Sight & Sound. 02/07.

African cinema, writes Mark Cousins in the new issue of Sight & Sound aligned toward the African On Screen season running in London from mid-February through mid-March, boasts "filmmakers as significant as Martin Scorsese, as discrepant as Orson Welles; imagery as mythic as that of Sergei Paradjanov or Nicolas Roeg; life stories with the amplitude of Francis Ford Coppola's. These are films from a continent three times the size of the US, with more than 50 countries, over 1,000 languages, and nearly 300 filmmakers in the Francophone territories alone. Many of us know something about Ousmane Sembène or Djibril Diop Mambéty, but their films don't become obsessions, something we rave about when drunk, or need to own, or show to lovers, or give to friends." Naturally, he argues that they should.

"Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako examines the ways globalisation has contributed to a process of effectively recolonising Africa through the snares of western financial institutions," writes N Frank Ukadike of a film that "exemplifies a number of trends in contemporary African cinema. What might be described as the new pan-African aesthetic interweaves melodrama, politics, ideology, satire and comedy - and Sissako draws on all these conventions to produce a film that not only instructs but entertains."

Also online:

• Linda Ruth Williams meets Paul Verhoeven for a long talk about Black Book.

• "The Magus has become one of the few forgotten films of a decade so fecund with invention and brilliance that even its disasters... have spawned dedicated followers," writes Tim Lucas. Now that it's reappeared on DVD, he finds "it's neither as bad as remembered nor as good as it had the potential to be."

• Into Great Silence, writes Catherine Wheatley, "is as much an essay on the experience of time as an exposé of the ecclesiastical life."

• Michael Brooke on The Lives of the Saints, a debut "as wildly self-indulgent, tonally choppy and floridly scripted as anything in [Ken Russell's] oeuvre."

Posted by dwhudson at January 19, 2007 7:41 AM