Reel Resistance - The Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
MELISSA THACKWAY is a lecturer, independent researcher and translator. She currently teaches African Cinema at Sciences-Po Paris and at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO). She has published widely on film and representationin Africa and the diaspora. JEAN-MARIE TENO is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker from Cameroon, whose award-winning works have screened in major festivals and are studied in universities around the world. Turning his sharp critical eye to the politics and social issues of the African continent, his dozen documentary films and feature-length fiction often examine the past to better untangle and understand the complex realities of Africa's postcolonial present.Reel Resistance is an exceptionally fruitful and reciprocally beneficial meeting of minds, a critical and aesthetic dialogue which is singular in tone; one in which the artist and his oeuvre continue to exist, fully and clearly, in themselves, rather that serving as pretexts and prime materials for scholarly investigation and performance of knowledge. Thackway's generous stance and critical analysis heightens the reader's grasp of the place and value of Teno's cinema in the international cultural arena, whilst Teno's bold and brilliant understanding of history and politics makes this work a must for readers, be they scholars or the general public. Reel Resistance is a treasure trove for understanding how the colonial past impacts the cultural present and future, in film and society, eliciting a wealth of creative resistance.
AFRICINE
The book makes an important contribution to the research of film history and the decolonization of Southern Africa.
MEDIENwissenschaft
The scope of their [Thackway and Teno's] exchange is extensive, while also focusing on specific aspects of image, sound, and the conceptualization of history. The tone is candid, with the kind of comfort and frankness that can exist between close intellectual friends.
African Studies Review
There are few monographs on an African filmmaker and even less on a documentary filmmaker, which is fundamentally what Jean-Marie Teno is apart from his only feature film, Clando. This more widely illustrated book therefore deserves to be a milestone. It is all the more so as it is fascinating from start to finish, summoning both the deep erudition of the academic Melissa Thackway in the first part and in the second the detailed answers provided by the filmmaker on his journey, its aspirations and its choices. It is through him a history of African cinema is being written, so much has his commitment never wavered.
Africultures
[I]t is a prime exemplar of solid scholarly research, a bona fide auteur study, not another eclectic digest or mishmash of festivalistic chatter and drawing-room speculations on African film and culture. [...] Reel Resistance is a timely addition to the growing body of critical studies of African filmmakers published over the last three decades.
Framework The Journal of Cinema and Media
This book is testimony to the long-standing collaborative relationship between Melissa Thackway and Jean-Marie Teno, as well as revealing a tremendous relationship even between Teno and the consistency of the message process of his cinema. The mutual assemblage of an incredibly unique text by a stellar scholar and remarkable filmmaker of global repute is a sufficiently complete book of history on documentary filmmaking on the continent. In addition, it equally shows how much further the scholarship and intellectual knowledge productions of African filmmaking can travel.
- African Studies Quarterly,