Gaze Regimes. Tsitsi Dangarembga

in this field who speak vividly of reconfiguring their positions as cultural practitioners.

      Given that gender is a relational social construct, framing proper femininity as well as proper masculinity by Othering alternative gender performances, we recognise that gender relations experienced by practitioners in film are not a matter to be addressed (or challenged) by women only; there are also (male) scholars and practitioners, such as Annas and Wa Munga, who are interested in how to subvert and change dominant gender hierarchies in societies in general and in cultural productions specifically, particularly cultural productions which inform hegemonic and alternative ways of seeing gender.

      Women making films have historically always been on the margins. African women making films are a doubly over-determined marginality. How should one approach this subject matter, which requires considered deliberation not simply as a matter of historical redress, but which begs a political (re)positioning on its own terms? Similar but different in its vision and agenda, Djo Tunda wa Munga and Rumbi Katedza, in a highly charged conversation, express the differences and similarities in their experiences of making films as a vehicle for healing. The traumatic histories of their respective countries, the DRC and Zimbabwe, offer a backdrop for what, in part, informs their film projects. Each sees art and the film medium as a means for holding a mirror up to the societies they come from. In this interview both film practitioners regard film as a means to educate and conscientise and as a tool to create a site for socio-political change in their countries. And even though their agendas might be similar, the fact that Katedza is a woman means that her access and experiences are markedly different from those of Wa Munga.

      Visual artist and photographer, Zanele Muholi, makes films that have a strong aesthetic awareness of violence as a landscape on which to offer her socio-political and historical commentary. Antje Schuhmann’s analysis of Muholi’s work not only serves as a site that confronts violence against women and the politics of Othering in an either hetero-normative or (post-)colonial context, but is augmented through autobiographical reflection and activism. Schuhmann is able to bring to the fore the significance of film as a creative, artistic practice which intervenes in dominant memory politics and national identity projects. Collective trauma is a subtext in Schuhmann’s discussion of Muholi’s visual activism and its forms of archiving, documenting, giving voice and claiming voice, of making visible the invisible; a reading of Muholi’s mixed media work is situated in a psychoanalytically informed cultural analysis. Navigating topographies of violence leads to the question of how to ‘heal’ an imperial, hetero-normative gaze and how to correct or subvert hegemonic gaze regimes. The role of film as artistic expression, coupled with visual activism, is an addition to the conditions of production informing the multi-layered possibilities of how and why women on the African continent make films. While Muholi is unambiguous in her commitment to an art practice, she expresses the need for didactism: her artistic practice is about educating an audience and creating a space for black lesbian women to be recognised and centred in a contemporary democratic South Africa.

      In the case study of Fanta Régina Nacro’s Puk Nini (1995) a sample audience reveals some of the competing factors at play in what is considered desirable (or plausible) for different markets and/or audiences. What is apparent from the conversation held at a roundtable in Johannesburg, South Africa is that audiences in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, responded to the same film in a different context (South Africa) in a way that was notably distinct. Perceptions differ not only due to locality, but also due to age; African societies are made up of young people navigating the tensions between innovation and tradition. The perceptions of gender relations vary from place to place and from one generation to the next, while the lived realities of hegemonic understandings of masculinity and femininity at the intersection of class and race often seem relatively similar but differ in rural and urban contexts. These differences are constructive in that they are opportunities for addressing similarities and differences in the issues raised: gender relations, the representation of women and men and issues that emerge through discourses on culture.

      Discourses on the female body politics, mobilised for the purposes of national culture and nation state formation, is reflected in Nobunye Levin’s chapter ‘I am Saartjie Baartman’. In her chapter she considers the significance of the repatriation of the body of Sarah Baartman (otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus) in forging a post-apartheid South African identity. Levin provides a close reading of the historically ascribed white European male gaze on Baartman’s black female body. The place of male narrators in Baartman’s history, defined in the documentaries of Swazi-born filmmaker Zola Maseko, is another position from which she considers dominant discourses of this historical figure. It is at this point that she shifts from her analytical position to her role as a filmmaker. Her strategy for countering and challenging these male narratives that have been in the service of empirical or nationalist discourses is to reclaim the personal in Baartman’s history. In her film I am Saartjie Baartman (2009), Levin describes her creative and narrative choices: to return to personal and intimate experiences of Baartman as a woman and to explore her loves and losses. As a filmmaker, Levin is aware of the recurrent cinematic representation of women’s bodies as symbolic of the nation state, and her insistence on reclaiming the space of the private is a political strategy to subvert official and prevalent histories that have been codified through predominantly male representations.

      Making films might be considered an artistic practice but it is also a business endeavour; films are also a commodity. In addition, films can be used as instruments to educate and/or as a mode of activism. For women on the African continent it is also a potential site for labour and economic empowerment. It is a vehicle through which to render histories and experiences visible. It is also a cultural product which travels – it crosses borders – and in this movement new meanings are produced. ‘Africa’ is no more a homogenous continent than ‘woman’ is a single universal category. The experiences of regional and geographical loci are inflected by gender, by class, by sexual orientation, by ethnic positioning, by rural or urban contexts, not to mention specific national histories of pre-colonial formations, slavery, colonialism, apartheid, liberation struggles and current conditions of post-coloniality. Logically, the question ‘What does it mean for women to be involved in cultural production in film in Africa?’ can only produce more questions. Given the differences amongst women, what are the intersections or similarities in the ways in which they experience their cultural practice? What are the coping mechanisms which they might share? What are the specifics? What are the challenges and chances of succeeding as women film practitioners on the African continent?

      Women who work in film as cultural practitioners are not only filmmakers. They are also businesswomen and entrepreneurs, curators and cultural critics. They are writers or producers. Some of these women’s voices are collected in this book.

      The chapters on production and curatorial practices reposition women’s film and filmmaking from the margin to a more visible, prominent position and allow these voices to be heard, at times even in their disharmony.

      The film practitioners, also as producers and directors and interview subjects, reflect a multi-faceted understanding of gender relations, gendered inequalities and political agency – either as individual or collective and at times both. This agency may be claimed in the name of feminism or not. In Jyoti Mistry’s contribution, ‘Filmmaking at the Margins of a Community’, a number of competing understandings of agency emerge. In the course of her role as co-producer of Elelwani (Ntshavheni wa Luruli, 2012), the tensions between the narrative world of the film and the real-world experience of the rural women participating in its production becomes starkly evident. She analyses the experiences of agency for the women in the local Venda community as a split experience, as double consciousness: women at once the subjects of a sovereign and citizens in a South African democratic state. For some women filmmakers the identification with feminist theory and practice is political in various enabling ways; it connects their filmmaking practice with socio-political change. While on the one hand they acknowledge their agency, as in the case of Jihan El-Tahri’s interview, they also recognise their marginality in the broader hegemonic, patriarchal sense in the ‘business’ of filmmaking, as expressed in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s ‘A Manifesto’.

      The inclusion of conversations and reflections by Shannon Walsh and Arya Lalloo on their collaborative filmmaking project Jeppe on a Friday