Overview

Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the ‘afropolis’, the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer. Through close readings of key works such as Life on Earth (1998), The Night of Truth (2004), Bamako (2006), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), Tey (Today) (2012), The Pirogue (2012), Mille soleils (2013) and Timbuktu (2014), Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema.

Full Product Details

Author:   James S. Williams (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Weight:   0.694kg
ISBN:  

9781784533359

ISBN 10:   1784533351
Pages:   376
Publication Date:   21 March 2019
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Illustrations Credits Acknowledgements 1. The Trouble with Beauty: Reimagining African Film Aesthetics 2. On the Front Line: In/visible Violence, Formations of Style, and Aesthetic Resistance 3. Screening Dakar: Locating Beauty in the Afropolis 4. Voice, Language, Mystery: From Ideological Struggle to Aesthetic Shudder 5. Queering the Baobab: Male Intimacy, the Erotics of Abstraction, and the Right to Beauty 6. On the Border, Becoming World: Migrant Beauty, Migratory Narratives, and the Transmigration of Cinematic Form 7. The Afropolitan Present Notes Works Cited Filmography Index

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Author Information

James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is the author of Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (2016), Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (2013) and Jean Cocteau (2008). He is also co-editor of May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution (2011, with Anna-Louise Milne and Julian T. Jackson), For Ever Godard (2004, with Michael Temple and Michael Witt) and Gender and French Cinema (2001, with Alex Hughes).

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