Professor’s research could affect teaching and study of film history

Assistant professor of film studies Aboubakar Sanogo’s research on African documentaries may affect the teaching and study of film history as it is known today.

Sanogo had been studying documentary films for years, but never heard mention of African documentary films in his classes. As a native of Burkina Faso, Sanogo knew these films existed in Africa and Europe and set out to find them.

Living and studying in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California at the time, he used Paris as his research base which allowed him to do original archival work. “This convinced me that for the rest of my life the archives will be a huge part of me,” says Sanogo.

His research led him to the discovery of the work of the Lumiere brothers who made about 100 non-fiction films in Africa. “They were doing much more than filming what they saw in front of them,” says Sanogo. “Many of the shots were set up.”

The professor says that through studying the pioneering work of the brothers who can be considered the first auteurs in the history of cinema, he was able to find that African cinema began, not in the 1960s as is commonly held in history books, but in the late 1890s, with the birth of the medium itself. This, he adds, completely changes African film history and world film history in general. Sanogo intends on pursuing this further because the Lumiere were not the only filmmakers involved in Africa in the early days of cinema.

This great film discovery, Sanogo points out, is also problematic. Because many of the shots were set up, they were not accurate depictions of African culture and helped contribute to the erroneous images of Africa that would stay with the world until today.

This goes hand in hand with Sanogo’s research on colonial cinema in Africa. Film was used to influence Africans into believing colonialism was good for them, but these films stopped being shown with the end of colonialism. “There are thousands of films which do not exist in the history of cinema because of the messages they contain,” says Sanogo. “They went right to the archives.” He aims to dig through the archives once again to reveal many of these films. He adds however that “the aim is not to rehabilitate colonial cinema, which may belong in the archives after all, but instead to tease out of these films elements for a more comprehensive history of cinema in Africa and in the world more generally.”

Along with continuing this research, Sanogo will carry on with teaching in the winter term, including a first year seminar class exploring cinema and human rights. He spent the first term studying issues such as slavery, abortion, and the Holocaust with his students and will spend the second semester examining human rights issues in film itself.