An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Innocent Ebere Uwah (Combe Trust Fellow, 2024)
Cinema, Ethics and Society: Poetics and Politics of Creativity on Screen Representation of Africa
Ideology is a narrative value. It is also the locus of contestations in stories that connect cinema and society. Among other things, it reveals the position of creative arts on ontological issues pertaining to cinema and politics. Africa, overtime, has been constituted into a harbinger of narrative oddities where ideology, albeit sequestered, is a vivifying oxygen in pushing politics. The thrust of this paper is to look at narratives about Africa beginning with films of Western origin to those of Nigeria’s Nollywood and unveil the nature of ideological politics in their aesthetics. In doing this, the framework of ethics is somewhat employed as an instrument of evaluation based on Malone’s concept of cinema as a possible moral compass. Using key film texts from different cultures, I argue that political ideology underlies most representations of Africa which has ethical implications. I contest that such representations significantly falsify social realities by ideologically politicizing their narratives. On this note, a nuanced notion of politics is evolved in the context of this discourse by means of critical analysis of selected mise-en-scenes while ethical reasons for censorship of monological and mendacious materials are foregrounded.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81857401179
Passcode: 6aSe7GF7