Aristotle's Plot

What is historical African cinema? And what kind of cinema is in Africa, for African audiences? During the period of colonial domination, the Pierre Laval Decree of 1934 forbade filming in the colonies without the express authorization of that territory’s lieutenant governor and deprived Africans from filming themselves for nearly thirty years. Instead, African audiences watched newsreels, propaganda films and Hollywood productions, which have continued to be widely distributed on the African continent. In countries where cinema has been controlled, censored and even denied to local populations, and where self-representations at the cinema have been made by others, Jean-Pierre Bekolo asks us about the political sense of making and broadcasting films in Africa today. He explores these questions through an aesthetic mise en abîme: a group of hooligans who are fans of Hollywood films reenact the gestures and words of Van Damme and Bruce Lee, clashing with a filmmaker we imagine to be the director’s alter ego, who has just returned to his homeland with a mission to defend African cinema at all costs.