New 'Sources' special issue on Revolutionary Cinema in Africa
In 2022, the symposium ‘Visions of Life’ was held at ODID, with support from the Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx) and the Leverhulme Trust. A new special issue in Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies on Revolutionary Cinema in Africa, co-edited by Dan Hodgkinson, draws from this symposium.
Like social media screen cultures today, celluloid filmmaking was a phenomenal source for audiences and filmmakers to make sense of the rapid change brought by African decolonization. Visual narratives created and popularized postcolonial and subversive subjectivities that orientated people in a moment of flux. This golden age of cinema provided audiences across Africa with a popular means for radical critique of and distancing from colonization, imperialism, heteronormativity, and postcolonial authoritarianism. As Ciraj Rassool writes, people “live out their affairs in storied forms” (Rassool 2004, 43) and film was an important storytelling medium of the time. And yet, scholarship on this era’s filmmaking often reduces it to mere propaganda or is laser-focused on a tiny canon of West African francophone auteurs, most infamously Ousmane Sembène.
This issue radically challenges this scholarship. It revisits the African filmmaking during political decolonization to re-evaluate the complexities of revolutionary filmmaking on the continent, its historic ruination, and the pioneering work of artists, archivists and activists in using this heritage to recast futures for audiences today. To this end, the special issue covers a variety of regions and understudied filmmaking genres and political contexts, such as: queer underground amateur cinemas in Apartheid South Africa; Italian communist solidarity films about migration to Europe and armed liberation struggles in Eritrea and lusophone Africa; Idi Amin’s chilling campaign of Ugandan propaganda films; reparative action with colonial ethnographic films of Ethiopia; the politics of African film restitution in independent found footage filmmaking (Perneczky); and the shifting meaning of liberation under postcolonial rule told through the history of a Guinean documentary. The issue also includes two brilliant interviews: one with Annouchka de Andrade, daughter of filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, and one with the president of the Ghana Academy of Film and Television Arts (GAFTA), Jim Panbonor Awindor.
Through a thrilling, diverse set of interdisciplinary analyses each article considers the importance of this film heritage to contemporary African activists, scholars, and artists. And we find that – just as the celluloid base of film is never stable (it is always decomposing) – so too is a film’s revolutionary politics never static. This special issue demonstrates how African revolutionary filmmaking practices – both historic and present – pull from the past to try to break from the constraints of the present and open the possibility of a liberated future.