Musa, Bala A. Nollywood in Glocal Perspective. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

This book gives a panoramic view of the rise and growth of Nollywood, Nigeria’s movie and home video entertainment industry, into the second largest and most prolific movie-producing industry in the world. It offers an analysis of Nollywood’s influence as a local and global cultural force. Scholars from Africa, the African Diaspora and beyond examine the factors that have shaped Nollywood’s unique story-telling, production, and distribution system. The volume shows how internal and external economic, social, cultural and technological changes intersect to define Nollywood’s film-making and entertainment ethos. It is grounded in sound theoretical perspectives that help readers understand the texts and subtexts of the industry’s emergence, transformation, and impact. The range of subjects covered span Nollywood’s historical roots in Nigeria pre-colonial traveling/community theatre to colonial era film-making, and its contemporary spin-offs and inspired cousins across Africa and in Europe. It illuminates the interface of artistic, business, cultural and technological innovation and creativity at the heart of Africa’s local and global pop culture explosion.

[Source: Springer].

Murphy, David. Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors. Manchester: University Press, 2007.

This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines - film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies - in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts.

[Source: Google Books].

Mistry, Jyoti, Antje Schuhmann, Katharina von Ruckteschell, Max Annas, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jihan El-Tahri, Beti Ellerson, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Henriette Gunkel, and Katarina Hedrén, eds. Gaze Regimes: Film and Feminism in Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015.

Gaze Regimes is a bricolage of essays and interviews showcasing the experiences of women working in film, either directly as practitioners or in other areas as curators, festival programme directors or fundraisers. It does not shy away from questioning the relations of power in the practice of filmmaking and the power invested in the gaze itself. Who is looking and who is being looked at, who is telling women’s stories in Africa and what governs the mechanics of making those films on the continent? The interviews with film practitioners such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Jihan El-Tahri, Anita Khanna, Isabel Noronhe, Arya Lalloo and Shannon Walsh demonstrate the contradictory points of departure of women in film – from their understanding of feminisms in relation to lived-experiences and the realpolitik of women working as cultural practitioners. The disciplines of gender studies, postcolonial theory, and film theory provide the framework for the book’s essays. The contributors who provide valuable context, analysis and insight into, among other things, the politics of representation, the role of film festivals and the collective and individual experiences of trauma and marginality which contribute to the layered and complex filmic responses of Africa’s film practitioners.

[Source: Wits University Press].

Medeiros, Paulo de, and Livia Apa, eds. Contemporary Lusophone African Film: Transnational Communities and Alternative Modernities. Milton: Taylor and Francis, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429026836.

Offering a range of critical perspectives on a vibrant body of films, this collection of essays engages with questions specific to the various cinemas and films addressed while putting forward an argument for their inclusion in current debates on world cinema. Drawing on various theoretical perspectives, the volume strives to reverse the relative invisibility that has afflicted these cinemas, arguing that most, if not all, Lusophone films are transnational in all aspects of production, acting, and reception. The initial three chapters sketch broad, comparative overviews and suggest theoretical approaches, while the ensuing chapters focus on specific case studies and discuss a number of key issues such as the convergence of film with politics, the question of gender and violence, as well as the revisiting of the period immediately following independence. Attention is given to fiction, documentary films and recent, short, alternative video productions that are overlooked by more traditional channels. The book stresses the need to pay attention to the significance of African film, and Lusophone African film in particular, within the developing field of world cinema.

[Source: Routledge].

Khalil, Andrea Flores. North African Cinema in a Global Context: Through the Lens of Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2008.

This book provides insight into contemporary film production from North African countries referred to as the Maghreb. Focus is both on the socio-economic context of film production, which suffers some of the same setbacks and obstacles as other regions of the developing world, and on the thematic details treated in the films themselves. The book delves into ideas such as gender and sexuality, national identity, political conflict, and issues of post and neo-colonial relationships in the context of globalisation. The book includes close analyses of individual films which at times show the taboo subjects of sexual and substance abuse, the lives of street children, , as well as upper-class contradictions between an increasingly global position of privilege while in the midst of a traditionalist society. Other chapters focus on an individual filmmakers’ world view as depicted in representations of contemporary daily life of the average Tunisian, Moroccan or Algerian. The book provides an understanding of day-to-day existence in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria as depicted by local artists. The theoretical questions raised stretch beyond this topic to touch on ‘third world’ art and film production, and production in conditions of political repression and rigid moral conservatism.

[Source: Routledge].

Hoefert de Turégano, Teresa. African Cinema and Europe: Close-up on Burkina Faso. Florence: European Press Academic Pub, 2004.

This work is an analysis of cinematic representation in relation to a politics of production and to a received body of knowledge on Africa. It explores the process of transnational, translational and negotiated identities within differentiated structures of power and hierarchy in a global system. Burkinabè fiction film is used to consider an asymmetric relationship between France and Burkina Faso and by extension between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. The analytical framework revolves around a notion of external affiliation, which is seen as a process of articulation of power and knowledge within cinematic space. It functions infrastructurally through the financing, production, distribution and exhibition of Burkinabè film, as well as through the body of knowledge that constitutes an idea of Africanness, as expressed through the modernity/tradition dichotomy, exoticism, the supernatural, postcolonial, and national identities. These themes serve as context for the film analysis. The study reveals various patterns of production and two main filmic tendencies. The power relations and the knowledge that Europe deploys do not result in a determined or objectified dependency on screen. Within this framework we see how Europe’s knowledge of Africa enters into relation with Africa’s knowledge of itself and produces a negotiated new Africanness.

[Source: European Press Academic Publishing]

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