Vivian Bickford-Smith and Richard Mendelson (eds), Black and White in Colour: African history on screen. Oxford: James Currey (£14.95 – 978 1 84701 522 8). 2007, 384 pp.

This intelligent and informative collection of essays brings together a group of leading historians (mostly, but not exclusively, South African) in order to discuss the cinematic representation of Africa in a range of films by both African and Western directors. In their introduction, the editors identify four ways in which the contributions to the volume explore the relationship between film and history; the extent to which films can be classified as ‘attempted filmic histories’; the status of films as forms of historical ‘evidence’; the role of films in shaping public opinion about the past; the manner in which films promote reflection on the nature and purpose of historical knowledge. The chapters vary quite widely in their treatment of these questions, partly in response to the films under discussion in individual contributions, but also to mark the very different approaches adopted by various authors. The collection is particularly strong on the first two research questions identified by the editors. As one might expect from a book on film by a group of historians, all of the contributions carefully trace the ways in which films adapt, modify, manipulate or in certain cases betray their historical sources in the creation of a fictional cinematic narrative. From Mahir Saul's opening chapter on the desire for an ‘authentic’ African past, liberated from the effects of (post)colonial modernity in Gaston Kaboré’s films, through to Nigel Penn's on the romanticization of white settler culture in Africa in Out of Africa, the volume is replete with the type of historical information/knowledge that often escapes the unsuspecting film critic. As one such unsuspecting film critic, I very much welcome the attention to historical/anthropological detail in, for example, the chapter by Robert Baum on Ousmane Sembene's historical films, Emitaï and Ceddo, which reveals the approximations and errors in the Senegalese director's representation of various ethnic groups and historical periods.

The collection is less sure-footed in the way it deals with the two research questions that require a specific engagement with film as film. For instance, the level of cinematic analysis in Baum's chapter, cited above, is very disappointing: to describe the ‘flash-forward’ to an imagined African Catholic celebration in Ceddo as ‘an unnecessary distraction’ is to fail to engage sufficiently with the film's aesthetic and intellectual agenda. A similar lack of engagement with issues of form, genre and aesthetic mark the chapters on Breaker Morant, Chocolat and Hotel Rwanda, amongst others: these chapters underline important historical issues but they have little to say about film as a medium for expressing such issues. However, many of the chapters are interested in exploring the explicitly cinematic nature of the works they are examining, and these are to my mind the most successful contributions to the volume. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these chapters are particularly strong on the evolving contexts determining the production and subsequent reception of a film in different locations and different periods: for Ralph Austen, the films Yeelen and Keïta, l'héritage du griot provide a striking illustration of the importance of understanding the conditions governing the construction of an imagined past; Robert Harms provides a fascinating discussion of various representations of the Atlantic slave trade; analysing the experimental film Proteus, Nigel Worden addresses the ways in which films can ask probing questions about the construction of historical memory; Carolyn Hamilton and Litheko Modisane intelligently trace the production and reception contexts of Zulu and Zulu Dawn; finally, David Moore's chapter on Lumumba is exemplary in its analysis of other fictional, as well as historical, representations of the period in question, underlining the possibility and the limitations of different ways of imagining this history. These contributions are the best illustrations of the book's inherently interdisciplinary project: for interdisciplinarity is a process that entails a willingness to learn from the expertise and the intellectual frameworks of others, not one that simply involves telling another discipline what it gets wrong. The editors’ decision to invite only historians to contribute to the volume might give the impression that analysis of the cinematic treatment of history is best left to historians, but the most significant contributions clearly reveal that our understanding of historical films is best enhanced when cinema is given equal billing to history.