Black and White in Colour : Africa's History on Screen

by Bickford-Smith, Vivian

• ISBN13: 9780821417478
• ISBN10: 0821417479
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-03-13
• Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr

Summary

Black and White in Colour: African History on Screenconsiders how the African past has been represented in a wide range of historical films. Written by a team of eminent international scholars, the volume provides extensive coverage of both place and time and deals with major issues in the written history of Africa. Themes include the slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, racism, and anticolonial resistance. Many of the films will be familiar to readers: they includeOut of Africa,Hotel Rwanda,Breaker Morant,Cry Freedom,The Battle of Algiers, andChocolat. This collection of essays is a highly original and useful contribution to African histography, as well as a significant addition to the growing body of work within the emerging subdiscipline of "film and history." It will appeal to those interested in African history and the ways in which films use the past to raise questions about the present.

Author Biography

Vivian Bickford-Smith is a professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town.

Richard Mendelsohn is the head of the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on South African Jewish history, and together with Vivian Bickford-Smith, has pioneered teaching and research in film and history.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
History as cultural redemption in Gaston Kabore's precolonial-era films	p. 11
Beyond 'history': two films of the deep Mande past	p. 28
Tradition and resistance in Ousmane Sembene's films Emitai and Ceddo	p. 41
The transatlantic slave trade in cinema	p. 59
'What are we?': Proteus and the problematising of history	p. 82
The public lives of historical films: the case of Zulu and Zulu Dawn	p. 97
Breaker Morant: an African war through an Australian lens	p. 120
From Khartoum to Kufrah: filmic narratives of conquest and resistance	p. 136
Cheap if not always cheerful: French West Africa in the world wars in Black and White in Colour and Le Camp de Thiaroye	p. 148
Whites in Africa: Kenya's colonists in the films Out of Africa, Nowhere in Africa and White Mischief	p. 167
Beholding the colonial past in Claire Denis's Chocolat	p. 185
The Battle of Algiers: between fiction, memory and history	p. 203
Raoul Peck's Lumumba: history or hagiography?	p. 223
Flame and the historiography of armed struggle in Zimbabwe	p. 240
Picturing apartheid: with a particular focus 'Hollywood' histories of the 1970s	p. 256
Hotel Rwanda: too much heroism, too little history - or horror?	p. 279
Looking the beast in the (fictional) eye: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on film	p. 300
Endnotes	p. 323
Index	p. 372
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