A Cinema Fighting for its Liberation

A Cinema Fighting for its Liberation Férid Boughedir (bio) The African cinema at the time of the Organization of African Unity (OAU): it was in effect in 1963 that for the first time a film entirely conceived and produced by an African made its appearance on the international scene, was seen by a paying audience, and received a prize. That happened at the International Festival of Tours (France), and the prizewinning film Borom Sarret by Ousmane Sembène (1963, Senegal) was established as the first film demonstrating great talent made by an African, opening the way to a cinema of fiction which would develop mainly in the Frenchspeaking countries of the continent (their English-speaking or Portuguese-speaking neighbors favoring, on the whole, the documentary). The anecdote of Borom Sarret was simple but significant: a poor carter saw the tools of his trade confiscated by the police because he had dared to cross the frontier between the Dakar of the poor and the Dakar of the rich. The emotional nature of this tale, the restrained anger of the author compared with the kind experienced by the more humble, the use of monologue which makes us inwardly experience the plight of the carter, and moreover an open end which appeals to humanity and to the indignation of the onlooker, made this film a premature masterpiece by which, straight away, the African cinema seemed to establish the tone of what was going to become one of its major directions. The application of picture and sound to the service of works of enlightenment arouses a consciousness of the realities of an Africa hardly out of colonialism and living the contradictions of freshly acquired independence. All the subsequent works of Ousmane Sembène, autodidact of the camera—who was a fisherman, a mason, a docker, then a writer before exchanging the pen for the camera "in order to speak even to the illiterate"—confirmed the vocation of the African cinema to inscribe itself as "awakener of the people," in total opposition to the cinema which had preceded it on the continent: that western cinema of "escapism" which the African producers accused of literally drugging the African public with its byproducts and of imparting values of foreign domination. [End Page 161] Domination by Foreign Companies It is, however, in terms of the rivalry with this foreign cinematographic distribution that the (short) history of the African cinema will be written from beginning to end. For foreign films (often the worst rubbish of worldwide production) were distributed by the big western companies which controlled the cinematographic market of the African countries, and looked unfavorably upon the appearance of a young African cinema which was going to compete with their films and damage their profitability and their influence. Several African countries such as Tunisia or Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), having tried to create a national monopoly on the importation of films to control their market and reserve a "screen time'' for their newborn production, were punished by boycotts as regards their supply of films. The big companies, who regrouped in joint responsibility trusts, obliged the states concerned to backpedal by imposing restrictions on their profit. Deprived of screens and of a paying audience, the African film would never be able to recover the cost of returning and giving birth to a second film—the African cinema was condemned to be stillborn. First Success of the African Cinema In view of this situation, and above all in view of the inertia of their governments as regards the future of the cinema kept for minor and simple "amusement," the African film producers were quite naturally led to regroup their efforts in order to attempt a unity on the scale of the continent. A first opportunity to meet was offered to them with the creation, in 1966 by the Tunisian Minister of Culture, of the Pan-African festival of the "Cinematographic Days of Carthage" (which acclaimed the first full-length film by Ousmane Sembène La Noire de... / Black Girl), soon followed in 1969 by the "Pan-African Festival of the Cinema of Ouagadougou" (Burkina Faso). The following year saw the creation of the Federation Panafricaine des Cineastes (FEPACI

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• La culture visuelle au sud du Sahara

  Open Access•J P Colleyn, Jean-Paul Colleyn•Cahiers d études africaines•2010

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