Cinema and Development in West Africa

James E. Genova

Description

Filmmaking in service to politics and propaganda

Cinema and Development in West Africa shows how the film industry in Francophone West African countries played an important role in executing strategies of nation building during the transition from French rule to the early postcolonial period. James E. Genova sees the construction of African identities and economic development as the major themes in the political literature and cultural production of the time. Focusing on film both as industry and aesthetic genre, he demonstrates its unique place in economic development and provides a comprehensive history of filmmaking in the region during the transition from colonies to sovereign states.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cinema as Art and Industry
1. The Cinema Industrial Complex in French West Africa to the 1950s
2. The Colonialist Regime of Representation, 1945-1960
3. West African Anti-Colonial Film Politics, 1950s-1960s
4. The Post-Colonial African Regime of Representation
5. The West African Cinema Industrial Complex, 1960s-1975
Postscript: Francophone West African Cinema to the Present
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Película fotográfica
• África
• General officer
• History of Africa
• Documentary film
• General
• West
• Africa
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 25 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253010117
• Langue: English

Extrait

CINEMA AND DEVELOPMENT IN WEST AFRICA
CINEMA AND DEVELOPMENT IN WEST AFRICA
James E. Genova
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2013 by James E. Genova
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Genova, James Eskridge.
Cinema and development in West Africa / James E. Genova.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01002-5 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01008-7 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01011-7 (eb) 1. Motion picture industry-Africa, French-speaking West-History-20th century 2. France-Colonies-Africa-History- 20th century. I. Title.
PN1993.5.A35G46 2013
791.43 0966-dc23
2013011314
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
To my wife Stephanie and daughter Eva
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Cinema as Art and Industry

1 The Cinema Industrial Complex in French West Africa to the 1950s
2 The Colonialist Regime of Representation, 1945-60
3 West African Anticolonial Film Politics, 1950s-60s
4 The Postcolonial African Regime of Representation
5 The West African Cinema Industrial Complex, 1960s-70s
Postscript: Francophone West African Cinema to the Present
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book is the culmination of several years of research and has benefited from the support, encouragement, and critical insights of many colleagues, friends, family, and institutions. I wish to thank Herman Lebovics for providing the inspiration for undertaking a study of the intersection of culture, economics, and the state. He has been a wonderful mentor and very dear friend. His unwavering support, unvarnished critiques, and guidance have been invaluable to me. Olufemi Vaughan has been a constant source of energy, intellectual engagement, and profound friendship. Our long conversations together through the years have generated vital questions and led to the significant rethinking of fundamental issues around the role of the state, civil society, and globalization in shaping postcolonial Africa. I thank Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, who read the entire manuscript and provided important suggestions for improving the narrative. His work on African cinema has strongly influenced on my own engagement with the subject. Toyin Falola also read parts of the manuscript and offered support and encouragement for the project. I thank Mamadou Diouf, whose humor, intellectual adroitness, and deep commitment to the general welfare of Senegal s people is an inspiring model of committed academic work.
I wish also to express my profound thanks to Ahmad Sikainga, Alamin Mazrui, and the late John Conteh-Morgan for welcoming me to the African American and African Studies Department at the Ohio State University and providing an immediate community of Africanist colleagues that made me feel at home. I will always miss John s humanity and cheerful smile. I thank my colleagues in the History Department at OSU as well as those on OSU s Marion campus who contributed to making this book possible.
I owe gratitude for the support of the following institutions that provided the structural means to bring this study to fruition. The College of the Arts and Sciences at OSU awarded a Research Enhancement Grant to fund work in Senegal s national archives. The History Department furnished an RTAP Fellowship to finance three years of overseas research in West Africa and France. The Marion campus of OSU provided a Professional Development Grant that enabled me to present some of the project s preliminary findings at conferences in the United States and overseas. I wish to thank the staff at several archives, whose generous assistance was vital to compiling the substantive material that made this study a reality. They include the remarkable and knowledgeable personnel at the Centre des archives d outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, France, the Archives de la R publique du S n gal in Dakar, Senegal, the Centre des archives contemporaines in Fontainebleau, France, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France. The Pompidou hosted a retrospective exhibit on African cinema in 2005, featuring the work of Manthia Diawara, that strongly influenced the direction of this investigation.
I also thank Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press for so strongly embracing this project, helping to improve the manuscript, and being a wonderful editor. Sarah Jacobi also provided crucial assistance in ushering the study through the publication process.
Most importantly, I offer my deepest thanks and owe the greatest debt to my wife, partner, companion, and colleague Stephanie Smith. Her insights into the vital role of artists and culture in shaping identities as well as state practices in Latin America have contributed immensely to improving this study s argument and opening new vistas for inquiry. She is the love of my life, the source of all of my happiness, a person without whom I cannot imagine experiencing life s journey.
Abbreviations

Agence de coop ration culturelle et technique
ACCT

Afro-American Films Inc.
AFRAM

American Motion Picture Export Company-Africa
AMPECA

Consortium audio-visuel international
CAI

Commission f d rale de contr le cin matographique
CFCC

Centre national du cin ma et de l image anim e
CNC

Compagnie africaine cin matographique industrielle et commercial
COMACICO

Fonds d aide et de coop ration
FAC

F d ration panafricaine des cin astes
FEPACI

Fonds d quipement rural et de d veloppement conomique et social
FERDES

Festival panafricain du cin ma et de la t l vision de Ouagadougou
FESPACO

Fonds pour l investissement en d veloppement conomique et social
FIDES

Front de lib ration nationale
FLN

Groupe africain du cin ma
GAC

Gosudarstvenyi institut kinematografii
GIK

Institut des hautes tudes cin matographiques
IDHEC

Journ es cin matographiques de Carthage
JCC

Motion Picture Export Association of America
MPEAA

Parti communiste fran ais
PCF

Rassemblement d mocratique africaine
RDA

Soci t d xploitation cin matographique africaine
SECMA

Soci t national volta que de cin ma
SONAVOCI

Union pour la d mocratie fran aise
UDF
CINEMA AND DEVELOPMENT IN WEST AFRICA
Introduction: Cinema as Art and Industry
I returned to Dakar, Senegal, in the summer of 2011 to complete research for this project and took my usual path walking along Avenue Hassan II (ex-Albert Sarraut) through the Place de l ind pendance toward the administrative building in the basement of which is housed the National Archives of Senegal. For years a movie theater stood at the southwest corner of the central plaza, although it was clearly run down and did not offer many showings. Now, though, the building was gone, replaced with a pile of rubble. Barely concealing the rubble was a fence that seemed to offer more perils than protection from the debris. No evidence remained that this location once offered audiences celluloid entertainment. Instead, the ruins blended into the generally decaying architecture that characterizes this once majestic space. In fact, much of downtown Dakar resembles the plaza-a mixture of crumbled buildings, others in better repair, frozen in 1970s architectural style, and some in a perpetual process of construction. Downtown Dakar was at that moment bustling with new construction projects promoted by then-president Abdoulaye Wade and financed by international lending agencies, China, and Morocco, among other outside sources. Much of the money appeared destined to develop a tourist infrastructure-hotels and a cultural park, financed entirely by China, which would contain the Seven Wonders of Dakar, one of which was to be a new site for the archives near the location of the historic train station, scene of the 1947-48 railway strike. This strike was one of the heroic moments in the saga of the anticolonial struggle, immortalized in Ousmane Semb ne s 1960 novel God s Bits of Wood.
Weaving unceasingly through this urban landscape were multitudes of people headed to work, shopping, or school or going out in search of a job; still others wandered, hustled, or sat on the sidewalks in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else. In fact, there were far too many of the last groups, although they had been made less visible in the city center with President Wade s construction boom. It s been more than fifty years since Senegal and the other countries of French West Africa achieved independence (celebrated in the plaza that bears its namesake), but the scenes of contemporary Dakar, marked by coterminous signs of renewal and decline, belie the heritage of that half century. It is a composite of hope for a self-directed future leading to economic development and cultural regeneration and of frustration as those aspirations have been blunted by a neocolonial system that has trapped Senegal and much of sub-Saharan Africa in a dependent relationship with their former colonial overlords and fostered a vicious cycle of impoverishment and nondevelopment. It is ironic that one of the Seven Wonders of Dakar, the realization of Senegal s first President L