Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-7drxs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-23T15:31:30.775Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Film as Evidence, Film as History and Film in History: Some African Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Bickford-Smith Vivian
Bickford-Smith Vivian*
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town and Institute of Historical Research, University of London
Get access

Extract

During my undergraduate years, a long time ago now, I cannot remember a single instance when any form of film was used for any purpose whatsoever in a history course at Cambridge University. Yet clearly film has become more acceptable to the historical academy as a whole in recent years. My own experience of engaging with film has been in three ways: with film as a form of historical evidence; through exploring the role film has played ‘in’ history, possibly by influencing opinions and policies; and, most controversially for historians at large, with analysing film as attempted history, as a form of history itself.

Type
Articles
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 110 , 2009 , pp. 17 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 For further discussion of these approaches, see Bickford-Smith, V. and Mendelsohn, R., ‘Film and History Studies in South Africa Revisited: Representing the African Past on Screen', South African Historical Journal (Hereafter SAHJ), 48 (2003) pp.1-9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Bickford-Smith, V. and Mendelsohn, R., Black and White in Colour. African History on Screen, (Cape Town, Oxford and Athens, Ohio, 2007).Google Scholar

3 Two books that examine western cinematic stereotyping of third world ‘others’ are Shohat, E. and Stam, R., Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, (London and New York, 1994) and Cameron, K.M., Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White, (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

4 Richards, J., Visions of Yesterday, (London, 1973); Smith, P., The Historian and Film, (New York, 1976); Aldgate, A., Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War, (London, 1979);Google Scholar

5 Apart from the Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn, Shohat and Stam, and Cameron books already cited, these include: Armes, R., Third World Film Making and the West, (Berkely, 1987);Google Scholar Davis, P., In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema's South Africa, (Johannesburg and Athens, Ohio, 1996);Google Scholar Diawara, M., African Cinema: Politics and Culture, (Bloomington, 1992);Google Scholar Gugler, J., African Film: Re-Imagining a Continent, (Bloomington, 2003);Google Scholar Pfaff, F., Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Bibliography, (New York, 1988);Google Scholar Thackway, M., Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Sharan Francophone African Film, (Oxford, 2003);Google Scholar Tomaselli, K., The Cinema of Apartheid, (London and New York, 1989);Google Scholar Ukadike, N.F., Black African Cinema, (Berkeley, 1994);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Maingard, J., South African National Cinema, (London, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 These examples also appear in a full length article on Cape Town as a cinematic city: Bickford-Smith, V., “The Fairest Cape of them All? Cape Town in cinematic imagination”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33, 4 (December 2009).Google Scholar

7 Bickford-Smith, V., Van Heyningen, E. and Worden, N., Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, (Cape Town, 1999), p.115.Google Scholar

8 Reynolds, G., ‘Image and Empire: Anglo-American Cinematic Interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1921-1937’, SAHJ, 48 (2003), pp.90-108.Google Scholar

9 Phillips, R., The Bantu in the City: A Study of Cultural Adjustment on the Rand, (Lovedale, 1938), p.323.Google Scholar

10 Burns, J., ‘A Source of Innocent Merriment: Cinema and Society in Colonial Zimbabwe’, SAHJ, 48 (2003), pp.130-7.Google Scholar See also: Burns, J., Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe, (Athens, Ohio, 2002).Google Scholar

11 Larkin, B., Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, (Durham and London, 2008).Google Scholar

12 Bickford-Smith, V., ‘How urban life was represented in film and. films consumed in South African cities in the 1950s’, Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads, 3, 2 (August 2006).Google Scholar

13 For an excellent analysis of cultural life in District Six that gives particular weight to cinema attendance see B.Nasson, ‘“She preferred living in a cave with Harry the Snake-catcher”: Towards an Oral History of Popular Leisure and Class Experience in District Six, Cape Town, c.1920-1950’, in P.Bonner et al (ed.), Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality, and Conflict in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa, (Johannesburg, 1989).

14 Gainer, D.J., ‘Hollywood, African consolidated films and Bioskoopbeskawing: aspects of American culture in Cape Town, 45-1960', MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2000.Google Scholar

15 Nasson, ‘Harry the Snake-catcher’, p.289; J.Lewis (dir.), Dragging at the Roots (1999).

16 Nasson, Harry the Snake-catcher', p.289; Gainer, ‘African consolidated films', p.134; D.Pinnock, The Brotherhoods: Street Gangs and State Control in Cape Town, (Cape Town, 1984), p.28.

17 CGlaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935-76, (Portsmouth, Oxford and Cape Town, 2000).

18 See the American History Review, 93, 5 (1988), pp. 1173-1227.

19 His most recent book on the topic is Rosenstone, R.A., History as Film, Film as History, (Harlow, 2006).Google Scholar

20 ‘A Conversation between Eric Foner and John Sayles’ in Carnes, Mark C. (ed.), Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, (New York, 1996), p.26.Google Scholar

21 Herlihy, D., ‘Am I a Camera? Other Reflections on Film and History’, AHR, 93, 5 (1988), pp. 1186-92.Google Scholar

22 Mendelsohn, R., Breaker Morant: An African War through an Australian Lens in Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn, Black and White in Colour, pp.120-135.Google Scholar

23 Rosenstone, R.A., ‘History in Images, History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History on Film’, AHR, 93, 5 (1988), pp 1174-5.Google Scholar

24 Bickford-Smith, V., ‘Picturing Apartheid: with a particular focus on ‘Hollywood’ histories of the 1970s’, in Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn, Black and White in Colour, pp.256-78.Google Scholar

25 Adhikari, M., ‘Hotel Rwanda: too much heroism, too little history - or horror’, in Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn, Black and White in Colour, pp.279-299.Google Scholar

26 Biko, S., I Write What I Like, (London, 1978).Google Scholar

27 Mendelsohn, R., ‘Breaker Morant’.Google Scholar

28 Bickford-Smith, ‘Picturing Apartheid’ discusses these sequences and analyses the successes and failures of these films in far greater detail than is possible here.

29 Biko, I Write What I Like, p.28.

30 See the chapters by Saul, Baum and Nasson in Black and White in Colour.