Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film, and: African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara (review)

For the last twenty years or so, film studies have undergone an intensely active period of consolidation. Hundreds of dictionaries, histories, and theoretical overviews of film have been published during this period, which has been especially noteworthy for gathering and preserving knowledge of filmmaking in former colonies around the world. Like medieval studies, for example, film studies is a demanding, multi-disciplinary pursuit: the critic must know something about history, culture, and sociology as well as film technology and the esthetics of a medium that employs several channels of communication simultaneously: sequential images, dialogue, voiceover, and nonverbal components of the sound track. The most productive researcher in Francophone film studies may well be Roy Armes, emeritus professor at the University of Middlesex in London.1 Armes’s work deserves attention not only for its serious scholarship and wide range of insights, but also for the extraordinary popularity of Francophone studies today, and even more so because of the growing prominence of film in teaching younger generations whose experience with visual media increasingly exceeds their experience with literary texts.