Cinematographic Thinking Essay

Cinematographic thinking starts at the iconic stage, but is by no means the totality or the fullness of it all. Pearce’s categorization of signs defined the iconic stage as that of perceived resemblance. Though Bazin would go to extremes to qualify cinema as a medium in which there is perfect and exact corellation between what is represented and its representation in film, it is important to note that every medium is characterized by some level of abstraction. Cinematrographic specificity should be considered as the zero point of interpretation. From the conception of the idea right to its eventual realization, there is a lot of transformation and difference. Cinema, in itself, as Ehrat reminds us, is a very difficult bedfellow for any non-dynamic understanding of cognition (2007, 137). To form meaning in cinema, there is need for the constant and endless mixing of vagueness and clarity. Iconicity gives anchorage and clarity, but then must be open to the free play of the imagination. Iconicity is the element of

This has made epics our natural choice. Apart from Mambety’s Touki Bouki chosen because of the quality in style and the novelty of the cinematographic techniques it brings to West African cinema, all the rest of the films in our sample are epics. That genre of film has been chosen because of their manifestly expressive cultural charater that could be crucial in arguing out, theorizing and defining the peculiarities of West African cinema. According to John Akomfrah, emphasizing and defining the specificity of cinema in Africa is crucial as a take off point (Givanni 2004). Manthia Diawara is of the opinion that regional affinities in a context like West Africa with common cultural traits, could be strong arguments for studying region cinema instead of the pan-African approach