Abstract This article re-examines the dynamic space–place relationships (the urban–rural, insider–outsider, conflict–love plot) in post-apartheid South African cinema with a special emphasis on the representation of white Afrikaner identity. Theories related to this argument were first systematically devised by Keyan Tomaselli in his studies of Afrikaans-language films made between 1965 and 1980. Similarly, the authors analyse the ‘structural basis of the images and recurring motifs reflected in local South African cinema’ in a sample of films made between 1994 and 2014. Johannesburg and Cape Town have gained various guises through vernacular urban narratives set within the gangster and crime genre, such as Jerusalema, Cold Harbour and Four Corners, whilst the rural landscape is explored extensively in Afrikaans romance films such as Platteland, Vrou Soek Boer and Leading Lady. The authors argue that the filmic representations of the rural and urban landscapes reflect the various kinds of South African identities as imagined by the director. The authors conclude that as illustrated by the case studies, whilst most of the Afrikaans films of the last twenty years represent a yearning for the ‘innocent pastoral years’ of their ancestors, there are exceptions to the rule, such as Katinka Heyns’ film, Paljas.

Abstract At a time when the reconciliation narratives peddled during the Mandela and Mbeki eras are increasingly coming under stress, a number of South African filmmakers have been offering viewers deeply felt, often autobiographically inflected and experimental filmic engagements with the everyday, affective textures of contemporary political disillusionment. This article reads two films associated with the so-called ‘New Wave’ in South African filmmaking – namely Jenna Cato Bass’s Love the One You Love (2014) and Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015) – in order to map the contours of waywardness as a mood and mode of cinematic narration peculiar to a particular post-transitional South African political conjuncture. Inspired by a recent flurry of international scholarly activity on the topic of mood, my analysis of these films considers the nuances that a reading of mood bring to understanding the aesthetics of ‘wayward feeling’ in contemporary South African visual culture.

Abstract South Africa’s turbulent past has led to its history being rewritten a number of times. The events of the last 450 years in particular have had a huge impact on the social, political and historical context, resulting in the current social tropes and inequalities emerging frequently as topics for discussion in the classroom. In April 2015 students at the University of Cape Town embarked on the RhodesMustFall campaign. The spirit of the campaign spread quickly across the country as students and citizens embarked on heated debates and protests on the significance and memory of such monuments. In the classroom students were encouraged to rethink monument spaces and interrogate the politics of remembering within the context of film studies. The theoretical framework focused on Marita Sturken’s premise that history, culture and memory are immersed in cultural artefacts that play a significant role in how we understand the past and its relationship with the present and the future. This article will discuss key theoretical ideas that emerged through interactions with students with reference to the RhodesMustFall campaign and how the cinematic space acts as a platform to rethink monument spaces.

Abstract This article looks at the ways in which Mama Jack, a South African slapstick comedy, frames certain individuals and groups as makwerekwere. The term, which is popularly used in reference to African migrants in South Africa, appears in the film despite the absence of any African migrant in the literal sense. Nonetheless, Leon Schuster, who plays the lead roles in the film, provides the conditions of the term’s use by performing blackness and exhibiting a stock of images associated with black foreignness. Makwerekwere therefore signifies a phony presence and serves to visualize violence against black foreigners. The article develops from the understanding that all texts, film included, communicate specific ways of seeing the world and therefore participates in the construction and circulation of normalized and misrecognized forms of violence. Film’s signifying potential need not be understated. By focusing on the various ways in which makwerekwere are deployed in Mama Jack, it will be noted that the pursuit of the comic tends to obfuscate and validate the negative portrayal of black foreigners.

Abstract Teresa Prata’s film Terra Sonâmbula (2007), an adaptation of Mia Couto’s magical realist novel of the same name, examines violence from a different perspective than its source material – although both the novel and the film consider the difficulties confronting Mozambican society in the face of a horrific civil war, Couto’s novel was published the same year the war ended, while Prata’s film was released fifteen years later, with the national climate much altered. Despite this difference, both the novel and the film make use of magical realism in certain pivotal moments of their narratives. This study analyses the function of magical realism in both works, arguing that the concept serves as a sort of coping mechanism, a way of making sense of the world that allows the narratives’ characters to remain hopeful despite the violence and devastation that surrounds them.

Abstract Aiming to provide a critical analysis of the filmic memorial of Portuguese colonialism I consider two alternative ‘visions of cinema’: the official version presented in Estado Novo propaganda newsreels, and, in ‘reverse shot’, the disruptive gaze found in censored auteur fiction films – Faria de Almeida’s Catembe (1965), Lopes Barbosa’s Deixem-me ao Menos Subir às Palmeiras… (1972) and António de Sousa’s Esplendor Selvagem (1972). Portuguese colonies were seldom depicted on film, and only the ‘right kind’ of images – specifically those presented in propaganda newsreels – tended to be approved by the censorship committees. Faria de Almeida received government support to film everyday life in Mozambique’s capital, in 1964. After the first version of the film was censored – with 103 cuts, a Guinness world record – projection of Catembe was banned.1 In 1972, Barbosa made a film about abuses of power in colonial farms in Mozambique. The film was banned. Sousa recorded initiation rituals and rites of passage in different Angolan ethnic groups. The documentary was considered ‘anti-political’. Until conducting this research, the films remained deposited at the Portuguese Cinema Museum, largely unknown to audiences and researchers. What are the limitations of the history of cinema – and of the knowledge of the ‘imagined man’ – as long as the perspectives provided in such censored colonial films remain unanalysed?

Abstract The heroine of Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, Carmen, appears as an archetypal femme fatale who lures unsuspecting men to their destruction by means of her manipulative sexuality. While Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, Carmen, reveals the psychology of masculine anxieties, sexual jealousy and murderous rage, his character, Carmen, expresses her credo of autonomous sexuality, and can be seen as a prototypical modern woman. My article examines the representations of the female protagonist’s sexuality in a contemporary South African film that re-works the Carmen story in an African context. I argue that U-Carmen eKhayelitsha/Carmen in Khayelitsha, directed by Mark Dornford-May (2005), does not realize the potential significance of Carmen’s sexuality. I trace the ways in which dance is not used to good effect in the film. In addition, I show that the film highlights traditional masculinity in various ways, such as offering disturbing parallels between the ritual slaughter of a bull and the murder of Carmen. I conclude that U-Carmen eKhayelitsha displays revisionist and ambivalent gender politics.

Abstract This article discusses the work of national and transnational women film-makers who contributed to the discourse on the Egyptian Revolution in the three years that followed the fall of Mubarak and who documented forms and expressions of female defiance through the lens of their camera. I argue that, in women-made documentaries, the social and political defiance vis-à-vis systems of governance and instances of authority (familial, religious and political) is shaped through the representation of a far-reaching form of disobedience, breaking the rules of social patriarchy and political paternalism, destabilizing the common knowledge on oppressed women and defying the overarching essentialist views on women’s conditions in Egypt. I argue that civic defiance cannot be understood without examining the more radical epistemic defiance to the established régime du savoir (regime of knowledge) informed by power relationships, and the way in which knowledge circulates and functions in relation to power centers and authoritarian elites.

Abstract In this article I will examine three films featuring Maghrebi migrant families between the 1960s and the present day, Le Gone du Chaâba (1997) by Christophe Ruggia, Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001) by Yamina Benguigui and Le Grand Voyage (2004) by Ismaël Ferroukhi. Each film portrays tensions between generations, between sexes, between societies and between beliefs and values. The tradition of the sacrifice of a sheep in Islam features in all three films and I use this theme to highlight how different members of the families sacrifice themselves or are sacrificed in the process of accommodating to a new way of life. I also deconstruct other subtextual references to Islamic culture and belief as representations of dilemmas and forms of reconciliation and belonging.

Abstract The Tanzanian video film industry is one example for the changes in popular arts production due to the introduction of the medium video film. The shift to the medium video film has created new visual styles and restructured physical and social spaces of production. Focusing on the history of the video film art group White Elephant, this article aims to show how the production of video films under conditions of intense competition and time pressure is a site of struggle over aesthetics, resources, identities and status. Relating the film groups to the history of art groups in Eastern Africa will point to the differences and continuities between the independent commercial production of video film and former popular art production as well as their relation to the state. This fields of production and the struggles within can be seen as a ‘mirror of society’ characterizing the dynamics of social change in contemporary Tanzania.