Lindiwe Dovey
Biographic Data
| ID | 108206 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lindiwe Dovey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lindiwe |
| FAMILY NAME | Dovey |
| SIGNATURE | DOVEY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6129-2236 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Transforming Documentary Film Cultures in East Africa: Judy Kibinge and Docubox
Intermediality in Academia: Creative Research through Film
This article provides an overview of the recent flourishing of research and pedagogy in higher education that seeks a greater rapprochement between criticism and creativity, bringing together diverse media, disciplines, and modes of knowledge production and expression. It focuses on transformations in film and screen studies and on the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of conducting creative, intermedial research through filmmaking, drawing on …
Toward Decolonized Film Festival Worlds
This chapter is in part a manifesto and in part an engagement with the thinking and practice already re-shaping film festivals in this era of decolonization and Covid-19. We take as a starting point and analyze the provocative docu-fiction film titled Film Festival Film (dir. Perivi Katjavivi and Mpumelelo Mcata, 2019, South Africa) which raises myriad, difficult, and enduring questions about film festivals and contemporary film culture. Reading …
W atching with Trotter
Mixing It Up: New Audiovisual Cultures in South Africa
This article explores the representation of social mixing in contemporary South African films, where apartheid-era anxieties around racial mixing have now developed into newer anxieties applied to realms beyond race, such as sexuality, nationality, and class. Beyond exploring the politics and aesthetics of films such as Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (dir. Khalo Matabane, 2005), we remember differently (dir. Jyoti Mistry, 2005), and Sea Poin…
Entertaining Africans: Creative Innovation in the (Internet) Television Space
In the growing scholarly literature on internet television, Africa is mentioned tangentially, if at all. This article attempts to rectify this by offering one of the first studies of Africa-based and Africa-focused internet television and video on demand (VOD) for domestic and diasporan African audiences. It begins by giving a brief overview of screen and television infrastructure across Africa before moving on to describe the landscape of intern…
Early Curatorial Practices, European Colonialism, and the Rise of “A-list” Film Festivals
If one situates the earliest film festivals within a two-millennia history of practices of collecting, curating, and displaying objects in Europe, their participation in “the writing of specific colonial and national histories” and the “universalizing of bourgeois views and visions” (Morgan 2013: 23) becomes overwhelmingly apparent. In his history of the museum, Jeffrey Abt locates its etymology in mouseion , an ancient Greek word referencing cul…
Festive Excitement and (Dis)sensus Communis in Action at Two Film Festivals in Africa
A focus on the “international” dimensions of film festivals in Africa may lead analysts to overlook the way their intensely localized, domesticated elements do not necessarily correspond neatly to conventional definitions of film festivals, as “glittering showcases for films and people” and “vital nodes for global film industries” that “attract widespread global attention” (Wong 2011: 1). A group of very original film festivals on the African con…
The Rise of “International” Film Festivals in Africa
As I write these words, in London, myriad festivals are underway: a traveling version of the Irish music celebration known as The Other Voices Festival is taking place at Wiltons Music Hall; the Spill Festival of Performance—a celebration of “radical live work” in experimental theatre and art—is on in east, south, and central London; the London Latin Music Festival La Linea claims to have brought the “who’s who” of contemporary Latin musicians to…
Introduction: Film Festivals and/in Theory
Egypt is the stark exception in Africa when it comes to the history of the production and exhibition of films. This is due to Egypt’s quite distinct experience of European rule, which meant that from the early days of British occupation (1882–1922), locals still had resources and power that people within other African countries did not at the time. While Egyptians started to make films from the early twentieth century, soon after the invention of…
Afri-Cannes? African Film and Filmmakers at the World’s Most Prestigious Film Festival
F ilm festivals’ whirlwind curatorial tours of the globe in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century beg an important question: where are the great sub-Saharan African filmmakers who began their work in the early 1960s? Several films, made with some African participation, were featured in 1950s film festivals. For example, The Boy Kumasenu (1952), produced through the Colonial Film Unit of Ghana and shown at the…
Moving Africa: African Film Festivals Outside of Africa
The first Third World, Black, and African film festivals outside of continental Africa began to appear in 1979, and include (in chronological order of their founding): the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, France (1979); the Festival International du Films d’Amiens, France (1980); the one-off Black Film Festival organized by Parminder Vir and Jim Pines in the UK (1981); the Verona African Film Festival, Italy (1982); the one-off Third Eye Fest…
Conclusion
In the suburb of Rubaga, one of the least affluent parts of Kampala, Uganda, a “film marathon” is under way in one of the city’s estimated 2,000 kibanda (video halls), wood-and-tin shacks that usually serve up English league football matches and “VJed” Hollywood, Bollywood, and kung fu films five times a day to packed audiences. The “film marathon” has been organized by Dutch art historian Alice Smits and American filmmaker Lee Ellickson as part …
African Film Festivals in Africa: Curating “African Audiences” for “African Films”
No celebration, no festival, could take place without a public, an audience, writes Odile Goerg (1999: 8–9). If this is the case, then it is quite remarkable that so little scholarly attention has been granted to considering audiences at film festivals. 1 Although certain prestigious film festivals (Cannes, in particular) operate mostly as closed, industry events focused on the glamor and business of filmmaking, most of the thousands of film fest…
“Where is Africa?” at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam
You are standing on the balcony of a hotel or a bar, looking down at a slice of a busy, dusty street. You are looking down at several men who are sitting on motorbikes, chatting to one another. You keep your eyes trained on them, for about a minute. They are clearly not aware of your presence. But then one of the men bristles, flicks a glance up in your direction, as though he’s felt himself being watched. Soon after, another of the men casts his…
Festivals and the politics of space and mobility: The Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival (FCAT) as nomadic heterotopia
For the past four years, Screen has contributed to a new and vibrant debate about the definitions, workings and meanings of film festivals within screen studies. This contribution has included reports on symposia, book reviews, a dossier on film festivals and reports on specific film festivals. Early in this discussion, Dorota Ostrowska noted ‘the absence of history as one of the disciplines which could help shed some light on the phenomenon of f…
Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals
Tracing the history of Africa's relationship to film festivals and exploring the festivals' impact on the various types of people who attend festivals (the festival experts, the ordinary festival audi
Interview with Davey Frankel: A marathon, not a sprint: the journey ofThe Athletetowards being seen
Interview with Rasselas Lakew: Tarifa African Film Festival', May 2010
Film Africa 2012: Reflections
Report on Film Africa: Celebrating African Cinema, 3-13 November 2011
Bizet in Khayelitsha: U-Carmen eKhayelitsha as audio-visual transculturation
This article takes as its focus Mark Dornford-May's film opera U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Dornford-May 2005), set in the South African township of Khayelitsha and based on Bizet's opra comique Carmen . The authors of the article approach the film opera in a self-consciously audio-visual and interdisciplinary way, paying attention at once to its operatic, filmic and socio-political worlds. They prefer not to rehearse arguments in favour of the politic…
African Jim: Sound, politics, and pleasure in early 'black' South African cinema
This article offers a new take on the film African Jim (popularly known as Jim Comes to Joburg), the first feature-length entertainment film made with a black cast and specifically for black audiences in South Africa (in 1949). In contrast to earlier interpretations of the film, which focus predominantly on the film's images, its problematic production context, and its patronizing narrative, we focus on and offer interpretation of the film's aura…
African film and video: Pleasure, Politics, Performance
African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen
Analyzing a range of South African and West African films inspired by African and non-African literature, Lindiwe Dovey identifies a specific trend in contemporary African filmmaking-one in which filmmakers are using the embodied audiovisual medium of film to offer a critique of physical and psychological violence. Against a detailed history of the medium's savage introduction and exploitation by colonial powers in two very different African cont…
Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals
Tracing the history of Africa's relationship to film festivals and exploring the festivals' impact on the various types of people who attend festivals (the festival experts, the ordinary festival audi
African film and video: Pleasure, Politics, Performance
African Jim: Sound, politics, and pleasure in early 'black' South African cinema
This article offers a new take on the film African Jim (popularly known as Jim Comes to Joburg), the first feature-length entertainment film made with a black cast and specifically for black audiences in South Africa (in 1949). In contrast to earlier interpretations of the film, which focus predominantly on the film's images, its problematic production context, and its patronizing narrative, we focus on and offer interpretation of the film's aura…
Redeeming features: FromTsotsi(1980) toTsotsi(2006)
This paper interprets Gavin Hood's film adaptation Tsotsi (2006) of Athol Fugard's eponymous novel (1980) from a constellation of angles: institutional (exploring the politics behind film funding and viewing in South Africa), historical (in relation to the interpretation of terms such as tsotsi, and the importance of understanding historical places such as Sophiatown and the impact of art forms such as kwaito), socio-political (in terms of the ci…
Entertaining Africans: Creative Innovation in the (Internet) Television Space
In the growing scholarly literature on internet television, Africa is mentioned tangentially, if at all. This article attempts to rectify this by offering one of the first studies of Africa-based and Africa-focused internet television and video on demand (VOD) for domestic and diasporan African audiences. It begins by giving a brief overview of screen and television infrastructure across Africa before moving on to describe the landscape of intern…
Subjects of exile: Alienation in Francophone West African cinema
Based on research conducted at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs' African Cinmathque, this article explores the narrative and aesthetic manifestations of alienation in francophone West African films of the past five decades. Rather than examine immigration films, it focuses on francophone West African films that interrogate the concept of alienation from points of view firmly grounded within Africa, such as Sembene's Niaye (1964), La Noire d…
Report on Film Africa: Celebrating African Cinema, 3-13 November 2011
South African Cinema in Exile
In this overview article, I attempt to characterize a South African cinema of exile through a number of lenses. I begin by situating my study within general studies of cinema and exile before focusing on Hamid Naficy’s distinction between exilic and diasporic films and the notion of the “interstitial”. I use Naficy’s theories, as well as the words of South African filmmakers themselves, as a framework against which to measure South African exilic…
South African Cinema in Exile
In this overview article, I attempt to characterize a South African cinema of exile through a number of lenses. I begin by situating my study within general studies of cinema and exile before focusing on Hamid Naficy’s distinction between exilic and diasporic films and the notion of the “interstitial”. I use Naficy’s theories, as well as the words of South African filmmakers themselves, as a framework against which to measure South African exilic…
Redeeming features: FromTsotsi(1980) toTsotsi(2006)
This paper interprets Gavin Hood's film adaptation Tsotsi (2006) of Athol Fugard's eponymous novel (1980) from a constellation of angles: institutional (exploring the politics behind film funding and viewing in South Africa), historical (in relation to the interpretation of terms such as tsotsi, and the importance of understanding historical places such as Sophiatown and the impact of art forms such as kwaito), socio-political (in terms of the ci…
African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen
Analyzing a range of South African and West African films inspired by African and non-African literature, Lindiwe Dovey identifies a specific trend in contemporary African filmmaking-one in which filmmakers are using the embodied audiovisual medium of film to offer a critique of physical and psychological violence. Against a detailed history of the medium's savage introduction and exploitation by colonial powers in two very different African cont…
Subjects of exile: Alienation in Francophone West African cinema
Based on research conducted at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs' African Cinmathque, this article explores the narrative and aesthetic manifestations of alienation in francophone West African films of the past five decades. Rather than examine immigration films, it focuses on francophone West African films that interrogate the concept of alienation from points of view firmly grounded within Africa, such as Sembene's Niaye (1964), La Noire d…
Bizet in Khayelitsha: U-Carmen eKhayelitsha as audio-visual transculturation
This article takes as its focus Mark Dornford-May's film opera U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Dornford-May 2005), set in the South African township of Khayelitsha and based on Bizet's opra comique Carmen . The authors of the article approach the film opera in a self-consciously audio-visual and interdisciplinary way, paying attention at once to its operatic, filmic and socio-political worlds. They prefer not to rehearse arguments in favour of the politic…
African Jim: Sound, politics, and pleasure in early 'black' South African cinema
This article offers a new take on the film African Jim (popularly known as Jim Comes to Joburg), the first feature-length entertainment film made with a black cast and specifically for black audiences in South Africa (in 1949). In contrast to earlier interpretations of the film, which focus predominantly on the film's images, its problematic production context, and its patronizing narrative, we focus on and offer interpretation of the film's aura…
African film and video: Pleasure, Politics, Performance
Report on Film Africa: Celebrating African Cinema, 3-13 November 2011
Interview with Davey Frankel: A marathon, not a sprint: the journey ofThe Athletetowards being seen
Interview with Rasselas Lakew: Tarifa African Film Festival', May 2010
Film Africa 2012: Reflections
Early Curatorial Practices, European Colonialism, and the Rise of “A-list” Film Festivals
If one situates the earliest film festivals within a two-millennia history of practices of collecting, curating, and displaying objects in Europe, their participation in “the writing of specific colonial and national histories” and the “universalizing of bourgeois views and visions” (Morgan 2013: 23) becomes overwhelmingly apparent. In his history of the museum, Jeffrey Abt locates its etymology in mouseion , an ancient Greek word referencing cul…
Festive Excitement and (Dis)sensus Communis in Action at Two Film Festivals in Africa
A focus on the “international” dimensions of film festivals in Africa may lead analysts to overlook the way their intensely localized, domesticated elements do not necessarily correspond neatly to conventional definitions of film festivals, as “glittering showcases for films and people” and “vital nodes for global film industries” that “attract widespread global attention” (Wong 2011: 1). A group of very original film festivals on the African con…
The Rise of “International” Film Festivals in Africa
As I write these words, in London, myriad festivals are underway: a traveling version of the Irish music celebration known as The Other Voices Festival is taking place at Wiltons Music Hall; the Spill Festival of Performance—a celebration of “radical live work” in experimental theatre and art—is on in east, south, and central London; the London Latin Music Festival La Linea claims to have brought the “who’s who” of contemporary Latin musicians to…
Introduction: Film Festivals and/in Theory
Egypt is the stark exception in Africa when it comes to the history of the production and exhibition of films. This is due to Egypt’s quite distinct experience of European rule, which meant that from the early days of British occupation (1882–1922), locals still had resources and power that people within other African countries did not at the time. While Egyptians started to make films from the early twentieth century, soon after the invention of…
Afri-Cannes? African Film and Filmmakers at the World’s Most Prestigious Film Festival
F ilm festivals’ whirlwind curatorial tours of the globe in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century beg an important question: where are the great sub-Saharan African filmmakers who began their work in the early 1960s? Several films, made with some African participation, were featured in 1950s film festivals. For example, The Boy Kumasenu (1952), produced through the Colonial Film Unit of Ghana and shown at the…
Moving Africa: African Film Festivals Outside of Africa
The first Third World, Black, and African film festivals outside of continental Africa began to appear in 1979, and include (in chronological order of their founding): the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, France (1979); the Festival International du Films d’Amiens, France (1980); the one-off Black Film Festival organized by Parminder Vir and Jim Pines in the UK (1981); the Verona African Film Festival, Italy (1982); the one-off Third Eye Fest…
Conclusion
In the suburb of Rubaga, one of the least affluent parts of Kampala, Uganda, a “film marathon” is under way in one of the city’s estimated 2,000 kibanda (video halls), wood-and-tin shacks that usually serve up English league football matches and “VJed” Hollywood, Bollywood, and kung fu films five times a day to packed audiences. The “film marathon” has been organized by Dutch art historian Alice Smits and American filmmaker Lee Ellickson as part …
African Film Festivals in Africa: Curating “African Audiences” for “African Films”
No celebration, no festival, could take place without a public, an audience, writes Odile Goerg (1999: 8–9). If this is the case, then it is quite remarkable that so little scholarly attention has been granted to considering audiences at film festivals. 1 Although certain prestigious film festivals (Cannes, in particular) operate mostly as closed, industry events focused on the glamor and business of filmmaking, most of the thousands of film fest…
“Where is Africa?” at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam
You are standing on the balcony of a hotel or a bar, looking down at a slice of a busy, dusty street. You are looking down at several men who are sitting on motorbikes, chatting to one another. You keep your eyes trained on them, for about a minute. They are clearly not aware of your presence. But then one of the men bristles, flicks a glance up in your direction, as though he’s felt himself being watched. Soon after, another of the men casts his…
Festivals and the politics of space and mobility: The Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival (FCAT) as nomadic heterotopia
For the past four years, Screen has contributed to a new and vibrant debate about the definitions, workings and meanings of film festivals within screen studies. This contribution has included reports on symposia, book reviews, a dossier on film festivals and reports on specific film festivals. Early in this discussion, Dorota Ostrowska noted ‘the absence of history as one of the disciplines which could help shed some light on the phenomenon of f…
Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals
Tracing the history of Africa's relationship to film festivals and exploring the festivals' impact on the various types of people who attend festivals (the festival experts, the ordinary festival audi
Mixing It Up: New Audiovisual Cultures in South Africa
This article explores the representation of social mixing in contemporary South African films, where apartheid-era anxieties around racial mixing have now developed into newer anxieties applied to realms beyond race, such as sexuality, nationality, and class. Beyond exploring the politics and aesthetics of films such as Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (dir. Khalo Matabane, 2005), we remember differently (dir. Jyoti Mistry, 2005), and Sea Poin…
Entertaining Africans: Creative Innovation in the (Internet) Television Space
In the growing scholarly literature on internet television, Africa is mentioned tangentially, if at all. This article attempts to rectify this by offering one of the first studies of Africa-based and Africa-focused internet television and video on demand (VOD) for domestic and diasporan African audiences. It begins by giving a brief overview of screen and television infrastructure across Africa before moving on to describe the landscape of intern…
W atching with Trotter
African history and culture studies (21 works) · Art (21 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Media studies (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · History (14 works) · Visual arts (14 works) · Movie theater (13 works) · History (12 works)