Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1998)

communal practices that help us see how this society functions. Many of the ritual practices depicted in the film are shown in real time, deliberately disregarding traditional Western film conventions which generally abbreviate these types of cultural practices so that the audience just gets the “flavor” of the scene. Faye deliberately uses the natural pacing of events to illustrate the complexities and nuances of the characters lives and actions. FESPACO is: The libation ceremony at the Filmmakers' Plaza. Ousmane Sembene, our grandfather of African cinema, leads the ceremony with glee. I watch from the sidelines. There are so many great filmmakers present, I'm in awe and I don't know if I should join in. After all, FESPACO is an African thang, and I have learned not to assume anything. Sembene starts a ring dance around the Plaza. He smiles at me. I smile back. He winks and motions me to join. I do. The sun beats down on my face, but I'm not sure if the warmth I'm feeling is from the sun or the ecstasy of the moment. It is both. I smile and truly bask in the power and beauty that is Pan-African cinema. Female nudity and issues around sex are openly depicted in the film. Although there was discussion among some of my American colleagues as to whether the nude scenes were gratuitous or not, I think they were not and flowed with the natural rhythms that Faye established within the pacing of the film. Although we as the audience desperately want Mossane and her chosen lover to escape, Faye does not quite let this happen. I wanted Mossane to leave her village much sooner than she did, but Faye's choice of delaying Mossane's departure is a much more complex choice, reflecting the reality and not the fiction of such a situation. By forcing the audience to accept the tragedy of Mossane, Faye forces audiences to look at the real situation of young women in contemporary African societies. Zeinabu irene Davis is an independent filmmaker and associate professor in the Department of Radio-TV Film at Northwestern University. Email: z-davis@nwu.edu Excerpt reprinted with permission from Black Camera, the newsletter of The Black Film Center /Archive and Zeinabu irene Davis. I 6 @ ANGLES Chronic by Jennifer Reeves Ann Arbor Film Festival BY JULIE SUBRIN : n 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival established itself as the first venue, outside of New York City art circles, for 16mm independent and experimental films to make their way to the public. The festival quickly gained a reputation for showing outrageous and non-conventional work to its unruly fans. Today, as "independent film" gains popularity with festivals across the country and films such as The English Patient are hailed as independent blockbusters, it is important to pay attention to differences within this broad category of "independent film," and, in particular, to question if and how a given "independent film" poses a challenge to the dominant narratives of mainstream film and other media. These questions were on my mind as I took in the 35th Ann Arbor Film Festival. There are two types of film which I have come to associate with the festival (though of course many films in the festival fit neither category): wacky, abstract, bewildering "experimentals," and well-meaning, socially concerned documentaries. While these two Ann Arbor staples may appear to be quite dissimilar, they do have one thing in common. Each offers a clear alternative to commercial uses of cinema. Those who make abstract experimentals are refusing film's established function as a story-telling medium, while the documentary filmmakers, prioritizing film content over form, try to bring to the screen issues ignored or suppressed by the mainstream media. But there is a third alternative to commercial film which seems to be gaining prominence at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, namely, the “experimental narrative." Like documentaries, experimental narratives use narrative structure in telling their story, but then poke holes in the very order they've created. They ask viewers to wrestle with rather than ignore (like non-narrative experimentals) or absorb (like non-experimental documentaries) the seemingly seamless cinematic world we know. In this article I will take a closer look at films from the 1997 festival and examine the relationship of these three kinds of independent film to conventional cinema. The Ann Arbor Film Festival has long been associated with the type of film which was flourishing in the 1960's avant