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FREEDOMWAYS
FIRST QUARTER 1972

ing when I arrived and among the coming attractions were The Professionals, The Great Sioux Massacre, Operation Poker and The Brides of Fu Manchu.

The distribution of American films in Africa serves a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, the exportation of American produced films to Africa provides a new relatively untapped market outlet for a rapidly dying domestic industry. Indeed, the low level of literacy combined with the fact that Africans are relatively unaccustomed to the American English dialect has created conditions which make the opening up of the African market a Godsend to the producers of second and third rate films. For due to the low level of literacy few Africans relate to the contents of the movie; African audiences are thus "action oriented." They prefer shootouts, bloody fist fights, wild chases in speeding cars, scenes of mass destruction, flashy clothes, loud singing and jubilant dancing to drama and analysis. Films from India and the Middle East, with belly-dancing, fighting, wild chases and miraculous escapes and with little or no recognizable plot are thus very popular and, in many instances, are preferred to American films. American films of the Flash Gordon, Superman and Tarzan variety are also very popular. American westerns are, needless to say, crowd pleasers while gangster movies also go over big.

On the other hand, the distribution of American films in Africa is simply another aspect of America's strategy of non-military control over the African people. And what is more, the nature and content of American films, when viewed outside the national boundaries of the U.S., reveal the relationship between authoritarian and racist repression at home and imperialist domination abroad. Indeed, it becomes visibly clear that the objective of bourgeois cultural propaganda both at home and abroad is to convince both the rulers and the ruled, the exploiters as well as the exploited that the present state of affairs is natural and just; that whether in the ghettos of the U.S., the slums of the Arab Medina, the Casbas of India or the rain forest of Africa, one defies the authority, breaks the laws and disrupts the order of the white American ruling class at his own peril. Thus in Africa as in the U.S., the police always catch and/or kill their man; the cowboys always defeat the Indians and in war films, English and American soldiers become invincible. And as if to illustrate to what extreme American imperialism will go to make its point, I recall seeing (and photographing) a movie poster in Ghana which showed a white Tarzan with his feet placed squarely upon the back of a shining black native who was sprawled out on his stomach after having been ren-

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