Amy Sall: The African Gaze

Accompanying our book launch event to mark the release of author, editor, archivist, and researcher Amy Sall’s The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power––an exhaustive survey of postcolonial still photography and cinema work from Africa featuring almost 300 photographs and interviews with key figures of the last 60+ years of image-making on the continent, including Malian director Souleymane Cissé––a one-night-only screenings series with films by Med Hondo and Djibril Diop Mambéty, both of whose work Sall gives extensive attention in her remarkable, ambitious, and eminently readable tome. Following the screening of Sarraounia, a book launch event for The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power will take place in the Metrograph Lobby with books for sale and Sall in attendance to sign copies.

“Med Hondo’s Sarraounia and Djibril Diop Mambéty’s two shorts screening here—Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun—exemplify the social breadth, storytelling heft, and enduring teachings of African cinema. This trio of screenings form a transtemporal constellation of continental history which speak to present realities. Hondo and Mambéty’s films convey a range of African political resistance and reflect a stunning stylistic multiplicity.” —Amy Sall