44

African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. By Manthia Diawara. New York: Prestel,
2010. 319 pp.

Cinema in a Democratic South Africa: The Race for Representation. By Lucia Saks.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 256 pp.

In this essay I review two new academic books that examine cinema in Africa. The first,
African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, is Manthia Diawara’s latest contribution to
the field of cinema studies, African Diaspora studies, and cultural studies. The second book,
Cinema in a Democratic South Africa: The Race for Representation, by Lucia Saks, is another
contribution to the study of cinema in South Africa after the demise of apartheid and the rise of
democracy. Given South Africa’s history of racial segregation and politics, South African
cinema has largely been viewed as outside the category of African cinema. Further complicating
this, African cinema has historically privileged West African, mainly Francophone, cinema,
which is highly subsidized by the French government. In this review, I juxtapose these two
books, which approach the study of cinema from different perspectives. Diawara’s book is
important because it shifts the focus from nationalism, nation building, and cultural identity and
instead targets the body of African films, which he argues is re-defining African cinema through
the use of “new forms of aesthetics and politics.” Saks’s book uses cinema in South Africa as a
way of understanding the shifts that have occurred since 1994, emphasizing the manner in which
cinema and representation is integral to national, cultural, and nation-state identity formation.
Diawara’s work can be categorized very loosely as a travelogue and part autobiography.
The book comprises three sections. Section one is mainly theoretical, examining African cinema
and arguing that contemporary African cinema represents a “new wave”—the New African
Cinema Wave—of filmmaking on the continent. The next section is a series of interviews/talks
by prominent African filmmakers and intellectuals. The book closes with a number of
filmographies and director biographies, emphasizing the importance of film and filmmaking on
the African continent. This book, like Diawara’s In Search of Africa (2000), can be read as
ethnographic. The book takes the reader on a journey through Africa (Ouagadougou) and Berlin,
positioning the voice of the author and the author’s encounters in these different spaces as a
context in which to understand the complexities of filmmaking and film viewing on the African
continent.
Diawara’s analysis begins with the grandfather of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene.
He argues that Sembene is important to any discussion or analysis of African cinema because he
was the filmmaker in Africa who gave a voice to the African image by challenging the belief that
Africa was “faceless and voiceless in Western and anthropological films” (24). He also argues
that through aesthetics and language, Sembene’s cinema challenged and subverted European
notions of African cinema. Through his films Sembene challenged the political and cultural
institutions in Senegal, and in an indirect manner he critiqued French neo-colonial relations with
Senegal. Although Sembene’s films were local in nature, he dealt with global issues through
local specificities.
Emphasizing the manner in which Sembene’s filmmaking practice, through aesthetics
and content, challenged the Western (European and American) ideas of cinema and examining
the manner in which African filmmakers have been active in creating a new film language that
speaks to the specificities of filmmaking on the continent, Diawara argues that contemporary
African filmmakers are at the forefront of creating this change in African cinema. He contends

Black Diaspora Review 3(1), Winter 2012

that contemporary African films should be categorized as The New African Cinema Wave. This
is an important political move because it positions the New African Cinema Wave as a
“movement,” resonating with the French New Wave, Italian neorealism, and other film
movements in Europe. In chapter 2, Diawara transports the reader to Berlin, where he was asked
to curate a series of African films. As the curator, Diawara was forced to consider his choice of
films in terms of “the value and specificity of African cinema in both contemporary and aesthetic
terms” (73). He is invested in highlighting the manner in which Africans are taking control of
their own aesthetics and vision of their world through film. Diawara argues that the newer
generations of African filmmakers, those that came after Sembene, are not invested in
Sembene’s oppositional film language (although he emphasizes the influence that Sembene has
had on these filmmakers). He suggests that their filmmaking styles and aesthetics have more
continuity with European and American films. He categorizes this new wave into three sections,
The Arte Wave, The Independent Spirit and the pursuit of a Pan-African cinema, and the New
Popular African Cinema. This book carefully offers analyses of films and filmmakers that fall
within these categories. Importantly, this book offers an analysis of Nollywood cinema,
approaching it from a “narratological” perspective. Diawara argues that Nollywood is important
to African culture and life and provides stories of “mobility” (179). He suggests that a “claim can
therefore be made for Nollywood as [a] repository of a new social imaginary in Africa, a new
purveyor of habitus—linguistic, body language, and dress style—and a mirror of our fantasies of
escape from economic and social problems” (17).
It is important to note that Diawara’s new book offers an analysis of a few films from
South Africa. Lucia Saks’s work, Cinema in a Democratic South Africa: The Race for
Representation, takes a different approach to film and film culture in South Africa. This book is
mainly concerned with national identity and is interested in positioning cinema as an important
tool in the construction of national identity in newly formed nation-states. The book offers an
analysis of the ways in which certain events that have come to define the South African nation in
the post-apartheid context have been represented through cinema in South African. This book is
interested in understanding the changes that film policy, education, exhibition markets, and
festivals have enabled in creating a new type of cinema, one that marks a shift in the manner in
which South African cinema was used as a propaganda tool during apartheid and
marked/stereotyped certain types of bodies in certain ways.
This study is about the ways in which South African films “attached itself to the nation
and thought of itself in national terms” (83). In so doing, the author positions South African
cinema post-1994 as “national cinema” and thus insists that there must be a national imperative
to cinema in Africa. Saks analyzes films that can be categorized very loosely as the Truth and
Reconciliation genre, a period that has come to define post-apartheid democracy through
forgiveness and reconciliation. She also examines films that deal with HIV/AIDS, another area
of national interests in South Africa.
This is just one of many books on cinema in South Africa that have been published in the
past ten years. The frustration is that all these books have the same political investment,
analyzing South African cinema as a national cinema, offering very little that is new or
refreshing. This study and future studies on South African cinema can benefit considerably by
viewing South African cinema through an approach that brings together aesthetics and content
(similar to Diawara’s methodology) rather than tagging cinema onto the nation and the national.
South African cinema, like African cinema, is transnational in nature (co-production deals,
filmmakers trained abroad), and future research can benefit from such an approach.

Black Diaspora Review 3(1), Winter 2012

Jordache Abner Ellapen

Black Diaspora Review 3(1), Winter 2012