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A f r i c a C i n e m a
CALL FOR ARTISTS
Through a photography group exhibition we would like to analyse the complex current situation of African Cinema, covering all aspects that conform it: production, shootings (including set photography), distribution, cinemas, infrastructures, personalities (directors, actors, scriptwriters, and technicians), audiences, etc. For this purpose we are carrying out a CALL for photographers of all nationalities, and in particular of African origin, who would like to research or have already analysed the reality of the seventh art in Africa. For more information write or send images to info@masasam.com
DEADLINE DECEMBER 2008
In collaboration with:
PRESENTATION:
To create cinema is, above anything else, to tell stories, the great majority of which are visions, dreams. Cinema is magic, it is evasion, but it also allows the possibility “to offer a point of view, to glance at the stories of the world, to capture and to question oneself about collective memory, to seduce, to entertain, and to inform” as says Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda when he describes shooting in Africa. What, however, is happening to the seventh art in the African continent?
African Cinema has en extensive trajectory, with great old masters and new generations which are trying to present themselves in a different way and reflect other realities, those which represent modern day Africa more accurately, diverse and multiple, in accordance to the new post-colonial everyday. However, African Cinema has two main difficulties: on the one hand, the almost absolute absence of a cinematographic industry and on the other hand, the enormous problem of distribution and consequently exhibition, which results in the amazing fact that African Cinema seems completely invisible to Africans themselves. Perhaps Africa is the worst place to see African Cinema. The best places up until now for its distribution are film festivals at both a continental and international level. During the Burkina Faso Film Festival (FESPACO), the most important festival of the continent, more than 400,000 spectators cram the cinemas and clap enthusiastically at the best African productions. However, once the Festival ends, Hollywood action films and Hong Kong martial arts films monopolise once again the few active cinemas that remain. It seems obvious then that Africans want to watch cinema, they want a space for evasion, to daydream, for projection, where they can identify themselves and where the codes used are their own. They want to see films about their own reality and carried out with their own way of observing their world and not that of others. However, the possibility of seeing their own films is scarcer and scarcer, and each year more and more cinemas shut down throughout the continent.
SELECTED ARTISTS MAY 2008
+ antoine tempé portraits of african film makers
Antoine Tempé’s work portrays and exalts the main characters of this adventure, endowing visibility to the most important figures of African Cinema, its directors. These portraits in black and white capture in a very sincere and direct way the perceptive looks and the courageous personalities of these resistant women and men, as indeed, making films in Africa is frequently an act of pure resistance.
+ stephan zaubitzer outdoor cinema at ouagadougou
Stephan Zaubitzer introduces us to the spaces which would normally project the work of those directors, the cinemas of Africa. In his series “Outdoor Cinemas in Ougadougou”, which was selected at the 2004 World Press Photo edition, Zaubitzer portrays a popular patrimony which is becoming extinct. When film theatres haven’t shut down, they are extremely deteriorated, starting with the rundown wall used as screen, which is hardly ever still white. Zaubitzer is interested in the rudimentary architecture of these installations, with old projection booths worn by time, but which still attract interest and attention by vital and dynamic audiences. Zaubitzer’s work also reflects and documents the atmosphere and hubbub which surround the surviving cinemas, where hundreds of everyday stories blend at dusk.
+ alban biaussat broken cinemas
In “Broken Cinemas”, Biaussat depicts a more heart-rending reality, the abandon and deterioration of many of the cinemas in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Spaces where one can still feel the pathos of old glory days and in whose current silence one can imagine the laughter and emotion produced by those long gone projections. Theatres which are now either completely abandoned, ruins endowed with a new function, or are about to close down, as audiences are decreasing fast due to the elevated cost of the ticket. Those in which there is still some regular activity, DVDs are projected, old 80’s or pornographic films free of copyright fees, whose distribution seems like the only thing that assures a minimum attendance.
Meyer has tried to represent the emotion lived when confronted with a screen in his series “My Brother Light”. An approach to the magic of African Cinema and its audiences by documenting the work of the “Travelling Digital Cinema” (CNA, Cinéma Numérique Ambulant) a project that was born from realising that the majority of Africans have a very slim chance of attending movie theatres and an even slimmer one of seeing the work of the directors of their continent. Confronted with this situation, the CNA, which already possesses seven autonomous teams in Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger, regularly visits small far away villages with no electricity or running water, to project on a 3m by 4m screen the latest African productions. Meyer’s work, which won recognition at the 2007 World Press Photo Edition, is the result of his experience with the CNA project during five years, and which is an emotional portrait of an Africa which observes. His photos speak of the very magic of cinema and transcend a mere documenting of an outdoor projection to narrate a live show, its installation, its dismantling, its technical problems and its mysteries. But, most of all, these photographs point to a highly pathetic dimension, the existence of something sacred in ritual common to all humanity, something in art.
Stay tuned...
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