Contemporary East African Cinema: Emergent Themes and Aesthetics

Abstract

At the turn of the 21st Century, a dynamic and eclectic cinema that had been slowly developing in the East African region gain traction. Yet, the nascent cinematic imaginaries of East Africa have received the least scholarly attention of all the regional cinemas of the African continent. The study explores emergent themes and aesthetics of East African Cinema by locating East African cinema in contemporary African cinema criticism, particularly its indigenous concepts, epistemes and approaches to film analysis. By conceptualising eclectic national cinemas into a complex homogenous entity, I argue that the various national cinemas of East Africa are best understood as a single regional, transnational cinema (at least within East Africa), given the shared socio-political, economic and cultural experiences, and this homogeneity manifests in the representation of parallel themes and aesthetics. I also posit that East African cinema is not a closed static cinema, however, because its aesthetics are influenced by other continental and international cinemas such as Nollywood, Bollywood, Hollywood and European cinema. Despite these influences, the narratives of East African cinema continue to be centrally organised in terms of African oral storytelling aesthetics. To explore the emergent themes and aesthetics in East African cinema, this study employs a range of disciplinary research methods. By combining close textual analysis with interviews with significant East African filmmakers, this thesis examines how the East African filmmakers partake of their presumed role of modern griots to reflect and shape popular discourses. Such discourses include the representation of history in the post-colonial era, power struggles concerning gender, class conflict, and migration to the Western world, all of which are recurrent themes in films across the region.