Jacqueline Maingard

I am a graduate of both the Arts and Social Sciences, and completed a PhD on anti-apartheid documentary film at Wits University in 1998. I was a founding member of the Film and Allied Workers Organisation (FAWO) in the late 1980s, and part of the collective that established the Newtown Film and Television School in Johannesburg. I taught film and television at Wits for ten years, before moving to the University of Bristol in 1998, where I am Reader in Film in the School of Arts, co-leader of the Screen/s Research cluster, and Programme Director of the MA in Film and Television Studies. In my research and scholarship, I have focused primarily on histories and identities in African cinemas. My monograph, South African National Cinema (Routledge, 2007), is an historical overview of cinema produced in South Africa, in relation to race and national identity. It maps the role of cinema in the making, entrenching and undoing of apartheid from the early silent film, De Voortrekkers (1916) to anti-apartheid and post-apartheid films, including Mapantsula (1998) and Zulu Love Letter (2004). I have extended this work in several subsequent publications, including an article on the rediscovered silent film, The Rose of Rhodesia (1918), directed by Harold Shaw (who directed De Voortrekkers), in a special issue of Screening the Past (2009), and an article in the Journal of Southern African Studies special issue ‘South Africa on Film’ (2013) on the colonial filmmaker, Donald Swanson, who directed the popular and historically significant African Jim (1949). My work on questions of identity in African cinema also includes two articles on Abderrahmane Sissako’s film, Bamako (2006), published in Screen (2010) and Critical African Studies (2013), that focus on the film’s epistemological challenge to the west and Sissako’s cinematic use of colour. I have also engaged in screen practice and directed a short film, Uku Hamba ’Ze – To Walk Naked (1995), in a collaborative project for the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995. It has been exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally, and is distributed by Third World Newsreel in New York. I curate public events on South African/African cinema and am a Trustee of Africa in Motion, Scotland African Film Festival, and collaborate with the Afrika Eye Film Festival in Bristol. I am currently extending my work on black cinema audiences in a research project, ‘British and Hollywood Cinema in South Africa, 1920s to 1960s: Black and mixed-race audiences in District Six, Cape Town and other South African cities’. It investigates how British and Hollywood cinema penetrated South African markets, and their impact on urban, black audiences from the 1920s, drawing on ‘scattered’ historical archives. My teaching encompasses film and screen theory and practice, embracing African/South African cinemas, global/world cinemas, national/transnational cinemas, and related theory and practice. I supervise research postgraduates in all these areas, including Chinese, Iranian, and colonial cinemas; globalisation and transnational film; and film/screen practice.