calvin & hobbes
the far side by gary larson
the boondocks
The white liberal continues to be the Madonna of African conscience.
The Africans live in the shadows of these ghosts and monuments, reading pretty texts on ‘reconciliation’ which the context negates in every visible way.
Written texts designed to obliterate the African time-space also constitute the obstacles and debris which the African must learn to sweep into their place before his cinema can become a true means of releasing a new communicative power.
Following political independence, the Africans in the southern region have reoccupied their territories, but they have yet to reclaim them as bases for the African psyche to unfold.
- Tafataona Mahoso Unwinding the African dream on African ground
speedbump
There have to be films made by Africans on the African condition before we can talk about African cinema. Resources to make films, to distribute them, to make them more accessible to African audiences are all important for the existence of African cinema.
As in the case of literature, there has to be a certain quantity, more writers and more books, before we can begin to sort out the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, the relevant from the irrelevant. So there has to be a decolonising of the economic resources and the technology so that they are available to more African filmmakers, and also a decolonising of the political space, freeing the democratic space so that filmmakers can confront real issues without the fear of state reprisals or without their films being blocked from reaching their real audiences in Africa.
However, the question of the decolonisation of the mind is as important, and it cannot wait until there are resources available… the question of African cinema is not only that of relations of wealth and power but also of the psyche.
Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Is the decolonisation of the mind a prerequisite for the independence of thought and the creative practice of African cinema?
old school
new school
the far side by gary larson
*given the infrequency with which i blog, i will post one every 2 weeks rather than 2/week (what was i thinking!)
Cinema is a clearly less spontaneous , more capital-intensive form of art than, say, writing or painting, and the contours of cinema in South Africa have been shaped, in part, by the competing aspirations of diverse forces within the state and the market.
It is thus no wonder that South Africa’s White Paper on the Film Industry brings together the ‘fighting rhetoric one has come to associate with postcolonial academese with phrases that might be found in a reader on neoliberal economic policy’
From To Change Reels Balseiro & Masilela (eds)
