Faced with the question of how most usefully to broach a corpus of a dozen films, made over a period of approximately thirty years, I have opted here to focus less on each work individually than on Jean-Marie Teno's work as a repertoire, to borrow Anjali Prabhu's term. Perspicacious close readings and analyses of Teno's individual films already exist in an array of articles (see Bibliography), and in my own earlier work, Africa Shoots Back. Here then, I want, rather, to take the opportunity that this monographic format presents to step back and analyse this oeuvre in its entirety, as an ensemble. Taken individually, each of Teno's films is a journey unto itself; collectively, they weave a fascinating bigger journey into Cameroonian society, its history, realities, predicaments and complexities, into postcolonial North-South relations, and into Pan-African relations more generally. Here, I want to highlight what seem to me to be some of the most salient and enduring stylistic and thematic characteristics and threads that traverse both the individual films and collective corpus like leitmotifs, or arcs, to the point of becoming trademark signatures of Jean-Marie Teno's cinema.

Imagined as both a complement to, and in dialogue with our subsequent critical conversation, this part of the book is divided into sections and further sub-sections, each of which seeks to identify a defining trait of Teno's work as a possible lens through which to read his films. It seeks, too, to frame and contextualize these characteristics within the theoretical and socio-political debates that both inform them, and which the films articulate. Indeed, Teno's cinema, like all art forms, is not isolated from the socio-political sphere from which it stems, and which is an integral part of it. The aesthetic, le sensible, conveys human experiences; poetics and politics intertwine; the text exists within a context. This contextualizing approach will at times take us back to debates and issues that are assuredly not new, and which have at times been addressed in existing writings and works on African cinema, including my own.