Lucia Saks

My research is in cinema studies, in specific South Africa/African cinema and media studies. I hesitate to append this label as my intention is not to produce another national cinema/media study, but examine what it means to home-grow a cinema/media in the South, given the overwhelming predominance of the Global North in production, exhibition, distribution and pedagogy. For this workshop, I wish to concentrate on the pedagogical and discuss what is at stake in producing an African archive of the moving image. Through digitization, the archival materials reach global publics, triangulating between the global north and the diverse parts of the global South. The archive could challenge film scholarship’s dependency on recalcitrant methodologies that frame African cinemas in avant-garde/Third Cinema formulae by producing a significant website, a Southern platform for scholarly networks and so on. This is the lens through which I would engage the theme of the workshop.