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Marxism In African Film Essay

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could render productive the task of defining the sign differential of cinema in Africa? Negritude, Satrean existentialism, missionary writings, ethno philosophy, anthropological structuralism and Fanonian neo-Marxist are the predominant philosophical trends that hold sway in African scholarship. These are philosophical orientations that are, to a large extent, alien to the continent and have in one way or the other defined or contributed to the anti-colonial rhetoric and the fight for liberation. Marxism, neo-structuralism and modernism seem to have dominated the theoretical construction of African cinema (Zacks, 1999).
Astride these philosophical orientations are equally the tools for film analysis in Africa that are equally imported from continental Europe and America. These tools have for a while been raising the ire of some film scholars in Africa, that judge the methods used by the standards of their provenance and not on the principles of what they offer or fail to offer in the task of tracing the signifier in film: “The direct importation into Africa of methods, theories, ideas and psychoanalytical assumptions developed in the First World and applied to African cinema is not without epistemological problems. Marxist, positivist or …show more content…

His fourth chapter, – The Cultural context of Black African Cinema –, which had the potential to be a thematic presentation of the cultural context, turned out to be a marathon of précis comments of over thirty films with no arguable scale of preference or convincing arguments for the choices made. Thirty or more films analyzed in that manner offer nothing more than poster clippings for whetting the appetites of those who would like to watch these films. What was needed was a judicious sampling of some films that could demonstrate tendencies, themes and forms that delineate emerging patterns in African

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