Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book is both a personal journey and an introduction to the cinema cultures of Africa. A book about the politics of cultural survival, it is also a major overview of African cinema and television.

The first part of the book traces the development of African cinema - from colonization to Afrocentrism. The author examines this development through a variety of fundamental themes: the decolonization of the imagination; the quest for legendary African origins and the mobilization of African cultural values. The second part of the book analyses specific films, particularly through narrative and in terms of their African specificity - in the use of silence, orality and humour. Finally, the author explores the social and economic contexts of the African cinema and television industry - including its often vexed relations with the West and the problems of production and distribution African film-makers face.

Exploring the achievements and challenges of those who seek to affirm African cultural values through film, the book also covers the African television industry and African-American cinema. It includes interviews with film-makers, stills from the films and, ultimately, a plea for seeing and respecting the otherness of the Other. Winner of the French National Film Centre's best filmbook of 1997 and now available in four languages, this is book which takes us into a process of learning how to look.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. viii)
• Part I The Origin, Akin to a Passage
• 1 Human Beings, not Ants! (p. 3)
• Black is black
• Colonial projections
• The ethnographic gaze: involvement or contempt?
• African responses
• Being on the same wavelength
• The politics of everyday life
• Founding figures
• Class struggle without placards
• The novelistic path
• Africa first
• English-speaking Africa: educational cinema and the Hollywood dream
• French guardian angels
• Revolutionary filmmakers?
• 2 Decolonizing Thought (p. 34)
• Africa betrayed
• Unspoilt Africa
• Pointing the finger
• The mirror-space
• The primacy of the collective
• The freedom to say no
• The duty to show?
• 3 'Proverbs Were Flesh and Blood': the Reference to the Past (p. 47)
• Necessary memory
• Black pharabos
• The struggle with oneself
• African recalcitrance
• History as nostalgia
• Legend, a false trail?
• 'Shelling' history
• The African cry
• 4 Closing Your Eyes (p. 72)
• The refusal to mimic the West
• Opting for openness
• Torn asunder by modernity
• 5 Opening up the Cracks in Identity (p. 82)
• A unified world
• Symbols in motion
• Reading with the heart
• Passing on knowledge
• Blocked transmission
• Drawing strength from the source
• An alternative development
• The origin in doubt
• Infidelities
• The Marabouts' projective mechanism
• From nudity to modesty
• 6 An Openness of Approach (p. 109)
• South African introspection
• Afro-American rites of passage
• Hybridized identity
• French assimilationism
• Farewell to negritude
• The anxiety of integration
• A cinema of revelation
• Part II At the Wellsprings of Narration
• 7 Black Humours (p. 129)
• A politically committed pastiche
• Laughing at oneself
• Derision as a strategy
• A vital laughter
• A cathartic parody
• 8 'Men Die, But Words Remain': At the Origin of Narration, Orality (p. 143)
• First, silence
• The path of simple self-evidence
• The primacy of orality
• Contrapuntal symbols
• Cultural specificities of the image
• Griots of a new kind
• The voice-off: the consciousness of the filmmaker
• Theatre is a mere waystation
• Letting them tell you stories
• What slowness?
• Space-time
• A cyclical composition
• Rather than heroes, the art of the paradox
• The topicality of myth
• 9 'If Your Song is no Improvement on Silence, Keep Quiet!' (p. 183)
• Dances of resistance
• Talking drums
• The song of the people
• African sound
• 10 Speaking Your Own Language (p. 195)
• The expression of lived experience
• A revisited French
• Failing to reach your audience?
• Priority to the emotions
• Opening up to multiculturalism
• Is dubbing the answer?
• Save the actor!
• 11 Towards a Criticism Based on the Need to Exist (p. 210)
• The Western diktat
• Towards a subjective criticism
• The dead weight of criticism
• African criticism
• Part III Black Prospects?
• 12 'He Who Wants Honey has the Courage to Confront the Bees': The Difficulty of Making Films (p. 221)
• The trials and tribulations of filming
• The dream of financial autonomy
• The trials and tribulations of funding
• The trials and tribulations of production
• 13 The African Audience is Anything But Homogeneous (p. 232)
• The agonies of distribution
• Dilapidated auditoriums
• The video monster
• Accompanying one's film
• A pluralistic audience
• A school of life
• 14 A Fickle Audience in the Northern Hemisphere (p. 251)
• Aiming true
• A limited audience
• Promotion through festivals
• 15 'When You've Got Meat to Cook, You go and Find Someone With Fire': The Logics of Western Aid (p. 260)
• The heart and the head
• Giving and after
• The internationalization option
• Consolidating professionalization
• Wrestling with the blank page
• The 'Ecrans du Sud' experience
• A key ministry
• Surviving
• Planet Atria
• 16 Televisual Strategies (p. 278)
• Africa can make it!
• Getting beyond the passive 'waiting game'
• Taking television by storm
• Conclusion (p. 288)
• Bibliography (p. 291)
• Appendix Where to see Black African Films (p. 299)
• Index (p. 306)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Barlet's study bears a semi-misleading title. Announcing that he avoids "hermeticism and jargon, since this book is intended, first and foremost, as an invitation to a voyage," the author has produced a user-friendly volume on a topic most Western readers probably know little about. But in asserting that "African cinema invites us to a genuine process of learning how to look," Barlet does not mean (by "us") the audiences for whom the films were intended; thus, the concept of the "Other" looms throughout the book. Clearly, the author has seen and enjoyed many films produced in sub-Saharan Africa, and he writes engagingly about the diversity and (for the non-African viewer) disorientations of African cinema. Because his subject matter is obscure, the issues that Barlet raises concerning it are difficult to assess, but his approach is provocative and helpful. His viewpoint aside, Barlet's insistence on plurality and difference should motivate readers to seek out the films that he mentions. He provides a useful bibliography and an appendix entitled "Where to See African Films." Recommended for all film collections. R. D. Sears Berea College