The Fourth Cinema: Morality and Tragedy in African Cinema

This article focuses on the concept of “The Fourth Cinema” in which questions of morality and tragedy as well as deep history and recorded history are interwoven and inseparable. These questions are important not solely to clarify specific misinterpretations but also to resist an impending misinterpretation of the concept of the fourth cinema. Based on Wole Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage,” the article discusses how the metaphysics of sacrifice in Yoruba oral traditions can be taken from its ritual contexts to explain what I have termed “the fourth cinema.” In doing that, I give a new interpretation to Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage” and therefore develop the fourth cinema with the aim to discuss its philosophical, spiritual, and historical relevance in African cinema, such as Biyi Bandele’s Elesin Oba, Femi Lasode’s Sango, and Tunde Kelani’s Saworoide. I therefore show the social relevance of the fourth cinema not solely in relation to the questions of morality and tragedy in the (post)colonial world but also to education and decolonial cinematic storytelling in Africa and beyond.