Collective vs. Individual storytelling

Philip Rosen’s “Discursive Space and Historical Time” piece on Ceddo bring up the question of the role of the African oral tradition, especially in terms of the ways audiences are addressed. Rosen states that “this oral tradition [is] closely related to the idea of community and [argues] that African culture emphasizes community and collectivity over individuality” (720). He then states that this is linked to the objectives of third cinema. While third cinema certainly has different (less capitalistic) goals than Hollywood, I can’t help but agree with Marianna’s post in believing that a certain amount of content is sacrificed for a different narrative form. As much as you want to argue that cinema is a collective experience because we’re all being exposed to the same content, at the end of the day watching a film is still an individualistic experience. This is not the retelling of history through the direct voice of someone sitting in front of you as present in oral histories, but an edited, mass-produced version of one person’s perception of truth, in this case, the Ousmane Sembene. Furthermore, one could argue that individualistic and collective storytelling experiences are indivisible : that there is always a grain of individualism within a collective oral history (the spin any individual places on a narrative) or that there is a collective experience even with the most individual of activities (for example, as Anderson notes the fact that we all individually read the newspaper everyday and have a clear concept that other people are reading the very same news, thus creating an imagined community). Where do individual and collective representations of history differ, and perhaps more importantly, where do they overlap?