Reframing Africa?

Description

This book takes readers on a series of stimulating intellectual journeys from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary era to explore notions of modernity in the production and reception of the African moving image and of African archival practices. Ideas are presented from multiple historical and contemporary perspectives, while inviting new voices to participate in discussions about the future of the African moving image. Reframing Africa? makes a plea for the recognition, preservation and repatriation of the African moving image archive, advancing ideas about how it speaks to contemporary Africans, possessed of the power to elucidate their lived experiences and to reorientate perceptions of the past, present and future. On the basis of this wide-ranging appreciation of the archive, the book charts a way forward for African-inflected film studies as well as other programmes in the humanities and social sciences. Reframing Africa? will appeal to scholars, academics and practitioners across the continent and beyond

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Film
• Art
• Video

Informations

• Publié par: African Minds
• Date de parution: 13 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781928502692
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Reframing Africa?
Reflections on Modernity and the Moving Image
Edited by Cynthia Kros, Reece Auguiste and Pervaiz Khan
Co-published in 2022 by
African Minds 4 Eccleston Place, Somerset West, 7130, Cape Town, South Africa [e-mail] | www.africanminds.org.za
and
mediastudies.press in the Media Manifold series 414 W. Broad Street, Bethlehem, PA 18018, USA www.mediastudies.press
2022 African Minds

All contents of this document, unless specified otherwise, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. When quoting from any of the chapters, readers are requested to acknowledge all of the authors.
ISBN (paper): 978-1-928502-67-8 eBook edition: 978-1-928502-68-5 ePub edition: 978-1-928502-69-2
Copies of this book are available for free download at: www.africanminds.org.za and www.mediastudies.press
ORDERS: African Minds Email: [e-mail]
Contents
Acknolwedgements
Preface
01 The Reframing Africa Audio-Visual Project Cynthia Kros, Reece Auguiste and Pervaiz Khan
02 Cinema, Imperial Conquest, Modernity Reece Auguiste, Cynthia Kros and Pervaiz Khan
03 Reflections on Ciné-archival Studies and the Dispositif in Africa Aboubakar Sanogo
04 Reframing Film Studies in Africa: Towards New Pedagogic Terrains Saër Maty Bâ
05 Movements of War: Film as Apparatus of Inscription and Transmission Bettina Malcomess
06 Reading Gestures in De Voortrekkers Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe
07 Reframing South African Cinema History: Modernity, the New Africa Movement and Beyond Keyan G. Tomaselli and Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren
08 The Foxy Five : Woke Politics and Participatory Culture Dylan Valley
09 Cinemas of Dis/agreement: Contemporary Afrikaner Dramas Emelia Steenekamp
10 African Cinemas across African Borders: Bridging the Gap between North Africa and Africa South of the Sahara A Conversation between Jihan El-Tahri and Pervaiz Khan
11 African Moving Image at the Intersection of Cinema and Television A Conversation between Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe, Dylan Valley and Pervaiz Khan
12 A New Becoming: Towards an African Time-based Media Practice Reece Auguiste
13 Opening the Way for Further Readings and Reframings Cynthia Kros, Reece Auguiste and Pervaiz Khan
Glossary
About the contributors
Acknowledgements
Thanks to colleagues in WSOA and the History Workshop, Lekgetho Makola and colleagues at the Market Photo Workshop, Ruksana Osman as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities (University of the Witwatersrand) for support during her tenure, and Jurgen Meekel for the Reframing Africa logo design and help with programmes. Thanks to Aboubakar Sanogo for the initial inspiration behind Reframing Africa and his later role in advising and contributing its conceptualisation. We also wish to acknowledge the support of Arts Research Africa (ARA), a project funded by the Mellon Foundation in the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand. This work is based on the financial support provided by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Preface
The Reframing Africa project is a research initiative based at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in partnership with the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. The project has hosted four annual workshops to date with several seminars and screenings in between. 1
Reframing Africa started with discussions between Pervaiz Khan, who is on the academic staff in the Wits School of Arts, and Cynthia Kros, who until recently had also been a member of staff in the School, heading the Division of Arts, Culture and Heritage Management, and who was a historian by training and had been a long-term member of the History Workshop – a research initiative founded at Wits in the aftermath of renewed trade union militancy and the Soweto Uprising of 1976. Our ideas were given momentum and the necessary support as our discussions attracted the attention of our colleagues both at Wits and other universities in South Africa and abroad.
The project that ultimately became Reframing Africa was prompted by our discovery of an event that had happened a hundred years before in our own neighbourhood. It is a discovery that has been documented by several scholars so perhaps it is surprising that it took us until 2016 to make it. Perhaps we had read about it in some of the published histories of cinema in South Africa without registering that it had happened so close to the Wits campus. On 11 May 1896 Carl Hertz, having brought a projector with him from England, screened the first film shown on the continent at the Empire Palace of Varieties, which was located on Commissioner Street, Johannesburg. Having established the proximity of the location gave us a powerful sense that history had been invisibly unfurling its buds just a few blocks away.
By 2016, we had become much more consciously attuned to rustlings in the undergrowth. Student protests had once again called our attention to things that were wrong in the country and the universities. Some of our colleagues responded to student calls for decolonisation by proposing new curricula that gave more prominence to African scholars and extra-European ways of making knowledge. And this gave us serious pause for thought. How could we be in this position so long after the much-celebrated official demise of apartheid? What would a radical transformation of the curriculum that allowed for a full appreciation of, and engagement with, African intellectual work entail? In our position as teachers and scholars we turned first to the things we believed we could do something about – namely the curriculum and pedagogy.
At the same time, a long-term friend and colleague, Aboubakar Sanogo, had been contributing through his work for the Federation of Pan African Cinema (FEPACI) to an initiative aimed at preserving and restoring the archive of African cinema and, crucially, also enabling access to it on the African continent.
Our first workshop in the Reframing Africa series took place in 2017. During the workshop a disturbing ignorance on the part of the majority of the participants concerning African filmmakers was revealed. Few could match faces to names or locate them accurately on a map of Africa. The case that Sanogo made for the cultivation of archival consciousness as a necessary element for driving a continental-wide campaign to save the archive and to locate it within the reach of ordinary African residents was persuasively made.
These then are our two principal motives for initiating the Reframing Africa series: thinking creatively about how to transform the curriculum, not only in what is usually known as Film Studies, but also in the Social Sciences and, hopefully, the Humanities as a whole; and raising general archival consciousness as a way of rallying support for the urgent task of preserving the archive of African cinemas or as we have latterly come to call it, of the moving image.
Since our first workshop, whose proceedings are reflected in this book, we have had three more, which we hope to write about in future publications. Each convening has shown us in different ways the extraordinary power of the archive to illuminate the workings of colonialism and modernity, the covert but often brilliant resistance of their subjects, the beauty and power of films made by African filmmakers in the post-independent period, and the range of approaches and methods adopted by contemporary scholars, filmmakers, photographers and artists who find in the archive rich resources to work and create with to make new stories and histories.
There are several significant scholarly books and articles about African cinema/s that examine the ways in which particular films made in the colonial or apartheid periods sought to serve certain ideologies or visions of circumscribed nations, or about how African films in the post-independent period have tried to grapple with the circumstances confronting their subjects. The scholarly literature also provides us with analyses of how African filmmakers have had recourse to the past before colonialism while being fully cognisant of the difficulties of recalling histories that bear the indelible stains of what came afterwards.
The scholarly literature is mostly very valuable, but our project is slightly different. We are trying to estimate what belongs in the archives – there is a highly selective formal archive that will shelter what are necessarily costly restored versions of what are considered to be the classics of African cinema. For better or worse, it is not possible to save and restore every film made by an African filmmaker. But we recognise that the participants in our workshops also draw on a multitude of other archives – home movie footage, institutional documentary material, photographs hoarded and then sometimes discarded, filmic material from now discredited or forgotten regimes and, increasingly, voluminous digital materials – and we have encouraged and, we like to think, facilitated exchanges about how the archive feeds our present-day work as theorists and practitioners.
Reframing Africa is at root a project about the African archive broadly defined. It asks questions pertaining to this archive as a repository of historical knowledge, its systems of classification, and what strategies should be developed to ensure its preservation in light of state negligence. In addition, this project also seeks to explore how audio-visual artists, filmmakers and scholars can use archival materials to enrich their creative work. In the process it seeks to offer African audiences a sense of how their historical location has, in part, been shaped by the archives through systems of representation. This raises the question of what might happen if Africans were to imaginatively project themselves into the future as custodians of the African archive. The thorny issu