Africa's Fourth Cinema A Yoruba Ontology

This book investigates the power that film has in philosophizing from an African perspective. In so doing, the book helps to decolonise, de-westernise, and diversify our understanding of the relationship between film and philosophy. Premised on Wole Soyinka’s the Fourth Stage, which is also known as the fourth area of experience where the metaphysical questions of the past, the present, and the future are entangled, this book conceptualises the Fourth Cinema. Connecting the fields of divinity, philosophy, and film studies, the book provides a Yorùbá ontology of film, grounded in the oratures and rituals of Òrìsà (Yorùbá deities), which have gone through several media of storytelling before the invention of film technology. The book explores the metaphysical sources of the fourth cinema in the motifs, colours, sounds and other languages/metaphors of Òrìsà; and thus, discusses the themes of individuality, communality, morality, drama, sacrifice, spirituality, death, tragedy, and annihilation via the fourth cinematic storytelling. At a time when African film, and Nollywood in particular, is growing and gaining in international acclaim, this book provides an important non-Western study of the intersection between film and philosophy. It will be of interest to researchers of world religions, philosophies, and cinema.