Africa is a big place, and any collection of the continent’s cinematic output is going to have to be similarly enormous. Luckily, June Givanni’s is absolutely massive. The film curator has been assembling her PanAfrican Cinema Archive since the 1980s, pulling together films, posters, audio, photos, ephemera and memorabilia from across Africa and the diaspora.
The archive contains over 7,000 items, but only a small selection is on display in Raven Raw’s follow up to the brilliant ‘People Make Television’. But even this condensed version is too broad and unapproachable to work as an exhibition. You’d need five times as many rooms as Raven Row can offer to come close to offering a satisfying overview of an entire continent’s cinema, and that’s before we even tackle whether a gallery is the best setting for multiple feature length films.
The most approachable, digestive things on display are the posters. There’s the stark red simplicity of ‘Hot Irons’, the ’90s swagger of ‘Boyz in the Hood’, the monochrome, sombre minimalism of Black Audio Film Collective and heaps of bright colours in all the festival posters.
You’d have to move in for a month to even scratch the surface of what’s on display
But then there are all the films themselves; documentaries about film festivals in Burkina Faso, shorts about young Black militants and the Rastafari movement. It’s all super interesting, and totally absorbing, but can you really manage to get here in time for the start of Felix de Rooy’s 100 minute narrative film ‘Ava and Gabriel: A Love Story'? And if you do, will you then happily stand there for 30 minutes of the documentary about the Images Caraibes film festival? There are musical satires, interviews, works of fiction, works of reality. There’s even a library stocked with books on African cinema and film theory. You’d have to move in for a month to even scratch the surface of what’s on display. Which sounds nice, sure, but I’m not sure they’d actually let you.
‘People Make Television’ worked because it was relatively bite-sized and manageable. But this is too cumbersome and unwieldy. They obviously don’t expect you to stand through a whole 30 minute documentary, so they don’t expect you to watch all of it, which does a bit of a disservice to the whole thing.
The so much great stuff to see here, it’s just impossible to take it in.
