Research: African Cinema: Home

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About This Guide

This guide attempts to provide list of resources to students or researchers studying or researching issues related to African cinema.

In this guide you will find:

General/Reference works: a selection of print and electronic resources providing overview type of information about African Cinema or filmmakers.
.Books written on major topics related to African Cinema or about films from individual African countries or by filmmakers from Africa.
Resources for finding film reviews or critical interpretations in the form of journal articles.
Repositories and databases of African films
Citation formats and guides.

Featured Resources - Books & Article databases

Screen Studies Collection

A comprehensive survey of current publications related to film scholarship alongside detailed and expansive filmographies. This collection includes the specialist index FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Database and the detailed and complementary filmographies created by the American Film Institute and the British Film Institute; AFI Catalog and Film Index International.

Learning from the Curse

"This book is about a story (Ousmane Sembene's Xala), about a time (the aftermath of Senegalese Independence), and about a place (Dakar, the capital of Senegal). It's also about the collaboration between an artist and an anthropologist, who have reacted in their different mediums to the story,time and place, and to what the other made of them ...."So opens a unique account in a genre of its own devising that will engage readers interested in Sembene Ousmane as writer and film director, in Senegal, in African film, in West Africa, or in books designed to be desirable objects in their own right.

African Filmmaking

This volume attempts to join the disparate worlds of Egyptian, Maghrebian, South African, Francophone, and Anglophone African cinema--that is, five "formations" of African cinema. These five areas are of particular significance--each in its own way. ..History, geography, production, distribution, and exhibition are considered alongside film studies concerns about ideology and genre. This volume provides essential information for all those interested in the vital worlds of cinema in Africa since the time of the Lumière brothers.

Third cinema in the third world : the aesthetics of liberation

Although Third Cinema began as a movement of, by, and for the colonized, Gabriel argued passionately for its transnationalist possibilities. In his seminal work Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, for example, he writesthat “the principal characteristic of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is made, or even who makes it, but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays.”

Global Nollywood

Global Nollywood considers this first truly African cinema beyond its Nigerian origins. In 15 lively essays, this volume traces the engagement of the Nigerian video film industry with the African continent and the rest of the world. Topics such as Nollywood as a theoretical construct, the development of a new, critical film language, and Nollywood's transformation outside of Nigeria reveal the broader implications of this film form as it travels and develops. Highlighting controversies surrounding commodification, globalization, and the development of the film industry on a wider scale, this volume gives sustained attention to Nollywood as a uniquely African cultural production.