Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike 
Black African Cinema [EPUB ebook] 

From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa.


Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering ‘francophone’ films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in ‘anglophone’ regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of ‘lusophone’ filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting ‘new’ African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties.


Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike,
Black African Cinema’s analysis of key films and issues—the most comprehensive in English—is unique. The book’s pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.



From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and

Tabella dei contenuti

   Acknowledgments       

   Introduction     


1 Africa and the Cinema      

   Information and Entertainment Media in Black

    Africa before the Arrival of Cinema  

   Some Early Contacts with the Cinema    

   Western Images of Africa: Genealogy of an

    Ideological Formulation   

   Banishing the Exotic: Toward a Positive

    Image?     


2 Francophone Origins       

   General Trends and the Problems of Development:

    An Overview      

   The Indigenous African Film Production   

   Med Hondo and Ousmane Sembene: The Schism

    between Theory and Practice    


3 Developments in Anglophone Film

   Production     

   Working for the Decolonization of the

    Picture   

   The Battle of the Frames: Film, Television, and

    Bureaucracy    

   The Formation of Independent Cinema in Ghana and

    Nigeria    

   Ghana: Contrasts in Ideology and Practice  

   Nigeria: Paradox of Mediocrity?   


4 The Cultural Context of Black African

  Cinema      

  Post-1970 and the Introspective Phase  

  Oral Tradition and the Aesthetics of Black African

    Cinema     

  Film and the Politics of Liberation


5 New Developments in Black African

  Cinema      

  Contours of an Emerging Trend: Toward a New

   Cinema?     

  Narration, Transgression, and the Centrality of

   Culture    

  Toward the Tradition and the Centrality of the

   Paradigm    

              

6 Conclusion: Whither African Cinema?       

  The Present Situation   

  The Question of Aesthetics    


  Notes     

  Selected Bibliography      

  Index

Circa l’autore

N. Frank Ukadike teaches in the Department of Communication and in the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.