African images, transnational audiences: resituating 'Africanness' in contemporary Francophone West African cinema

© 2013 Dr. Alice BurginCompleted under a Cotutelle arrangement between the University of Melbourne and the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense.For over fifty years, francophone West African celluloid art cinema has remained reliant on international support from France, which, as a self-proclaimed champion of art cinema in the global arena, remains this cinema's primary producer and consumer (Millet 1998, 147). At the same time, the various attempts to create a sustainable, domestic industry in the region continue to fail, and international interest in this cinema is on the wane, leading to the description of this industry as “an invisible cinema” (Barrot 2011, np). There remains only scant scholarship examining the complexities of the transnational industrial conditions in which this cinema is being produced and circulated, with even fewer studies committed to interrogating the effect of this French investment on the way this industry engages with its domestic market. This thesis has been designed to redress this gap in scholarship by taking into consideration all the levels on which this cinema participates in processes of transnational cultural exchange with France, examining the political, economic and ideological power relations that these processes engender. By considering how the francophone West African cinema has been shaped by social, economic and cultural forces, connected not only to the region’s colonial history and present relationship with France, but also to emerging effects of contemporary global flows, this thesis uses critical transnationalism to address pertinent questions regarding the dynamics of this North/South partnership and its impact on the development of this industry today