MAC 248 Topics in Global Media

A survey course on the global language of film and media. Screenings and readings will cover a range of national contexts, examining questions of national identity, national cinema, alternative cinema, Third cinema, experimental ethnography, diaspora, postcoloniality, globalization, and transnationality. The course will take advantage of the international and intercultural makeup of Los Angeles as a means of exploring media and accessing practitioners who are working across national boundaries.

 Topics in Global Media: African Cinema.  African has one of the largest, if not the largest, film industries in the world. However, it is rarely given much, if any, significance within global film theory and history. This course will explore African film and video across a broad historical period including early colonial visual culture, post-independence Francophone Art films, sub-Saharan Black African cinema, Anglophone Nollywood and Ghana popular video, the visual griot, the Yoruba traveling theatre tradition, and African new media. This class also is a survey of the academic traditions that have attempted to examine the history of African film and media. We will explore such traditions as National Cinema, Third Cinema, Diasporic Cinema, Transnational Cinema, and Experimental Ethnography. Within each of these often-conflicting traditions we will focus in on a particular regional case study. We are faced with several obstacles in this project, including the vexing difficulties of cross-cultural analysis. What if the cinematic practices in Africa and North America are so different that we cannot properly speak of a trans-cultural medium of film in general? Complicating things further is the fact that cinema itself has been crucial in the formation of the concept of race, the nation state, and Africa.