Calao or the Bird of Prey: Western Versus African Views of Africa Through Film
Kandioura Dramé, French
2003 TTI Fellow
Africa still bears the burden of the stereotyped images in the West of the dark continent. Undergraduates at UVA generally have very little, if any exposure to the rich world of Africa and frequently unconsciously hold ancient stereotypes and biases about this vast and diverse place. My course entitled Africa in Cinema brings into focus these perceptions and allows students to knowledgeably question and confront them through the lens of the African, American and Western European filmmakers' focus on Africa. To do this effectively, the instructor and the students must be able to seamlessly manipulate a large quantity of annotated film in small segments for the purposes of learning how the director has used camera, actors, scene sets, and other features to both directly and subtly send messages about the nature of Africa and its peoples. To that end, by means of the support provided by a Teaching + Technology Initiative fellowship, my project entitled Calao or the Bird of Prey: Western Versus African Views of Africa Through Film, will produce a flexible, searchable database of African film. Through providing a database which marks film segments from the DVD and connects them to their associated annotations, the instructor and students will be able to randomly access scenes from films for the purposes of comparison. The ability to dynamically define time segments related to an external digital media will allow instructors and students to go further and deeper in their explorations than they would through use of conventional analog media.