Africa: The role of music in African cinema · Global Voices
Ndesanjo Macha

Beatriz Leal Riesco explores the role of music in African cinema: “Since the early days of African cinema, music has formed part of a (self) conscious discourse concerning the problematic realities of Africa.  Its use has rarely been gratuitous and goes far beyond the traditional—and much less experimental—Western customs of dramatic punctuation, of evocation of place, of establishing an emotional relationship with the spectator in which the image is almost always predominant, or as accompaniment to the never-ceasing rush of action that hardly leaves one time to think…”