… the new members of the FEPACI believed their prophetic mission was to unite and to use film as a tool for the liberation of the colonized countries and as a step toward the total unity of Africa. It was in this sense that in its early days FEPACI sought to be affiliated with its sister association, the Organization of African Unity (OAU). In 1969, at the Festival Panafricain de la Culture in Algiers, African filmmakers gathered to create an inter-African organization (1992:39).
The establishment of FEPACI was a defining moment for the programmatic agenda of ‘decolonising cinema’.
Decolonisation by rejecting white imaginations in cinematic representations was a way of building solidarity; a way to provide a platform for a conscious political will through cinema and to ‘take back’ African history which, through colonialism, had denied Africans the ability to tell stories in a uniquely African way. While FEPACI continues to be instrumental in organising the biennial film festival in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, exponential changes and growth of film production on the continent have created a new generation of filmmakers who, firstly, do not rely on the privilege of formal film school training and, secondly, are able to tap directly into markets and create content outside of the infrastructure that has historically been necessary for the making of films (for example, national funding sources and foreign funding agencies).
There are a number of important and interesting contradictions emerging from these contemporary production conditions. These are largely informed by the collapse of certain infrastructures (for example, the closing down of many movie theatres and a lack of funding from broadcasters). Digital technology and the rapid turnover from production to distribution have further facilitated and revolutionised how films as products move into markets, not only locally and nationally, but through the current prolific network for moving products into the diaspora more globally.
Christina von Braun’s chapter, ‘Staged Authenticity’ makes a significant departure from the more accepted idea that filmic gaze is gendered. She argues for a neutrality of the gaze on account of its mediation through the camera apparatus and rethinks the position of the observer and the potential offered in reordering gender. It is an important political move that suggests that the camera and the act of filming can ‘choose between identifying with masculinity or femininity, between the experience of “inviolability” and that of “lack”, and even both simultaneously’. Such a hypothesis allows for a radical shift in the politics of gaze regimes initially inscribed in cinema studies (Laura Mulvey 1975, 1981, 1989), and creates the possibility for reconfiguring identity formations to serve the multiple functions that the ‘cinema-arm’ offers in an African context. Von Braun concludes: ‘[t]hat means learning to differentiate between the phantasmal self-images of the collective imaginary and one’s own individual violability. Only then can the images of the collective imaginary be “made legible”’. It is this invitation to view the apparatus as the camera with infinite identity possibilities that enables women’s film narratives to be extricated from a gendered gaze. This offers the starting point for the rest of the contributions, where there is an acute awareness that the women who reflect on their experiences and observations do so from multiple historical-political positions: colonial histories, histories of liberation and oppression. These histories and places of personal memory constitute the place for a re-imagined sense of the collective which informs a number of the underlying concerns expressed by the subjects who are interviewed in this book: Jihan El-Tahri and Taghreed Elsanhouri.
In the interview that Ines Kappert conducts with Christina von Braun and Taghreed Elsanhouri, the two subjects answer very differently to the question ‘Are you a feminist?’ Elsanhouri speaks of her identification as a ‘feminist’ as a private articulation while Von Braun offers a public declaration of her political subject positioning. Herein lies the summation of the recurring tensions that emerge in the interviews that follow and the prevailing themes that underpin the experiences of women on the African continent. The multiple roles of women, not simply as cultural practitioners in film, is bifurcated if not multi-furcated; a split-consciousness with dual agendas that inform their politics and their practices and reveal the tensions between private positions and public articulations.
There are other participants who totally refute any feminist categories, who do not ascribe to feminist politics as collective identity, as tools of analysis and as vehicle for change. Feminism for them is neither instrumental in informing their practice nor relevant in transforming the patriarchal structures in their communities. Instead, in their discussions femininity and feminism come to be conflated or are viewed as mutually exclusive. Feminism is an individual experience, a private act, and the collectivisation of feminist politics is seen, in part, as anti-feminine. In this instance, these film practitioners claim an individual agency but refuse a collective political identity. This refusal is not infused with a post-modern anti-identitarian critique as raised by post-colonial and/or queer feminists, who problematise politics of belonging based on imagining a homogenous ‘we’. The rejection of the need to adopt a position within a chosen political collective is often grounded in situating oneself as an individual, in notions of natural femininity and heterosexuality and/or a tactical disguise of one’s sympathies with a collective battle in order to better ‘work the system from within’. Mozambican filmmaker Isabel Noronha in her interview with Max Annas and Henriette Gunkel calls her filmmaking practice ‘cinema of resistance’, in which she explores life in a post-colonial state. In the detailed account of her development towards a film practice she shows how personal will rather than a collective identification is the source from which she draws her emancipation, a sentiment not unlike those expressed in the interview with Jihan El-Tahri. These women are less concerned with the immediate politics of gender as a collective identification and more focused on the broader terrain of the politics of patriarchy and the way in which individual experience enables individual emancipation.
What are the challenges of representing these non-conforming paradigmatic and pragmatic experiences? How do we reflect on knowledge production that belies any programmatic structure, that is responsive, spontaneous to opportunity and motivated by a desire to reinvent as determined by individual will and yet inspired on occasion by a collective consciousness?
We refer to Spivak’s notion of strategic essentialism to ground political agency in a universal understanding (culturally, socially, biologically) of ‘womanhood’. But acknowledging that the political, theoretical and/or personal preferences ‘we’ women have are informed by our different socio-political positions means also acknowledging that such preferences amongst women do differ. We might agree or disagree on how to claim agency and in the course of claiming agency we might agree or disagree on how we as women identify ourselves. One might call herself feminist, another might reject this label as anti-feminine, antimen, a white Western legacy, and might prefer to identify as womanist (Alice Walker), or as a woman of colour activist, or as ‘woman-identified woman’ (the Radical Lesbian manifesto; see Radicalesbians 1970) or simply as a woman empowered by her mother rather than by any political movement.
But beyond all differences, it is obvious that the marginality of women in society and of women as film practitioners needs to be radically and consciously challenged, with multiple direct and indirect tactics, and with both individual and collective strategies. Consequently, this book documents a repositioning that