Documentary Objectives: Filming Africa from Colonialism to Independence - Rachel Gabara

Session Description: For well over a century, filmmakers have been shooting documentaries in West and Central Africa, a region that included the colonies of French West and Equatorial Africa and now encompasses fourteen nations and nearly 200 million people. These films played a crucial role in the development of both European and African cinemas yet have been largely ignored by scholars. In the wake of fifty years of French colonial documentary in sub-Saharan Africa- propaganda-infused travel, hunting, expedition, and ethnographic films- African directors reclaimed their cinematic image by challenging outsider claims to authenticity and developing new models for nonfiction. I will highlight the nearly forgotten innovations of the decades following independence to demonstrate how, in a complex network of images and languages and across a dynamic range of modes, African documentarists remade a global art form rooted in oppression, exoticization, and a simplistic conception of filmic realism. Speaker Bio: Rachel Gabara is the Nancy Gillespie Brinning Professor in French at the University of Georgia, where her teaching focuses on nonfiction and historical fiction from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to Documentary Objectives, published earlier this year by Indiana University Press, Gabara's recent articles address early African film criticism \(Global Movie Magazine Networks, University of California Press\), cinephilia and modernism in African cinema of the late 1960s and early 70s \(Modernism/modernity\), and contemporary debates about restitution and archives \(Contemporary French Civilization\). Her research in Burkina Faso, Senegal, and France has been supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.