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Journal of African Cinemas - Current Issue
Volume 15, Issue 2-3, 2023
- Editorial
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Editorial
More LessIn this issue of the Journal of African Cinemas, a mix of transnational and cross-regional scholars discuss documentary cinemas and African stories. Beyond the erstwhile hotly debated question of the positionalities of Global North and Global South in the production of theory, these scholars offer a sutured argumentation that usurps this intellectual duel. The discussions enliven a transnational debate centred on the documentation of Africa in world cinema history, critique and galas. Tangential to this idea of documenting African cinemas is a most respected iconic figure – the late Distinguished Professor Emeritus Kenneth Harrow – who significantly advanced scholarship on African cinemas despite his Global North affiliations. The issue features two Obituaries on Harrow, written by his intellectual peers, celebrating his generous personality and intermediary role as a borderless intellectual. There are also three book reviews. The first is about Kenneth Harrow’s unique book, which correlates African cinema with space and time quantum theories. The second review is on the history of Africa’s sidelined classic cinemas, a book by Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy. The third review focuses on a recently published auto-ethnographic scholarship on South Africa’s prolific filmmaker, Richard Green, and a leading scholar, Keyan Tomaselli. All these discussions are closely anchored on global interlinkages in the critique of how Africa is documented in documentary cinemas of human stories and wildlife filmmaking, in Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) generative technologies, and diverse global assemblies.
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- Articles
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There’s more Spain beyond the sea? Contemporary documentaries on Equatorial Guinea
More LessIn the last decade of the twenty-first century, the colonial issue between Spain and Equatorial Guinea has been approached with greater interest than in previous periods, and numerous theses, research works and books have attempted to broach an issue that is little known in Spanish society. We start from the hypothesis that colonial relations between Spain and Africa are gaining greater interest in the Spanish academic world, and especially in the artistic field; where a notable number of film directors have dealt with the subject of Equatorial Guinea in their documentaries, in an attempt to seek keys to understanding aspects related to colonialism, racism, memory and Afro-descendance. This article presents five contemporary documentary films. These documentaries are: Un día vi diez mil elefantes (One Day I Saw 10,000 Elephants) (Guimerà and Pajares 2015: 00:77:00); El escritor de un país sin librerías (The Writer from a Country without Bookstores) (Serena 2019: 00:79:00), Manolito Nguema (Grunfeld 2019: 00:85:00); Anunciaron Tormenta (A Storm Was Coming) (Vázquez 2020: 00:88:00) and A todos nos gusta el plátano (We all Like Plantain) (Bermúdez 2021: 00:60:00).
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Nelson Makengo’s Nuit Debout: Infrastructures between promise and improvisation
By Steyn BergsThis article discusses Nelson Makengo’s twenty-minute video work Nuit Debout (2019), which documents power outages in the city of Kinshasa (DRC) and the everyday and informal practices people develop to cope with these instances of infrastructural fallout. More specifically, through a close formal analysis of Nuit Debout alongside relevant theoretical accounts from various perspectives and disciplines, it argues that Makengo’s video conveys a sense of how the Kinshasa inhabitants it portrays are suspended between what has been called ‘the promise of infrastructure’ on the one hand, and the necessity of acts of infrastructural improvisation on the other. As will be demonstrated, this is a suspension between two different temporalities – each with their seemingly incommensurable rhythms and exigencies – that coil and come together in the present as pictured in Nuit Debout, often leading to a sense of stuckness or to impasse. Throughout the article, it will be made clear that Makengo’s piece qualifies, challenges, and troubles the notion – commonly found in academic literature on infrastructure – that infrastructure is ‘normally’ invisible by focusing on the lives and experiences of people who are themselves routinely invisibilized.
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The ethics of wildlife documentary making in Africa: Fréderic Rossif’s La Fête Sauvage and the school of lies
By Ian GlennCritiques of faked sequences in wildlife documentary films have generally ignored films made in Africa. While recent revelations show how David Attenborough and others have misled audiences, the most shocking example is Frédéric Rossif’s film La Fête Sauvage (1976). Though the film remains notable for many reasons – dramatic aerial sequences, lyrical use of ultra-slow motion, technical innovations, the music of Vangelis – from the perspective of Southern African wildlife film history, the production has to be seen as ethically and scientifically dubious. The interviews with the crew in the Making of the Documentary disc, rather than being a clarification of the conditions under which the film was made, were for large parts obfuscatory and misleading, acting simply as justification of their and Rossif’s behaviour rather than any kind of honest retrospective.
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Scriptwriting with AI: A comparative analysis of ChatGPT and human-crafted short-film scripts: A South African perspective
More LessFollowing the release of the ChatGPT chatbot in 2023, by OpenAI, this research project conducted a comparative analysis between a short-film script generated by ChatGPT-3.5 and one crafted by a human scriptwriter, both tasked with creating South African-based scripts focused on African aesthetics and storytelling techniques. While ChatGPT proved efficient in generating scripts, it was primarily programmed by non-Africans and thus cannot produce authentic South African experiences in its narratives. The platform is useful for African filmmakers as a tool to assist them with formatting, structure, enhancing conflict and improving action descriptions. ChatGPT is not autonomous and cannot produce creative work like humans can. It generates scripts based on programmed narrative models such as the three-act structure, the Hero’s Journey and Freytag’s Pyramid. While African writers are encouraged to use these platforms for brainstorming and structuring, the core of the story and its authenticity will come from the human screenwriter.
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Global silences on African cinemas: Dialectic of omission in western canons
By Paulo CunhaThis article examines the absence of African cinemas in three key fronts of western-led global film canons: cinema history, film criticism and the industry. It reflects on the mechanisms and processes that, invariably, have been creating and replicating in mass form the so-called global film culture that reveals itself in a more or less evident, hegemonic way. It also argues that as world cinemas advance on these three fronts, African cinemas have not made much headway to impact global directions in cinema canons significantly.
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- Obituaries
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A word on Ken Harrow: Scholar extraordinaire
More LessKenneth Harrow, a distinguished scholar of African cinemas, was known to many through his exemplary works. This is, without doubt, a highly merited recognition given his prolific efforts and great labour in popularizing the study of African cinemas and spearheading its theoretical breakthroughs. I, however, have known him beyond his scholarly profile, having enjoyed a lengthy acquaintance at personal and professional levels. I have been in contact with him for many decades, sharing academic labours and maintaining a healthy and productive intellectual exchange. His passing on is thus a double loss to me. As I join the rest of his global community of friends in celebrating Harrow’s excellence and breakthroughs in African cinemas, I write this obituary as a note to a gone friend who generously lent me his hand throughout my academic sojourns.
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To Professor Ken Harrow: Scholar, human rights activist and friend (1943–2024)
More LessThis is an obituary for Professor Kenneth Harrow (Ken as we knew him) who passed away in April 2024. A draft version of the obituary was first delivered at the 49th Annual Conference of the African Literature Association, Louisville, KY, 23–25 May 2024.
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- Book Reviews
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Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes, Kenneth W. Harrow (2022)
More LessReview of: Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-scapes, Kenneth W. Harrow (2022)
New York and London: Routledge, 238 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-00328-889-3, e-book, $35.09
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Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema, Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds) (2014)
More LessReview of: Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema, Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds) (2014)
Oxon and New York: Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge, 217 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-90797-551-6, h/bk, $48.95
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- Book Review
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Richard Green in South African Film: Forging Creative New Directions, Keyan G. Tomaselli and Richard Green (2023)
By Tanja SakotaReview of: Richard Green in South African Film: Forging Creative New Directions, Keyan G. Tomaselli and Richard Green (2023)
Cape Town: BestRed and Lynne Reinner, 276 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-92824-660-2, p/bk, GBP 29.50
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