Engendering Screen Representation, Spectatorship, and Curation
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Published:April 2025
Domestic Disturbance: Afro-Feminist Poetics in Dilman Dila's Ugandan “Horror Romances”
This chapter examines two video films by the Ugandan filmmaker Dilman Dila in order to explore them as sites of knowledge production for our understanding of genre films and their representations of Black womanhood. Focusing on the films How to Start a Zombie Apocalypse and Cursed Widow Blues, the chapter illustrates how they bring together popular genres like romance and horror in ways that undermine the formulaic nature of romance. In doing so, these films offer revisionary responses to the stereotypical representations of African women espoused by the Third Cinema style of production as well as more contemporary popular video films. In particular, the chapter argues that these films disturb the domestic by effecting a haunting on the cinematic image of a “good African woman” in order to intimate at alternatives beyond the frame that may better serve to represent the realities of urban African women in contemporary African cinema.
Filmography
References
Fashioning African Screen Worlds: La noire de … and Les saignantes
Victoria L. Rovine notes that “garments . . . are very literally embodied; when they travel, they serve as shorthand referents to the people and cultures with whom they originated.” Cinema and dress are, in this sense, connected as situated, embodied practices through which African subjectivities travel and are ‘re-fashioned’. “refashioned.” Taking the films La noire de . . . (1966), by Ousmane Sembène, and Les saignantes (2006), by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, as its focus, this chapter suggests that material traffic between costume and cinema is a generative rubric through which to examine the notion of African screen worlds. It argues that the “fashioned” nature of film is an essential formal consideration for the study of African cinema, as it reflects how filmmakers have shaped new and changing ways of inhabiting African identity, as well as the highly corporeal, situated practices by which women, in particular, have molded the contours of African cinema.
Filmography
References
Nollywood Cinema and Its Housemaids’ Fandom: The Case of Eldoret, Kenya
This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of local housemaid fans of Nollywood televisual cinema in Eldoret, Kenya. It explores the social conditions that produce and at the same time marginalize the typical female domestic worker. It examines the serendipitously constructed identity of the housemaids as Nollywood televisual cinema fans and how it becomes a form of therapy for them to navigate the challenges of the social identity of the housemaid. The chapter considers the Eldoret housemaids’ Nollywood fandom as a case of repurposed leisure, to the extent that they draw parallels between the narratively constructed experiences in Nollywood cinema and their real-life experience, making it possible for them to identify with and draw inspiration from the desirable narrative closure and poetic justice of Nollywood cinema.
Filmography
References
Archival Films in Contemporary Archives: Fragmented Legacies of a North African Women's Film Heritage
With the excitement of innovations and new directions in African cinema also comes an increased awareness of the significance of its heritage. Reflection on the past lives of storyworlds and the responsibilities of archives is more and more urgent, as pioneers from the 1970s and 1980s pass on and their films are in danger of getting lost. This chapter explores three pioneering North African women filmmakers’ early feminist works and their archival life. It examines Fatma 75 (1976) by Selma Baccar from Tunisia, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978) and La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (1981) by the Algerian filmmaker Assia Djebar, and Une porte sur le ciel (1989) by the Moroccan director Farida Benlyazid. The self-reflexive ethos of this chapter reflects the main argument that close personal relationships and professional networks are essential to the success of contemporary restoration projects. In considering these films’ individual and combined stories of archiving and preservation, the chapter explores a way forward for historical research across diverse African screen worlds.