This year is the 30th anniversary of the release of one of the most interesting movies of the 1970s. It was made in the same year as The Exorcist. It hit the screens within months of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Terrence Malick's Badlands, each of which is cherished by cinephiles. It is better than any of these, yet it has almost never been shown in British cinemas and only specialists are likely to have heard of it.
It is not a difficult film. Like Bonnie and Clyde, it is a story about young people on the run. Nor is it overly serious. Like Jean Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle, it is playful and beautifully inventive. The reason it is not well known is simply that it and its director are African.
In the 1970s, while Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin and Bogdanovich were storming the citadel of Hollywood, thousands of miles away from the coke parties and swimming pools of Los Angeles, an equally vibrant film culture was blossoming in Dakar, Senegal. Striking films made by passionate and complex directors were released in such rapid succession that it was hard to keep up, yet nearly 40 years after black Africans started making films about themselves, few in the west have even the most basic co-ordinates with which to plot this Senegalese wave of talent.
For the first 60 years of its history, African cinema consisted largely of western filmmakers setting their Tarzan movies there, or films like The African Queen which were told from the point of view of a white missionary. No significant black African directors emerged. In 1935, the Misr studio in Cairo became the first of its kind in the Arab-African world and, as a result, an industry developed in Egypt, which has remained the continent's biggest film producer. Its output comprised mostly comedies and musicals but Kamal Selim's The Will (1939) was the first to bring some kind of social realism to the screen.
When true indigenous forms of cinema began to emerge it was, again, the Arab north of the continent which led the way. The Egyptian Youssef Chahine produced the seminal Cairo Station in 1958, which mixed melodrama, tragedy and scenes of a women's campaign against marriage. Its style was as bold as that of the American director Nicholas Ray.
In 1966, the first black African feature was made, in Dakar. The director was a former Citro?n factory worker and novelist, Ousmane Semb?ne, who had studied filmmaking in Moscow. The film was Black Girl, about the housemaid of a white French family who commits suicide. Semb?ne used an interior monologue to let us hear her thoughts and had that monologue spoken by a different actress, the first of many experimental techniques used in African cinema in the next two decades.
Semb?ne became the father of black African cinema and, sustained in part by subsidies from the French government, Dakar became its mini-LA. While Francophone Africa would produce a series of master directors in the years to come, Anglophone Africa produced none.
Again in Dakar, the next great director to make his name was Djibril Diop Mambety who, aged 28, made Touki Bouki, the film whose 30-year anniversary is now so conspicuous by its absence. The title means "Journey of the Hyenas" in the local language of Wolof, and throughout his career Mambety used hyenas to symbolise the viciousness of human beings. This caustic road movie was Africa's Easy Rider and is the continent's first modernist film. It would be 20 years before Mambety made his next feature. Called simply Hyenas, it was another masterpiece.
Meanwhile, in Mali, Souleymane Ciss? released Baara (1978) and The Wind (1982). Like Semb?ne, Ciss? studied in Moscow. His work at this time was less fable-like than Semb?ne's but, as in Baara ("the world of labour"), he captures the richness of African city life. In Ethiopia, the UCLA-trained Haile Gerima directed Harvest 3,000 Years in 1975, a brilliant, slow-moving portrait of farming life, shot rigorously with long lenses. One character dreams of a place "where there are no flies and no Europeans."
Where American cinema started to take a nosedive in the 1980s, Africa underwent a golden age. A film festival at Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, to the south of Mali, became its showcase. When Gaston Kabor? made Wend Kuuni there in 1982, the continent had another landmark. This story about a mute child adopted by a whole village had echoes of films by Truffaut and Herzog, but its theme of pre-colonial solidarity made it more powerful than either.
The 1990s continued to produce outstanding films. Dani Kouyat?'s Keita, The Legend of the Griot (Burkina Faso, 1995) was the best of many films about African oral traditions, and as recently as last year, Abderrahmane Sissako's Waiting for Happiness, made in Senegal's northern neighbour of Mauritania, gave anything made in the west a run for its money. The modernity of African cinema is not at all alien to us in the west. But it is our great loss that British film magazines, television and radio programmes, books and festivals do nothing to explore the cinematic landscape of western Francophone Africa-to take just this area-and have done nothing to mark 30 years of Touki Bouki.
