"BLACK AND WHITE IN COLOUR considers how the African past has been represented in a wide range of historical films. Written by an eminent team of scholars, the volume provides extensive coverage of both place and time and deals with issues that have been prominent in the written history of Africa. Among the themes dealt with are the slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, racism and anti-colonial resistance. Many of the films will be familiar to readers: they include Out of Africa, Hotel Rwanda, Lumumba, Cry Freedom, The Battle of Algiers and Ceddo.
This collection of essays is a highly original and useful contribution to African historiography, as well as a significant addition to the growing body of work within the emerging subdiscipline of ‘film and history’. It will appeal to readers and scholars interested in African history, in ‘film and history’, and in film studies."
Author(s): Vivian Bickford-Smith; Richard Mendelsohn
Publisher: James Currey / Ohio Univ. Pr. / Double Storey
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: ix,374
City: Oxford, UK / Athens, USA / Cape Town, SA
List of Contributors
Introduction
History as cultural redemption in Gaston Kabore's precolonial-era films / Mahir Saul --
Beyond "history" : two films of the deep Mande past / Ralph A. Austen --
Tradition and resistance in Ousmane Sembene's films Emitai and Ceddo / Robert Baum --
The transatlantic slave trade in cinema / Robert Harms -- "What are we?" : Proteus and the problematising of history / Nigel Worden --
The public lives of historical films : the case of Zulu and Zulu dawn / Carolyn Hamilton and Litheko Modisane --
Breaker Morant : an African war through an Australian lens / Richard Mendelsohn --
From Khartoum to Kufrah : filmic narratives of conquest and resistance / Shamil Jeppie --
Cheap if not always cheerful : French West Africa in the world wars in Black and white in colour and Le camp de Thiaroye / Bill Nasson --
Whites in Africa : Kenya's colonists in the films Out of Africa, Nowhere in Africa and White mischief / Nigel Penn --
Beholding the colonial past in Claire Denis's Chocolat / Ruth Watson --
The battle of Algiers : between fiction, memory and history / Patrick Harries --
Raoul Peck's Lumumba : history or hagiography? / David Moore --
Flame and the historiography of armed struggle in Zimbabwe / Teresa Barnes --
Picturing apartheid : with a particular focus on "Hollywood" histories of the 1970s / Vivian Bickford-Smith --
Hotel Rwanda : too much heroism, too little history, or horror? / Mohamed Adhikari --
Looking the beast in the (fictional) eye : the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on film / David Philips
Endnotes
Index
