The African Media Center at the University of Westminster has issued a call for papers for their November, 2012 conference ‘Evolving African Film Cultures: Local & Global Experiences.’ The conference will focus on “changes in African film and television production and, of equal importance, the transformation of African film audiences in local and global contexts.”
Kunle Afaloyan’s ‘Araromire’
Click ‘Read More…’ for the full description of the conference and for contact information.
Four days ago, Rel Dowel’s ‘Changing the Game,’ with Tony Todd, Irma P. Hall, and Kirk Jones, opened in 5 cities (Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, D.C., and Atlanta). It’s been getting some great reviews and generating an amount of hype, with NYC Movie Guru calling the film “suspenseful, intriguing, wise and genuinely heartfelt.”
The synopsis:
An epic tale about a supremely intelligent young African-American male who rises from the ferocious and oppressive streets of North Philadelphia to being a shining star in the lucrative world of high finance at Wall Street’s most prestigious firm. However, he soon finds that the white-collar world is filled with crime and death just like the drug-filled hood he left behind. His only chance of survival is to fully integrate a mysterious gift from a slain childhood friend fully into the fabric of his character.
The trailer:
And some audience reactions from its premiere:
From HBO documentaries, The Loving Story focuses on the marriage between Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Loving. In 1958, the couple was arrested in Virginia for violation of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws; Richard was white while Mildred was black and Native American. The case became the basis for Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court case overturning anti-miscegenation laws across the country.
Originally airing on Valentine’s Day, the documentary is being released by Icarus Films to institutions and libraries on Monday, May 14th.
From the Washington Post’s review of the film:
It’s interesting how much we can know the basic outline of such an event and yet not really know the participants… [the film] rescues the Lovings from the perfunctory realm of footnotes and newspaper clippings and brings them into a more emotional light.
Here’s the director’s promo for the film:
And a clip of Mildred reflecting on the Civil Rights Movement:
Another, longer trailer is here at traileraddict, with other footage that doesn’t overlap the previous two.
Volume 3, Number 2 of Black Camera has just been released by IU Press, and features a new section called Close-Up, which critically examines a particular subject in film employing a variety of modes of inquiry. In this issue, the focus is on Nothing But a Man (1964) by Robert Young.
The JSTOR page for Black Camera is here – and ordering information from IU Press is here.
You can click on the table of contents to see a larger version.
Nairobi has been at the center of some great music videos recently, and they deserve to be seen. The songs and videos here, taken alone, would stand up just fine. Together, though, they are wonderful compositions.
The music for Kichwateli (Swahili: TV Head) comes from Nairobi based Just A Band as well as Maasai Mbili and Berlin based ModeSelektor. Bobb Mchuri of Studio ANG wrote and directed the video.
The video – described by The Inspiration Room as “a short poetic film set in a post-apocalyptic African slum and city which takes the viewer on a spiritual and metaphorical voyage through a young boy’s dream” – is a product of BLNRB, a project of Nairobi’s Goethe Institute for musical and artistic collaboration between Berlin and Nairobi.
Just A Band made quite a splash when they came on to the scene in 2008, though 2010’s Ha-He, featuring bad boy hero Makmende, really made them big. [For etymology and film nerds: Makmende is a sheng word derived, on some accounts, from Dirty Harry’s line ‘Go ahead, make my day, in 1983’s Sudden Impact.] Makmende then became the muse for a range of internet memes, including ‘Makmende didn’t cheat death – he beat it fair and square,’ and this fictional 10,000 Shilling note:
Anyway, here’s video, the directed by Jim Chuchu and Mbithi Masya, chock-full of nods to blaxpoitation and kung fu films:
Goldbreaks, a mostly black and white video directed Hawa Essuman (also behind Soulboy), stars Mister Abbas, Lon’ Jon, Kimya, Teichmann, set against some great shots of Nairobi. This video is also part of the BLNRB lineup.
Check out the rest of BLNRB films here.
And while you’re at it, check out Just A Band’s other videos, including their self-animated 2008 hit Iwinyo Piny.
Last Fall, our former archivist Mary Hueslbeck put together a display at the IU Cinema featuring a collection of toys and action figures of black movie stars.
It’s a pretty interesting collection, and reminds me how action figures and toys have the Janus-like quality of being both fun (I had a great time popping Jim West off of his saddle), and how they are also objects of serious sociological consideration (why is Samuel Jackson noticeably lighter as Mace Windu for preschoolers, and noticeably darker for adults as Shaft?).
Below, some of our selections (click Continue Reading below for more photos and figures).
Will Smith as Captain James West in Wild Wild West (1999). This toy is from the Burger King Kids Club.
In Saddle Vault, one of six toys released by Burger King, James West flies from the horse when you push the saddle down.
Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu in the Star Wars series, in a release by Playskool for preschoolers.
Released for the non-preschool set, this Samuel L. Jackson from Shaft (2000) comes with a gun, a Movie Maniacs stand, and a small poster.
A new(er) documentary film by Idrissou Mora-Kpai follows the stories of Afro-Vietnamese orphans born of Vietnamese mothers and West African fathers – tirailleurs sénégalais - brought by the French to fight la sale guerre, mostly in today’s Viet Nam. The synopsis:
Through the story of Christophe, a 58-year-old Afro-Vietnamese man, the film reveals the little known history of African colonial soldiers enlisted to fight for the French in Indochina. Christophe was one of seven Afro-Vietnamese orphans adopted by one of those soldiers when he returned to Benin after the war. The film explores the long lasting impact of bringing together two populations who previously had no ties and sheds light on a frequent practice within colonial history, that of using one colonized people to repress the independence claims of another colonized people.
Told in Vietnam and Benin, the film gives space for the grown Afro-Vietnamese orphans to tell their stories, but also to explore the contradictions of the colonial order.
“The French sent us to fight their war for no good reason,” remarks one veteran in the trailer. “It was their enemy, not ours.”
You can see the full trailer here.
The French use of colonized peoples as soldiers has been the subject of feature length historical fiction before – notably in Ousmane Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1988) – about a group of soldiers massacred by the French after fighting for France – and Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory (2006) – about Algerian men who fought the Nazis in France. Now, a documentary lens has been brought to the phenomenon.
George Orwell, too, wrote about the tirailleurs sénégalais in his essay Marrakech. With a tone that betrays Orwell’s own prejudices, he describes a column of Senegalese soldiers on the march, and reflects:
But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. “How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?”
Isn’t it great to see cameras turned in the other direction?
In The Pulse, our new feature section, we’ll connect different voices on topics in Black Film. We’ll ask a question, frame it, and then connect with some of the many modes of answering that question. In this first installation, we’ll look at the conversation about language in Nigerian Cinema.
* * * * * *
Language does many things in cinema. It produces, packages, and reflects culture. It validates and sanctions particular tongues. It denotes an audience and creates revenue streams. And among many other things, it plays.
In Nigeria, whose 158 million citizens speak some 500 languages, the film industry puts out 1,000 to 2,000 films a year. A global audience estimated in the hundreds of millions (if not more) watches these films, which are dubbed, subtitled, or already in an accessible language (mostly, but not always, English).
What matters, then, about language in Nigerian cinema?
The national dialogue on films in indigenous languages –from online messageboards to newspaper editorials to facebook – is particularly robust these days, due in no small part to the visibility of 2011’s 5th Festival of Indigenous African Language Films. This, too, against a trend of de-Anglicization of Nigerian films in recent years.
“While Nigeria has been busy discussing how to decolonize television screens for the past 60 years, the Nollywood industry has done so in less than 30 years, yet the success of the industry still has its own problems that need to be carefully articulated, since it bears on our very being as people,” said Dr. Onookome Okome in a presentation at the festival, according to The Sun.
L-R: Segun Adefila, Bukola Awoyemi and Tunde Kelani on the set of Arugba (2010), a Yoruba film. . © 2011 Mainframe Film and Television Productions
Not that the process has been homogenous and weighted evenly, as languages in Nigerian films do not mirror Nigeria’s linguistic composition[i].
Not enough people, it seems, are aware of Jessie Maple, given her contributions to black cinema. So for those who aren’t familiar, and introduction from Diane Tucker:
Jessie Maple is included in nearly every who’s who of film except the Registry. Will is the first post civil rights feature-length film produced by an African-American woman. (Hollywood guilds are more than 80% white.) Maple’s film received the Special Merit Award at the Athens International Film Festival.
And there’s much more.
In 1974, she became the first black woman to join the International Photographers of Motion Picture & Television Union (except that ‘became’ is a tame verb to use, given the trials and obstacles to joining the union, including lawsuits against major New York TV stations, pushback from the industry, and the weightiness of ‘being the first’). She recorded the experience in her book How to Become a Union Camerawoman (more on that below).
In 1982, she founded 20 West, Home of Black Cinema in Harlem as a venue to show films by independent and black filmmakers to the public.
All the while, she was producing content, often with her husband Leroy Patton, with whom she founded LJ Productions in 1974. She produced two feature length films (Twice as Nice was her second in 1988), and several documentaries (Methadone: Wonder Drug or Evil Spirit and Black Economic Power: Reality or Fantasy among her selections).
New York Women in Film and Television called Maple’s work “a forerunner of the independent, minority filmmaking that would cultivate directors like Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, Leslie Harris and Lee Daniels.”
In 2005, Maple donated her personal collection to the BFC/A, and we maintain an extensive collection of her films and logbooks, photos and news clippings, correspondences and more. So, in the way that archival material can make our past that much more alive and actual, what follows is a sampling of scanned materials in the Jessie Maple Collection (click ‘Continue Reading’ after the first item to see the rest; click on each photo for a larger image).
The February 1976 Ebony magazine (newstand price:$1) includes a feature on Jessie Maple. It tells the story of Maple’s struggles to break into the Cinematrogphers Union and of her courtship with her husband, Leroy Patton. The article is written 5 years before the release of Will, though it mentions the project. Between the timbre of a 1970s Ebony issue (“What Happened to the Black Revolutionaries?” asks one title piece, among ads for a range of products), the piece details Maple’s work and determination in a particular type of biographical voice:
Like other grown-ups among her four brothers and seven sisters, Jessie has spent all of her adult years in the north, but she retains a deceptively Southern manner. And when though the quiet drawl, infectious giggle and unassuming air there appears a hard-nosed, ambitious professional, it can come as a surprise.
This issue, as well as other issues of Ebony and many other magazines, can be accessed here.
The 6th annual International Indigenous and Afro-descendant Film Showcase and Awards took place last week in Lima, Peru. The Anaconda Prize – the event’s top award – went to the Guatemalan film El oro o la vida (Gold for Life).
Hosted by Susana Baca (Afro-Peruvian singer and Minister of Culture), the event expanded this year to 12 films highlighting the experiences of Indigenous and African peoples from the Chaco to the Caribbean.
On the theme ‘The Image of All Peoples,’ two documentaries focused specifically on afrodescendientes. Soy Afro (I Am Afro) offers a view of life and how identity and diversity is constructed in Bolivia.
Soy Afro
The other documentary, Los caminos del grupo Elegguá (Becoming Elegguá), told the story of the folk music group Femenino Elegguá and the different journeys the group members have travelled to become the face of Afro-Venezuelan music. No trailer is available online, but you can see the group performing here and here.
The festival puts strong emphasis on indigenous and afro-descendant authorship of film.
“Indigenous people are behind the camera as well; they are creators and producers of images, and that marks an important conceptual difference,” said Roger Rumrill, a member of the Center for Indigenous Cultures of Peru, in an interview with CCE Lima.
“It is to not be curious or exotic objects, but to be creators of images in line their identities and cultures.”
There’s no word yet on whether Soy Afro or Los caminos del grupo Elegguá will be available in English, but we will keep our eyes open.
