Recovering Lost African Film Classics: Towards a more complex history of African cinema

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A number of early career films made in the 1960's-1970's by both prominent and undeservedly neglected African filmmakers have fallen into obscurity and are now rarely screened either in cinemas or in festivals in Africa or the West. Due to their inaccessibility, these works are often omitted or brushed over in African film histories. In certain cases, this has led to a rather truncated account of the development of these filmmakers, careers, omitting significant aspects of their creative evolution; for example, certain key films by the well-known Senegalese filmmakers Ousmane Sembene (Taaw, 1970) ad Djibril Diop Mambety 'Contras' City, 1969; Badou Boy, 1970) are now rarely shown and are largely absent from critical works. In other cases, the omission is much more harmful to the critical understanding of African filmmaking, as it has in effect led to the relegation of particular directors and film styles to a marginal position within African cinema as a whole; e.g. hugely important but now overlooked films by Nigerian filmmaker Mustapha Alassane ( Le Retour de l'Aventurier, 1966) and Ivorian filmmaker Desire Ecare (Concerto pour un exil, 1968) provide evidence of an aesthetic and generic range - pastiche, comedy, poetic realism - that were excluded from the dominant critical paradigms concerning African cinema for much of the 1970's and 1980's.These films will be screened as part of Africa in Motion (AiM), an African Film Festival to be held in Edinburgh in June 2006. In practical terms, the project involves identifying four 'lost African classics', the location of the film prints and arranging transport of the prints and viewing copies to Edinburgh. In some cases only one film print survives and, either no English subtitles are in existence, or they are of very poor quality. The project will arrange the production of English subtitles, either by overseeing the translation of existing French subtitles into English or the translation of the original dialogue in the films. These films will be screened with their newly created English subtitles as part of AiM. A catalogue of detailed synoposes and production information will be complied and published on the web along with the English subtitles, making these films available for study by other Anglophone African film scholars, as well as for inclusion in other Anglophone African film festivals the world over.These films will thus become available to a wide audience, including students, theorists, critics and the general public. A number of leading African film scholars will be invited to take part in a roundtable discussion on these 'lost classics' during the Festival in ordet o gauge the importance of these negloected works. The participants in the roundtable will be invited to write up their interventions as articles, which the project co-ordinators will then seek to publish as a special issue of a leading journal in the field. This publication would constitute a hugely significant intervention in the field, bringing together the work of an important group of scholars in order to debate the evolution of African cinema, and to reassess the theoratical and critical paradigms that have emerged from the truncated history of this body of film production.AiM clearly has an important artistic and public awareness dimension, and the inclusion of these lost African classics as part of the festival will also confirm its significance as a major research event with important implications both for the writing of African film history, and for the questioning of key assumptions in African film criticism. Taken together with the resulting research outputs, the project will allow crucial and revealing insights into the early development of cinema production in African countries, thu offering new critical perspectives and opening new avenues for research.