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Special Topics: (379-0-71)

Topic

African Cinema

Instructors

James Michael Hodapp

Meeting Info

Northwestern Qatar Room 2-256: Mon, Wed 10:00AM - 11:15AM (AST)

Overview of class

""This course provides students with an introduction to African filmmaking. Although Africa has been represented on screen essentially since the birth of cinema, it is only within the last 60 years that it has had a cinema of its own in which African filmmakers made their own films. In the early 20th - century colonial powers used cinema as ethnography and propaganda to represent Africa as savage, dark, mysterious, and dangerous to legitimize their oppressive regimes. Hollywood also
misrepresented Africans in popular films such as the Tarzan series (1918 - 2016) and King Solomon's Mines (1937). While this course acknowledges this pre-history, it is ultimately interested in the period beginning in the 1960's when most African nations gained independence. We will tackle a variety of filmic forms, aesthetic, and ideologies employed by African filmmakers from the independence era until today including (but not limited to) social realism, anti-colonialism, short films, animation, avantgardism, and science fiction. We will also examine the social and political issues that many African films address including gender politics, racism, Eurocentrism, migration, corruption, human rights, and Westernization while also acknowledging that we need not saddle African cinema with a burden of representing Africa any more than we do for any other cinema. In other words, African cinema is also entertainment. Moreover, we will discuss how films are circulated, funded, distributed, and consumed - including the role of piracy. Primarily, the course focuses on sub-Saharan black African cinema but does include some North African films to gesture to the enormity of the geography covered by African Film Studies."

Registration Requirements


  • Prerequisites: None

  • Sophomores and above

  • Open for cross-registration

  • Satisfies Africana Studies Minor & Film and Design Minor & Media & Politics Minor

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Registration is reserved for sophomore, juniors, and seniors only.