This paper considers the impact of online distribution on the long-term availability and preservation of African cinema. It examines the case of M-Net's African Film Library (AFL), a video on demand library of classic African films that was launched in 2012, but taken offline by 2013. The paper argues that this short-lived project represents a pivotal moment in the way we think about African film archiving and distribution, in which new technologies and consequently disintermediated business models promised to facilitate the circulation of African films in a manner that was socially beneficial, but which in reality resulted in monopolistic control of the content that presented a serious threat to its long-term preservation. The paper goes on to argue that the AFL case encapsulates the entire discourse surrounding the shift to online distribution, in which a 'cybertopian' narrative of a disintermediated and thus democratized film culture quickly gives way to a reality in which content is more tightly controlled by an increasingly narrow and powerful set of private stakeholders, ultimately threatening the preservation of any content that is vulnerable to the shifting demands of the market.
This paper proposes an ethnomusicological approach to Djibril Diop Mambéty's films, as a means of reading their diverse musical soundscapes. Paying particular attention to Touki Bouki (1974), it demonstrates how, in this film, the approach delineates what may be seen as a reclamation of Josephine Baker -an international figure who has been objectified for her race and gender -resituating her within a wider global African cultural heritage.At the beginning of Djibril Diop Mambéty's first film, the 21-minute Contras City (1969), we find an early example of the director's interest in the manipulation of music as a means of generating culturally significant meaning. Initiating a scathing critique of neo-colonialism in Senegal, the film imposes a recording of Handel over a downward tracking shot of Dakar's city hall, over which we hear an anonymous female voice proclaim 'Oh my sweet France'. A male voice swiftly retorts -'Your sweet France apparently can't stand the sun…this is Dakar sweetie'. At this point the music 'windsdown', slowing and gradually lowering in pitch, as if it were playing on a gramophone to which the power had been cut. The electronic failure represents the wider failure of Europe's colonial legacy in Africa, where the initial hope offered in upbeat European classical music is interrupted by the reality of contemporary Senegal. With this manipulation of musical sound, Mambéty establishes the vital importance of music within his work, from the outset invoking the wide-ranging functions of music as a
A venerable form of petitionary prayer, the litany emerged as a key aural expression of Counter-Reformation Catholicism around the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly in the confessionally contested borderlands of the Holy Roman Empire. Its explicit projection of the dogma of sanctoral intercession, rejected soundly by Protestant theologians, helped to make the litany a flashpoint for religious controversy. Especially in the duchy of Bavaria, the northern bastion of the Counter-Reformation, the litany flourished in a wide variety of monophonic and polyphonic forms that reflected its fluid position on a spectrum between oral and written traditions. This essay explores the usage and significance of the litany in Counter-Reformation Germany, focusing especially upon the Thesaurus litaniarum (Treasury of Litanies, 1596) by Georg Victorinus, music director of the Munich Jesuits. Intimately connected with currents of Catholic reform in German-speaking lands, this great anthology illustrates the varied and creative ways in which composers responded to the litany’s distinctive ebb and flow of titles and petitions to holy intercessors.
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