Film Critic

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Article

Boughedir, Férid  

Houda Ben Ghacham

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Tunisian film critic and director, was born in Tunis on 11 March 1944. His father, Taoufik Boughedir, was a journalist, novelist, playwright, and an influential figure in cultural life. Boughedir attended a French secondary school in Tunis and lived in the family home in Halfaouine, an area of old Tunis that was later to provide the name for the director’s first film. He went on to study French literature in Rouen and Paris and wrote two doctoral theses on African and Arabic cinema.

Boughedir first made a name for himself as a film critic, writing for, among others, the journal Jeune Afrique, which was published in Paris and distributed in francophone Africa. In his writing for this, he was an inexhaustible supporter of the cause of African cinema. He was involved in organizing the oldest pan-African film festival, Les Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage, in Tunis which he ...

Article

Gerima, Haile  

Elizabeth Heath

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Haile Gerima was born in Gondar, Ethiopia. As a child, he acted in his father’s troupe, performing across Ethiopia. In 1967 Gerima moved to the United States and two years later enrolled in the University of California at Los Angeles drama school. There he became familiar with the ideas of black American leader Malcolm X and wrote plays about slavery and black militancy. After reading the revolutionary theory of Third Cinema, however, Gerima began to experiment with film. Gerima returned to Ethiopia in 1974 to film Harvest: 3,000 Years his first full length film and the only one of his works to be shot in Africa Although famine and the recent military overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie I placed severe restrictions on the film crew the final result was a sophisticated examination through the story of a village that finally overthrows its feudal landlord of the centuries ...

Article

Knopfli, Rui  

Luis Gonçalves

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Mozambican poet, journalist, and literary and film critic, was born in Inhambane, Mozambique in 1932. His family name, Knopfli, comes from his Swiss great-grandfather. Knopfli’s father was in Mozambique, where he worked for the colonial government, and he married by proxy a Portuguese primary school teacher from the northeast of Portugal whom he had met years before, in Coimbra. She arrived in Mozambique at the end of 1930. In Mozambique, work assignments for both parents meant periods of separation for the couple, and Knopfli divided his time between his parents. He grew up on the school grounds playing with children of all races, while his mother worked in a racially integrated school. Knopfli credits his profoundly antiracism stance to his upbringing.

Early in his life Knopfli started to read politically engaged poetry from local authors who criticized the colonial regime which profoundly influenced him He also read poetry ...

Article

Mitchell, Elvis  

Joshunda Sanders

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

film critic, author, and producer, was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He was one of nine children born to his parents. His father, Lou Mitchell, worked two blue-collar jobs at a laundry and a dairy farm to support the family. Despite the fact that he dropped out for a time, Mitchell graduated from Wayne State University, where he majored in English. While he was in college, he started his career reading his movie reviews on Detroit public radio. But it was his people-savvy that began his career in journalism. He found out where the prominent film critic Pauline Kael was about to conduct a television interview and ended up accompanying her to the interview, thus gaining a powerful mentor who would go on to recommend him for a job at the Detroit Free Press.

He didn t get that job but he went on ...

Article

Vieyra, Paulin  

Elizabeth Heath

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

One of the founding figures in African filmmaking, Paulin Vieyra was responsible for dismantling barriers blocking the birth of film in Africa. Not only famous for these achievements, Vieyra was also influential as a film critic and film historian and did much to promote African cinema abroad.

Vieyra was born in Porto Novo, Benin, where he spent his early childhood. His father, a high-ranking civil servant in the French colonial administration, sent him to school in France at the age of ten. An excellent student, Vieyra was admitted to the University of Paris. When a bout of tuberculosis sent him into the hospital, Vieyra met film school students there who encouraged him to enroll in film school. He was admitted to l’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris and in 1955 became the first African to graduate from the school.

After graduation Vieyra organized the film group Le Groupe Africain ...

Article

Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou  

Samba Gadjigo

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Beninese filmmaker and film critic, was born the oldest of eight children in Porto Novo, Benin (former Dahomey), on 30 January 1925. Vieyra’s great-grandfather, a Muslim Yoruba, was a member of a Bida royal family in Nigeria that was sent to Brazil as slaves. Following the 1835 Muslim slave rebellion in Bahia and emancipation in Brazil, Vieyra’s great-grandfather settled in the former Portuguese slave port of Porto Novo (New Port), which was said to be a tributary of the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo. He brought with him a mulatto wife, the daughter of his former Jewish Portuguese master and a black slave, and the Portuguese last name Vieyra.

Vieyra’s father was a Yoruba railroad administrator. His mother, originally from Sierra Leone, was a merchant. In 1935 they sent Paulin then ten to France to attend boarding school During the war his school was closed Moving from family to ...

Article

White, Armond  

Joshunda Sanders

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

film critic, author, and lecturer with often controversial and contrarian views on film, was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of seven children. He and his siblings grew up during the civil rights era in the northwest part of the city at a time when the neighborhood was predominantly Jewish. His father did a number of jobs, including working at Ford Motor Factory and playing piano, and attempted to own a gas station and a pool hall. White grew up in a family of movie fans, and classic films like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and The Long Hot Summer (1958) piqued his interest in film, along with international films—from Italian directors like Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti—that White could watch on Canadian television, which was available in his Detroit home.

He has said ...