Trash and a New Approach to Cinema Engagé

This paper is an attempt to rethink a new approach to African cinema grounded in the various ramifications of the notion of trash—that is, the materiality of what Ba taille identifies with expenditure: the detritus of the various systems and institu tions engendered by globalized commodity capitalism, and their ultimate relationship to African cinema. In all its senses, the term “trash” impels us to push into the heart of the rubbish tip until we have reached the breaking point where it will then be possible to return to such phenomena as Nigerian video films; to the melodramatic, not only in Nollywood but elsewhere; to the popular and the popularized; to the thematization of the prosthesis as seen in O Heroi; to pieces of identity recuperated in films by Mweze Ngangura; to the poignant effects of African textures and designs in the films of Abderrahmane Sissoko. This supplement to the high forms of “cinema” now functions to destabilize the former systems of culture, and to enable new space-clearing gestures in African film criticism to emerge

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• Rethinking Third Cinema

  Wimal Dissanayake, Anthony Guneratne•Rethinking Third Cinema•2003

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