Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to lay bare the diversity and essence of African cinema discourse. It is an anthology of historical reflections, critical essays, and interviews by film critics, historians, theorists, and filmmakers that signifies a dialogue and engagement apropos the ideology and cultural politics of film production in Africa. The contributors are extremely concerned, not only with the history of African cinema, but with its future and its potential. This book, then, is not limited to the expansion of the discourse on African cinema, but tries to approach the definition of the critical canon within the exigencies and manifestations of art and African sociopolitical practices. The authors view these practices as an investment in a cultural imperative stemming from the quest to delineate how critical methodologies are derived from and shape contemporary historical and cultural practices. Hence, the contributions are less about the usual constrictive method of analysis and more about illustrating manifestations of an interrogative critical methodology that is certainly an offspring of an indigenous African critical cum cinematic culture and paradigms.

From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa.
Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties.
Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, "Black African Cinema"'s analysis of key films and issues--the most comprehensive in English--is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.