African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen

by Lindiwe Dovey

Overview

Analyzing a range of South African and West African films inspired by African and non-African literature, Lindiwe Dovey identifies a specific trend in contemporary African filmmaking-one in which filmmakers are using the embodied audiovisual medium of film to offer a critique of physical and psychological violence. Against a detailed history of the medium's savage introduction and exploitation by colonial powers in two very different African contexts, Dovey examines the complex ways in which African filmmakers are preserving, mediating, and critiquing their own cultures while seeking a united vision of the future. More than merely representing socio-cultural realities in Africa, these films engage with issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, "updating" both the history and the literature they adapt to address contemporary audiences in Africa and elsewhere. Through this deliberate and radical re-historicization of texts and realities, Dovey argues that African filmmakers have developed a method of filmmaking that is altogether distinct from European and American forms of adaptation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231147552
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/20/2009
Series:	Film and Culture Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lindiwe Dovey is lecturer in African film and performance arts at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She holds a BA Honors degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She is the founding director of the Cambridge African Film Festival and has made both documentary and fiction films.

Table of Contents

List of Film Stills
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: "African Cinema": Problems and Possibilities
1. Cinema and Violence in South Africa
2. Fools and Victims: Adapting Rationalized Rape into Feminist Film
3. Redeeming Features: Screening HIV/AIDS, Screening Out Rape in Gavin Hood's Tsotsi
4. From Black and White to "Coloured": Racial Identity in 1950s and 1990s South Africa in Two Versions of A Walk in the Night
5. Audio-visualizing "Invisible" Violence: Remaking and Reinventing Cry, the Beloved Country
6. Cinema and Violence in Francophone West Africa
7. Losing the Plot, Restoring the Lost Chapter: Aristotle in Cameroon
8. African Incar(me)nation: Joseph Ga‹ Ramaka's Karmen Ge‹ (2001)
9. Humanizing the Old Testament's Origins, Historicizing Genocide's Origins: Cheick Oumar Sissoko's La GenŠse (1999)
Conclusion
Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

James Genova

This book explores a specific and emergent genre of African filmmaking and the critique of violence found at its center. Lindiwe Dovey's arguments are compelling, innovative, and substantiated.

— James Genova, Ohio State University

Ato Quayson

Once in a while a book is published that instigates a paradigm shift in how we view an object of study. Lindiwe Dovey's African Film and Literature is one of them. By paying attention to African films primarily as films in the process of more complex ethnographic, historical, and sociopolitical elaborations, Dovey delivers a gift to be celebrated. One thinks of the nuance of her observations in the same vein as those of C. L. R. James and his writings on American cinema.

— Ato Quayson, University of Toronto, and author of Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

Christopher Miller

This is a fine work of scholarship that sets a high standard for the discussion of African film. The book brings together-perhaps for the first time in a work of this magnitude—two centers of gravity in African film as it exists now: Francophone West Africa on the one hand and post-apartheid South Africa on the other. Dovey undertakes a thoughtful exploration of the question of adaptation from literature to film.

— Christopher Miller, Yale University

Editorial Reviews

[An] important book... Highly recommended.

Choice