Anila Gill

This course attends to various cinematic traditions emerging from Sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas. Students will engage with the colonial histories subtending the politics of aesthetics in West Africa, the ideals of pan-Africanism circulating through oral traditions, the violent legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, and the radical futurity expressed in experimental film circles in the United States. The course begins with canonical Senegalese films like Black Girl and Touki Bouki, moves on to political films like Lumumba and Sambizanga, and then concludes with screenings from the LA Rebellion and Black Audio Film Collective. By the end of the course, students will have a comprehensive understanding of the various African cinematic aesthetics discussed in class and demonstrate a critical capacity to discuss the geopolitical and historical contexts in which African cinemas were produced.

Writing in 1948, Satyajit Ray diagnosed what he observed to be an artistically impoverished national film industry too readily capitulating to Western influence: “What our cinema needs above everything else is a style, an idiom, a sort of iconography of cinema, which would be uniquely and recognizably Indian.” While many manifestos following Ray’s were quick to dismiss the possibility of a singular aesthetic emerging from a nation hosting as many divergent ethnic, religious, and linguistic populations as India, the discussion had already given life to film societies, artistic movements, and literary and theatrical institutions unwilling to involve themselves in popular Hindi cinema’s cultural and linguistic regime. Periodized between Partition and the Emergency, this course begins with regional art cinema emerging from West Bengal (Sara Akash, Devi, Meghe Dhaka Tara), moves through Hindi-Urdu literary traditions (Garm Hawa, Ankur), and explores cinematic representations of caste relations from South Indian filmmakers (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, John Abraham).