---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: sniang <[log in to unmask]> Date: Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 11:56 AM Subject: CFP Dear colleague, Would you plaese post? Call for Papers The Changing Aesthetics of African Cinema: A Conference February 13-15, 2009 University of Victoria (Canada) Confirmed : John Akomphrah, Fanta Nacro, Jean Marie Téno, Abdellatif Kechiche (unconfirmed) Over the last twenty five years any parameter controlled by first or second generation African film makers has undergone a radical shift. The once prevailing realist approach has given way to an explosion of forms. Musicals, allegories, parodies not to mention an increasing number of literary adaptations and documentaries have diversified the cinema of the continent, thus challenging monolithic definitions of it. A cinema once characterized by tentative images, formulaic narrations, today, features artful productions borrowing from visual, textual and melodic images from around the world. Characters whose origins are difficult to ascertain abound in the films of Mambety, Abderrahmane Sissako and Raoul Peck. Nationalist spaces cohabit with diasporic ones, fragmented narratives combine to account for, document and reveal dead ends or political blockages in African societies. Beginning in the 1990s, character types have moved from the "been-tos" of the films of the first generation to tragic figures plagued by complicated psychological makeups. Passionate murders, betrayals, dreadful individual predicaments are no longer the makings of external forces but the product of deep emotional traumas (Moussa Sene Absa's Madame Brouette, Gaye Ramaka's Carmen Gei, Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyenas, Jean Pierre Bekolo's Les Saignantes, Fanta Nacro's Night of Truth). Likewise, whereas critics have argued that African cinema in the 1990s featured many films on the history of the continent, the very notion of history has shifted. Jean Marie Téno's fictional oral documentaries all point to internally determined forces gnawing at the freedom of the individual man or woman. Women filmmakers-ever so few on the continent- are producing mostly documentary films, but also fictional ones crafting images of womanhood much different from the maternal figures of their predecessors. Sokhna Amar, Moufida Tlatli and Tsitsi Dangaremba, for example, describe the harrowing ordeal of women victims of patriarchy, yet resolutely speaking/imaging themselves of their predicament. The Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema Research Group, a SSHRC funded programme, is organizing a three day conference, at the University of Victoria, February 13-15th, 2009, to examine how these changes have impacted the aesthetics of African cinema. The conference will devote each day to one of the following: the Contemporary African documentary, the Contemporary African fiction film, filmmaking in the African diaspora. Paper proposals in English or French should be sent to the organizers July 15th, 2008. Please send proposals by e.mail only. [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html