Subject: FW: Cinema of Senegal -- documentary
From: owner-h-afrlitcine
To: Multiple recipients of list H-AFRLITCINE
Subject: Cinema of Senegal -- documentary (fwd)
Date: Tuesday, 19 November, 1996 3:34PM
From: CATARCHIVE@aol.com
This memo is in response to several inquiries we have
received for more detailed information on the 1978
television documentary THE CINEMA OF SENEGAL. This title is
one of several dozen we offer for sale, not available
elsewhere.
This documentary is 27 minutes long and was made when the
Senegalese film director Ousmane SEMBENE was in the United
States on the occasion of the premier of his new film CEDDO.
On this program he discusses filmmaking in Senegal, and by
extension filmmaking in black Africa with his compatriot the
elder statesman of African filmmaking Paulin Soumanou VIEYRA
and Larry KARDISH, Associate Curator in the Programming
Division of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Mr. Kardish had at that time arranged a retrospective of
African films at the Museum.
Excerpts are shown on this program from Mr. Sembene's film,
and from ET LA NIEGE N'ETAIT PLUS by Ababacar Samb-Makharam,
and REOUH-TAKH by Mahama Johnson Traore.
The conversation is in French with a very competent voice
over translation. Senegal was in 1978 the only country in
sub-Saharan Africa with a film community, and this community
was astonishingly vital. The 20 or 30 directors there had
managed to make films against tremendous odds. There were no
production facilities in the country -- all lab work was
done in France. Indeed, films in Senegal were until a few
years before this program produced only in the French
language because Senegal has several different languages, no
one of which -- it was thought --would have guaranteed an
audience sufficient to warrant nationwide distribution. The
topics discussed with some passion on this program concern
this situation and such other themes as art in a
post-colonial society, censorship and self-censorship, and
the way Senegalese films track the underlying concerns of
society, including the conflict between Christianity and
Islam and both with old indigenous religions, the role of
educated Senegalese who return to a country in which they
can no longer relate so comfortably to older traditions,
etc. The film clips, too, reflect these themes.
To order. Following from our film catalogue. Creative Arts
Television Archive is a licensing agency representing
several hundred completed television documentaries not for
sale elsewhere. Some of these titles concern cinema and are
now available in video formats for research or classroom
use.
We offer VHS (home video) copies of documentary programs
about cinema, film directors, scoring for film, animation,
experimenters, studies of techniques, profiles and
interviews, produced in the period 1950-1980.
Creative Arts Television
Post Office Box 739
Kent, CT 06757
If you are with an institution and wish to place a large
order please give us an idea of the quantity you seek. On
some titles we can achieve a price reduction from our lab
and pass this on to you.
Sorry, we do not rent our cassettes or send them out on approval. We prefer
to ship by UPS for safety, so when you order please indicate your UPS
address
(unless you prefer shipment by post to a PO box). These programs are offered
for private or classroom use, or inclusion in a library, not for duplication
or any commercial use.
In-Reply-To: 199611251411.JAA21632@dag.XC.Org