Before looking specifically at Jean-Marie Teno's work, it is useful to start with a word or two about documentary filmmaking in general, and its particular development – and at times complex representational issues – in the African context. While some existing studies have focused on documentary films made in Africa, mostly in the colonial era, and numerous articles, chapters and some rare books have focused on individual documentary films or filmmakers, at present, African documentary filmmaking per se remains a relatively uncharted domain, even if there are clear signs of growing academic and critical interest in it. This introduction does not purport to fill that gap. It does not aim either to give an exhaustive historical presentation of the documentary, multiple excellent studies of which already exist, nor specifically of African documentary, which would require a book of its own. It simply seeks to offer a frame, or a context in which to situate Jean-Marie Teno's work.

Defining Documentary

Answering the what might at first appear simple question of what defines a documentary has long proven to be notoriously slippery, as Patricia Aufderheide illustrates. Not only are there multiple types of documentary, but its boundaries and forms have shifted and evolved since the invention of cinema in 1895, often thanks to on-going technological evolutions. Aufderheide offers a useful broad definition, notwithstanding, describing documentaries as ‘portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material’. Bill Nichols adds, ‘documentaries address the world in which we live rather than a world imagined by the filmmaker’. But perhaps it is the three pioneering filmmakers of the 1920s considered the ‘fathers’ of documentary – Robert Flaherty (USA), John Grierson (Scotland) and Dziga Vertov (Russia) – who, in their respective claims to film ‘truthfully’ and to be artists, best captured the inherent elusiveness of the form's boundaries. They captured too the tensions within a form that is never more than a reproduction of reality, with all the possible manipulations that this infers.