Bronwen Pugsley
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CHALLENGING PERSPECTIVES: DOCUMENTARY PRACTICES IN FILMS BY WOMEN FROM FRANCOPHONE AFRICA Bronwen Pugsley Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Nottingham, 2011 ABSTRACT This thesis is located at the intersection of three dynamic fields: African screen media, documentary studies, and women’s filmmaking. It analyses a corpus of fifteen films by Francophone sub-Saharan African women filmmakers, ranging from 1975 to 2009, within the framework of documentary theory. This study departs from the contextual approach to African women’s documentary, which has been predominant among scholarship and criticism thus far, in favour of a focus on the films as texts. The popular models developed for the study of documentary film by Western scholars are applied to African women’s documentaries in order to explore their innovative and stimulating practices; to determine the degree to which such models are fully adequate or, instead, are challenged, subverted, or exceeded by this new context of application; and to address the films’ wider implications regarding the documentary medium. Chapter One outlines the theoretical framework underpinning the thesis and engages with existing methodologies and conventions in documentary theory. Chapter Two considers women-centred committed documentary, analyses the ways in which these films uncover overlooked spaces and individuals, provide and promote new spaces for the enunciation of women’s subjectivity and ‘herstories’, and counter hegemonic stereotypical perceptions of African women. Chapter Three addresses recent works of autobiography, considers the filmmaking impulses and practices involved in filming the self, and points to the emergence of a filmmaking form situated on the boundary between ethnography and autobiography. Chapter Four explores the filmmakers’ ethnographic practices, considering their specificities in the light of pre- existing conventions within ethnographic filmmaking to emphasise the films’ formal and political reflexivity. The fifth and final chapter analyses a selection of works of docufiction, demonstrating their striking singularities and arguing for the significance of films that blur the boundaries between fiction and fact and thus push the borders of the real. The overall aim of the thesis is, therefore, to show the overlooked diversity of documentary voices and to demonstrate that the practice of documentary by women from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa is both formally innovative and reflexive, and politically challenging. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my two research supervisors, Dr Nicki Hitchcott and Dr Lynsey Russell-Watts, without whom this project simply couldn’t have materialis/zed. I was privileged to benefit from their advice, support, and encouragement, with which they were generous above and beyond any expectations I may have had. Guidance received from Dr Rosemary Chapman, who provided interim supervision at a crucial time during the planning of this thesis, was also very valuable and much appreciated. I would also like to offer thanks to the filmmakers whose work I drew on in the development of this thesis, in particular Angèle Diabang Brener and Khady Sylla, who kindly sent me copies of their films when they were not publicly available. I am also very grateful for the assistance and information provided by Jeannick Le Naour during my many visits to the Cinémathèque Afrique. My thanks extend to my family members, who encouraged and supported me throughout my studies, in particular my mother Caroline (to whom I should apologise for the title of Chapter One), my father Tony, and my grandparents John and Mary. I am particularly grateful to the following people for their continued friendship and encouragements: fellow postgraduates, Alex Mevel and Hocine Dimerdji; my neighbour Clémence (and Werner); Maud, Gaëlle, Cyrielle, and Céline; and most of all my childhood friend Yolaine, who showed a strong interest in this project from start to finish. Last but not least, I would like to make a special reference to Alex, who was consistently supportive, generous, and optimistic, and made the last six years simply fly by. I hope to return the favour one day. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ......................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................ii Tables of Contents ......................................................................................................iii Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One – Documentary ..................................................................................... 44 Chapter Two – Women-Centred Committed Documentary...................................... 85 Chapter Three – Autobiographical Documentary................................................... 128 Chapter Four – Ethnographic Documentary ........................................................... 168 Chapter Five – Docufiction...................................................................................... 209 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 249 Filmography............................................................................................................. 258 Bibliography............................................................................................................. 277 iii INTRODUCTION In 1963, the Cameroonian journalist and filmmaker Thérèse Sita-Bella released Un Tam-tam à Paris, a short documentary that chronicles Cameroon’s National Dance Company’s tour in Paris. This is widely recognised as the first film by a woman filmmaker from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa and it is particularly significant that it is a work of documentary. While male filmmakers from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa produce more fiction films than documentaries, their female counterparts have, from the very beginning, clearly favoured the latter medium. The website of the Centre for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema, founded by Beti Ellerson, provides a timeline of African women’s films during the first decade of the twenty-first century. This timeline reveals that between 2000 and 2010, African women filmmakers throughout Africa made over one hundred documentary films, against roughly eighty fiction films.1 Accordingly, the pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye, who remains to this day the most celebrated Francophone sub-Saharan African woman film director, has made mostly documentaries and docufictions.2 Her third film, Kaddu Beykat (1975) is her most successful and enduring work, having received positive appraisal from a selection of French viewers (Foster 1995: 130) and awards at the Berlin Film Festival and at the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou 1 See <http://www.africanwomenincinema.org/AFWC/2000s.html> [accessed 18 April 2011]. These figures are consistent with my own inventory of films released by Francophone sub- Saharan African women filmmakers. 2 Faye has made four fiction films: La Passante (1972), Revanche (1973), Man Sa Yay (1980), and Mossane (1991); and ten documentaries and docufictions: Kaddu Beykat, Fad’jal (1979), Goob na ñu (1979), Les Âmes au soleil (1981), Selbé et tant d’autres (1982), 3 ans et 5 mois (1984), Ambassades nourricières (1984), Elsie Haas, femme peintre et cinéaste d’Haiti (1985), Racines noires (1985), and Tesito (1989). 1 (FESPACO) in 1976. Faye rapidly acquired relative fame in Africa and in the Western world but it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that other African women filmmakers emerged. In 1990, Angela Martin maintained that aside from Sita-Bella, who made only Un Tam-tam à Paris, Sarah Maldoror, a Guadeloupian living in France who made a few films on Africa, and ‘one or two newcomers’,3 Faye was the main African woman film director (1990: 5). Seven years later, Denise Brahimi contended that there was still usually no more than one single woman filmmaker per country throughout the African continent (1997: 68–9). These included Kadiatou Konaté (Mali), Fanta Régina Nacro (Burkina Faso), Christiane Succab-Goldman (Mali), and Zara Mahamat Yacoub (Chad). A clear commonality between these women and those who undertook filmmaking later still, around the turn of the century, such as Victorine Bella-Meyo (Gabon), Fatou Kandé Senghor (Senegal), Rahmatou Keïta (Niger), and Appoline Traoré (Burkina Faso), is their frequent choice of documentary over fiction. In building the corpus of films analysed in this thesis, around sixty active women documentarians from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa were identified, most of whom have made more than one film during the course of the last few years. The striking predominance of documentary as a means of cinematic expression for Francophone sub-Saharan African women is thus the founding observation of this thesis. Part of the aim of the present study is to account for this concentration on documentary, by exploring some of the contextual factors influencing their choice of cinematic medium, as well as the social, cultural, 3 Although Martin does not provide names, it is possible that she is referring, for example, to Zoulaha Abdou (Niger), Margaret Fobé Fombé (Cameroon), and Mariama Hima (Niger).