African film : new forms of aesthetics and politics /

This engaging book is at once a diary-like narrative and a provocative critique of the state of African cinema. The reader accompanies Diawara (New York Univ.), a leading scholar of African culture and a filmmaker to the 2009 Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, then to a major 2008 program on contemporary African cinema in Berlin, Germany, and finally to a conference on Nollywood (Nigerian video industry) in Lagos, Nigeria. In Ouagadougou, Diawara reflects on several early films of Ousmane Sembene, the important role Sembene played in developing an African film language, and the ways in which younger African filmmakers have struggled to find their own styles and voices. He expands these ideas in the Berlin chapter, focusing on thematic and stylistic changes by such prominent filmmakers as Souleymane Cisse, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Jean-Pierre Bekolo. The book's narrative ends with a discussion of the enormously popular Nigerian industry (Nollywood) videos and the tensions between "art" and "popular" films. The book also includes the transcript of a panel discussion by several important African filmmakers, short biographies/filmographies of some 30 African filmmakers, and audio interviews on an accompanying DVD. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; general readers. C. Pike University of Minnesota