of the Reel helps me to feel deeply their continuous presence in my life, their love and wisdom, which never left me.
These experiences, moreover, flow like a river alongside the cinephilia of Jean Tchouaffe, my grandfather. He was an avid film fan and even built his own movie theatre so that he could better indulge his cinematic consumption. In the family, he was known as ‘Arizona Colt’, usually just ‘Colt’, after the character played by Giuliano Gemma in the Spaghetti Western of the same name. That experience in itself could be the object of a further work on notions of film distribution and cultural overlaps, changing ways we think about global distribution of films as dumping grounds, ignoring universal cultural tropes and the power of cinematic seduction. 2
From an early age, watching movies from all over the world taught me about the love of humanity and the universality of culture. I was prepared as a child to have an intimate insight into the mechanisms and the realities of culture and politics.
In academia, no one has ever written a book completely on his own. I extend my gratitude to Drs Toyin Fayola, Tom McCourt, Hector Amaya, Alexie Tcheuyap, Bridget Teboh, Herve Tchumkam, and Catherine Boone for the invaluable support and patience.
For all those who participated in helping me get where I am now – my family, Pierre & Nadine Kemeni, Christian & Serges Tchouaffe, Gerard Kamdom, Martina Pacidjo, Chloe-Maeva, Pierre junior, Batiste, Johan, Emilie-Therese, Florence and Vincent and all my uncles and aunts.
I could not finish without mentioning my dear friends Dieudonne Dang, Patrick Bouchez, Jean-Marcel Fokam, Joal-Didier Engo; my neighbors Jay, Douglas Max Martin & Christina Michelle Cones; Kelly Hutchinson, Remo Moser and Carl Kieffer, Grooms Street, and my folks at Pecan Street Café, RuthChris Steak House, Haymaker, and The Crown and Anchor down by my place.
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript, and my publisher, Intellect Books. Being able to be associated with such a fresh and creative academic publishing house is a huge accomplishment for a young scholar striving to make a name for himself in the field of film studies. I particularly give thanks to Jelena Stanovnik, Claire Organ and Sheri Malman for their invaluable support.
Notes
1 Under the French colonial regime, the natives were not allowed to use cameras. African cinema was born in European exile in 1955 with Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s Afrique-sur-seine (1955), which was political from the beginning. The colonial authorities’ ban on the natives’ filmmaking, coupled with its policy of caging their images, haunted the continent. The lasting effect of these processes was to press African filmmakers into channeling their mental and physical energy towards identifying their work as a confrontation against racism and its legacy; bringing together a mission to decolonize the minds of Africans, to bring their continent out of the cultural ghetto it was boxed into, to heal its wounds and to repair its deformed heritage from colonialism and to bring the community back together.
2 My grandfather was a major landowner and coffee farmer in Cameroon. He conducted his life influenced by the charisma of the cowboy figure and the codes of the Western hero. He even liked to dress like ‘Colt’ and the other heroes of his favourite films, even carrying a gun at his waist when visiting his plantation. Watching films with my grandfather, I enjoyed sharing with him the regression into the infantile pleasure of cinematic seduction. The legend was that he was an early pioneer traveling the entire country before settling in Kekem (West Cameroon) in the late 1930s. He reportedly was a major force in developing the area. He stood up to ‘the bad guys’ during the war of independence that ravaged the entire area. Like ‘Arizona Colt’, he too was ‘the man from nowhere’, who helped build a little city and always stood up for law and order, business, and family values.
Part I
Native Context: The Battle for the Nation’s most Sacred Resources; the Palaver Tree, Mevungu and Colonial Cadavers
Where there is no Vision, the People Perish
(Proverbs 29:18 King James Version)
Dulcius ex aspiris (Sweeter after difficulties)
Introduction: Native Context: Fighting the Shadow of the Time
Passion of the Reel focusses on the struggle between artistic creativity and tyranny, and how a cultural resurgence against an authoritarian regime becomes a cultural project. The capacity to hold culture hostage is a predicate of tyranny, particularly in places where political regimes can rely neither on history nor on the popular vote to achieve legitimacy. Such dictatorships are, essentially, fictitious institutions based on symbols and metaphors – invented narratives that have turned statecraft into stagecraft. Film-making plays an important role in challenging these institutions by exposing them as mass producers of ‘fiction’ from which they create a warped reality. Passion of the Reel demonstrates how independent Cameroonian cinema, rather than perpetuating an invented mythology, is systematically deconstructing the outdated dictatorship, and, in the process, introducing the basis for a new media literacy and a new pedagogy for a reason-based political culture. This book addresses how artistic sovereignty becomes a space to provide a pedagogy of cultural and political decolonization based on indigenous home-grown knowledge and wisdom.
The battle against autocracy involves redefining a host of relationships: between power and the state; colonial legacies and memory; conscious and subconscious transmissions; power and narcissistic anxieties; and fiction and auto-fiction, as counters to a culture of fatalism and resignation. Those in power and control have failed to fulfil the promises made at the dawn of independence. Their political fictions necessitate the invention of a progressive utopia that truly reflects the values of the body politic and the rising political leadership. 1 In practice, this requires dissecting these fictions, these sets of narrative and representational strategies, and the ways they carry and circulate symbol