| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Written in French (1996) and translated into English in 2000, Olivier Barlet’s African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze is a historical review of African cinema. Although it does not focus extensively on any one film or filmmaker, it provides an overview of many African films and references all of Sembène’s films up to and including Camp de Thiaroye (1988). This three-part volume first outlines the history of African cinema since colonial times and explores such themes as decolonization of the imagination and Afrocentrism. The second part of the volume discusses the narrative of selected films, including some of Sembène’s work. In the last part of the volume, Barlet examined the socioeconomic contexts and the many hurdles African filmmakers face as they seek to secure funding for their films.
In his volume, African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent (2003), Joseph Gugler undertook a historical and thematic examination of African cinema. Of the seventeen African films he examined, Sembène’s Xala (1974) figures prominently. By showing how Xala satirically illustrates the illusion of independence and the betrayal of the African elite, Gugler illustrated why the films are best viewed with an appreciation of the historical, social, political, and cultural context in which they were produced. Melissa Thackway’s Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film (2003) is particularly geared toward film theory, analysis, and classification of Francophone African films. One of the book’s most significant chapters examines the relationship between indigenous oral literature (orature) and African film. It also provides a rich account of the many kinds of traditional story structure that can be seen in contemporary African film. In Thackway’s chapter on films that deal with the experience of African immigrants in Europe, she compared and contrasted Sembène’s La Noire de… and Le Cri du Cœur by Idrissa Ouédraogo. Although these two films are many years apart (1966 and 1994), Thackway brought to life the discussion of migration in African films, a topic particularly underexplored.