Africa: a portrait of Britain
Our display, having emerged from several strands of thought, focused on the depiction of Africa in British cinema. The year 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of independence for many African states and the World Cup took place in Africa, for the first time, that same summer. The display also coincided with the modest addition to the library's collection of new books on South African cinema, as well as the end of a double season of films at BFI Southbank.
John S. Bond gave his contemporaries an account of the first South African War (1880-1881) in the optical lantern slide reading Transvaal in War. This was displayed alongside three other readings from our Pre-cinema history collection. The second South African War (1899-1901) was one of the first wars to be filmed, only to then be promptly shelved as an appropriate subject for the British film industry. Some early films can be seen in the BFI's DVD release of RW Paul films and on screenonline.
One cannot help but notice a distinctly gloomy and negative tone to much of the writing on British films depicting Africa.
In 1958 Jimmy Vaughan notes that the African "commodities" of both Hollywood and British films, were "either violence or bloodshed, or lurid glamour ". In 2007 Tiisetso Tlelima makes the same lament focusing upon African representations in Blood Diamond (2006) and The Last King of Scotland (2006).
A look at past and present issues of the BFI's Sight and Sound magazine offers interesting bookends to the subject of 'Africa in films'. Firstly, Alan Tanner, in 1956, reflects on the ethnographic approaches to Africa in film. Over fifty years later, in 2007, Mark Cousins wonders why it is so rare, in the west, to be able to see the "invisible classics" of African cinema.
In British African Stories, Ann Ogidi provides a great overview of colonial and post-colonial Africa ranging from well known imperial pieces like Sanders of the River (1935), to those on the countdown to independence, such as Simba (1955) and Guns at Batasi (1964).
The decency and optimisim of Guns at Batasi was replaced by cynicism in films like The Last Grenade (1969) – Richard Attenborough appears in both. Then, in the 1980s, comes a British film directed by John Irvin, shot by British cinematograher and legend Jack Cardiff, on the very British hero of the book by Frederick Forsyth, The Dogs of War (1980). Despite all this the film, with Christopher Walken in the lead, has a decidedly American feel to it. For White Mischief (1987) however – or so the pressbook on display informs us under the heading 'No Yanks, please – we're British' – the producer/director team made "an aggressive decision to make a virtue our of . . . extreme 'Britishness'."
By the 1990s the British seem to have disappeared altogether and the mixed motives of British mercenaries have been replaced by equally uncertain military types in US Special Forces – see Tears of the Sun (2003).
References
Pre-cinema history collection
- A cruise on the East coast of Africa, by J. Forsythe Ingram, [188?] (Optical lantern readings)
- Our West African settlements, by the Rev. George Adcock, [188?] (Optical lantern readings)
- Stanley in Africa, by J. Forsythe Ingram, [188?] (Optical lantern readings)
- Transvaal in war, by John S. Bond, [19--?] (Optical lantern readings)
Journal articles
- Africa as seen by Europeans and American film-makers, by Jimmy Vaughan, pp.17-22, Young Film, no.1, Jan 1958
- Hollywood's depiction of Africa, by Tiisetso Tlelima, p.42, Screen Africa, Sep 2007
- Recording Africa, by Alan Tanner, pp. 41-44, Sight and Sound, vol.26, no.1, July 1956
