Bodies in Motion: physicality, materiality, and decoloniality in the digital age of francophone and lusophone African cinema

The digital revolution in African cinema has prompted fierce debate, particularly concerning the perceived quality of digital filmmaking in the context of Fespaco, the world’s largest pan-African film festival. Digitisation is creating an ever-greater blurring of genres, styles, and ‘national’ cinemas, as well as a sense of a loss: of material film reels, of the grain of analogue film, of a physical connection between film and body. This thesis proposes that questions of physicality and materiality - aesthetics and ethics of the body in film, the dissolving, fractalising body of digital film, and the aesthetic techniques of representing texture, touch, and bodily motion in digital film - are in fact critical to consider within the digital age of African cinema.

The thesis argues for the importance of such filmic aesthetics and ethics in the representation and articulation of decolonialities of being in increasingly transnational and multidirectional contexts. It draws upon and reinterprets the work of Frantz Fanon using a body-phenomenological methodology in conjunction with theories of decoloniality. It proposes that aesthetics of physicality and materiality in the digital age respond to decolonial imperatives of rehumanisation and politics of reciprocity and generosity.

Nine films from francophone and lusophone African producing countries/directors, which all featured at Fespaco during the festival’s transition to digital submissions (2013-2017), and which engage with the aesthetic considerations outlined, were selected for analysis. Supporting the film analysis, in-depth interviews were conducted with two of the directors, Alain Gomis and Dani Kouyaté, to bring their first-hand perspectives on filmmaking in the transition to digital, and on their own geographies and aesthetics.

The methodological approach also allows for a critical questioning of the categories of ‘francophone’ and ‘lusophone’ African cinema. It is a key part of this thesis to address the limitations of binary comparative perspectives and instead bring films together throughout the thesis in close analysis. The films in this thesis complicate attempts at dividing them along colonially-established lines, particularly in terms of language and geography, and represent multifaceted situations of oppression and resistance that point to the need to rethink what decolonising processes mean. These considerations interact with the significance of digitisation on the intermedial aspects of films, and the ways in which intermediality creates transformations of media and productive ruptures for resistance, re-humanisation, and reciprocity in the
boundaries between them.