The first representations of Africa in film can be traced back to the beginning of cinema, and between 1895 and 1900. The Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès had made Africa a site for cinematic representations; however, a close study of both those initial filmic moments and colonial cinema reveals how Africa was a site for European projections. The objective of this dissertation is to understand how Africa has evolved from the colonial cinema to the modern day West Africa's cinema. The author traces the history of Africa in film and its various forms of cinematic expressions and discusses the emergence of new aesthetics in Sub-Saharan Francophone cinema serving the purpose of signification, only by selecting certain properties of real objects. By bridging the fields of film semiotics, narratology, postcolonial theories and cultural studies the author hopes to contribute to a better understanding of Africa as a place and space in cinema.