African film vs. American film

20 July 2012

Post by Lara (diagram by Kevin)

One of our host family’s favorite pastimes is to gather around the 10-inch screen of their electronic DVD player (with anywhere from 6-10 people occupying the small living room) and settle in with an African film or two before going to bed.  The films we watch tend to be Sierra Leonean, Nigerian, and Ghanaian.  On the surface, they aren’t unlike American films—they have romance, love triangles (and octagons, sometimes), revenge, family feuds, friendships, births, deaths, etc.  I certainly cannot say I’ve done a detailed enough study of these films to give any sweeping descriptions of the overarching themes and elements of each genre, but there are some things we’ve noticed about the African films we’ve seen that stand out.

As opposed to the neatly packaged “crisis-climax-dénouement” model that we were taught in our American high school English classes and that nearly every mainstream film that we’ve seen tends to follow, the African films we’ve watched tend to cycle through crises and climaxes every 5-10 minutes, and even introduce new characters with their own plotlines well past the halfway point of the film.  As a matter of fact, the physical timeline of these films seems widely arbitrary.  Most of them are split into 2 parts, and the films tend to end somewhere between 1 and 2 hours in, whether the conflict is resolved or not.  Kevin used his mad skills to draw up a general plot diagram of American vs. African films here:

Another interesting feature in many of these films is the soundtrack.  We’ve noticed a certain minor chord played on the synthesizer that we’ve heard in every single film so far, to denote suspense and/or surprise. For most other parts of a film, an upbeat sounding tune is played in the background, even when two characters are fighting (we’ve been told that music is omnipresent in Africa, and our experience so far certainly supports that observation).  One film we watched was a musical and made extensive use of Kanye West-style auto-tuning while the characters sang about their hardships.  We’ve also heard Phil Collins and Boyz II Men (“They read you Cinderella, You hoped it would come true, and one day your Prince Charming would come rescue you…” you can bet I was singing along to that one with our 16 year old host brother!) 

Kevin pointed out as we were talking through the differences in the films we grew up with and the African films we’ve watched since we arrived here is that they much more closely resemble soap operas, and I think that is a solid point. A lot of these films tend to end abruptly without tying up all of the loose ends, which one can certainly argue is more reflective of real life than those that wrap up neatly inside a 90-minute plotline. The films can be very interesting to say the least, and I’m sure they offer plenty of insight into some of the cultural differences we are coming face-to-face with during our time in Salone.  We may update this post in the future, but for now it sums up our thoughts pretty well.