The direct importation into Africa of methods, theories, ideas, and psychoanalytical assumptions developed in First World and applied to African cinema is not without epistemological problems. Marxist, positivist, or liberal-humanist approaches, among others, do not automatically apply in attempts to understand African films and audiences. The call on mainly Lacanian psychoanalysis as an interpretive framework assumes that African viewers have essentially white, Westernized subjectivities and that their readings are determined, as John Higgins expresses it, in terms of how the film seeks to position spectator so that film can be understood (105). This kind of film theory has little purchase among audiences which evade subjectivities and viewing positions assumed or constructed for them by directors, and which in turn are assumed by critics to be themselves located within post-Freudian psyche. These kinds of European deconstructivist rituals (see Willemen 1-29) assume particular sets of moder and post-moder conditions and periodizations not necessarily replicated in Africa in quite same ways. Oral cultures, as one example of cultural divergence, speak a different world than those of written cultures. Ontologies shaped by orality assume that world consists of interacting forces of cosmological scale and significance rather than of discrete secularized concrete objects.' The kinds of storytelling strategies possible within discourse of cosmologies which include influence of para-normal agents, as described to an extent in Jean Rouch's films, provide grounding for divisions of existence that differ from dualism postulated by dogma of ghost in machine. The relationship of Africans as quintessentially Other to historical Same of Europe emerged from respective experiences of colonialism and neo-colonialism. It is against this background of indeterminacy that we discuss failure of Western film theory to understand various comprehensions of existence that inscribe narratives and forms of much cinema in Africa.