FREN 322 - Introduction to Cinema in Francophone Africa

This introductory course is designed to provide a broad historical overview of cinema in Francophone Africa. We start out with a journey back to Francophone cinema’s roots in the colonial past, when film was enlisted to serve various educational purposes as part of the French civilizing mission. Then we do a deep dive into the early postcolonial period to revisit classics such as Afrique 50, Les Statues meurent aussi, Afrique-sur-Seine, Moi un Noir, among a few others. Finally, beginning with Ousmane Sembene’s 1963 Borom Sarret (The Cart Driver), we chart the history of film in Francophone Africa, including North Africa (Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia, and Algeria), from the early sixties to the present. Through readings of key texts and critical discussions with filmmakers and film scholars, students will engage a wide range of issues, including censorship, auteur cinema, ethnographic cinema, counter-ethnographic essay films, popular genres, the contested legacies of Pan-Africanist cinema, gender issues, ecocriticism and eco-cinema, and the combined fallouts from the video and digital revolutions that, as elsewhere, have radically shifted the paradigm of film production and consumption in contemporary Francophone Africa. Corequisite(s): FREN 204 Alternate years. (4 Credits)