RIP Ousmane Sembène, giant of African cinema

:( I liked his novels.

I've never read any, but just reserved Xala at the library. How many have been published in English?

I've read three -- "God's Bits of Wood" is my favorite. "Xala" and "The Money Order: with white genesis" are also good. Next year there's supposed to be a critical collection of short stories.

oh no! RIP
Xala is a treat. very funny. i want to see more but his films are hard to find here in dc!

i've never seen any of this guy's stuff but have always wanted to. kim's has his stuff, i imagine?

http://www.filmreference.com/images/sjff_02_img0845.jpg

very little is in stores: I've seen Black Girl/Borom Sarret and I think Xala on the local shelves. His last, Moolaade, which got the widest release in the US, is not on US disc.

black girl is one of the most harrowing things i've ever seen

It's sort of a perfect, devastating film, partly bcz it's a concentrated 50 minutes or so.

He studied film at Gorky Studio in Moscow

Hey, let's hear it for the Soviet role in birthing African cinema!

Moolaadé has sat in my Netflix queue, release date unknown, since last August. Shameful

well, most of his films were French-financed in part; I don't know if posthumous DVD releases will be easier to put together.

A Filmmaker Who Found Africa’s Voice
By A. O. SCOTT

Ousmane Sembène, by consensus the father of African cinema, was nearly 40 when he started making films. (He was 84 when he died over the weekend at his home in Dakar). By 1960, the year that Senegal, his native country, won its independence from France, he was already a novelist of some reputation in Francophone African circles.

He had also played a significant role in political and aesthetic debates that had gathered force as the postwar movement toward African decolonization accelerated. He took a radical, pro-independence line against what he took to be the assimilationist tendencies of proponents of Négritude, the more established literary movement associated with writers like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor.

Senghor, a poet and scholar (and the first African elected to the Académie Française), went on to become Senegal’s first president. (He died in 2001.) Mr. Sembène, in his role as Africa’s leading filmmaker, would remain a thorn in Senghor’s side, as uncompromising a critic of Africa’s post-liberation regimes as he had been of French colonial domination.

In a 2004 interview with “L’Humanité,” the daily newspaper of the French Communist Party (which Mr. Sembène joined as a dockworker in Marseilles in the 1940s), he noted that “in more than 40 years since Senegal’s liberation we have killed more Africans than died from the start of the slave trade.”

In films like “Ceddo” and “Xala” he pointed an angry, often satirical finger at the failures and excesses of modern African governments, Senghor’s in particular, and his unsparing criticism made him a controversial figure.

Nonetheless, it is hard to overstate his importance, or his influence on African film and also, more generally, on African intellectual and cultural self-perception. Mr. Sembène was in many ways not only Senghor’s political and aesthetic antagonist but also his biographical and temperamental opposite. Senghor, who had received an elite education in metropolitan France, believed, at least in the 1950s, that Africans in territories ruled by France could carve out an identity for themselves within the larger cosmos of French language and civilization.

Mr. Sembène, whose formal schooling ended in the sixth grade, received his French education not at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, but rather on the Marseilles docks and in the radical trade union movement. Like Sékou Touré and Frantz Fanon, his allies in the radical wing of the anti-colonialist movement, he believed that Africans would experience true liberation when they threw off European models and discovered their own, homegrown versions of modernity.

“What was unique about Sembène was he began to challenge the dominant figure, Senghor,” recalled Manthia Diawara, a professor of Africana studies at New York University who grew up in Mali in the 1960s. “He valorized African languages over French. He began to say that independence had failed. He celebrated the equality of Africa with Europe. And it was very good for us to see a man who was self-taught, who did not come out of the French educational system, who went on to write these books.”

The books were quickly superseded by his films. “I came back to Dakar, and I made a tour of Africa,” Mr. Sembène told L’Humanité, reflecting on his return home in 1960 after nearly 20 years in France. “I wanted to know my own continent. I went everywhere, getting to know people, tribes, cultures. I was 40 years old, and I wanted to make movies. I wanted to give another impression of Africa. Since our culture is primarily oral, I wanted to depict reality through ritual, dance and performance.”

And so he developed a filmmaking style that was populist, didactic and sometimes propagandistic, at once modern in its techniques and accessible, at least in principle, to everyone. He frequently made use of nonprofessional actors and wrote dialogue in various African languages.

“The publication of a book written in French would only reach a minority,” he said. In contrast, he envisioned a “fairground cinema that allows you to argue with people.”

The arguments take place within his films as well as around them. In “Moolaadé” (2004), one of his last movies, a group of women rises up against the traditional practice of female genital mutilation, challenging the authority of the village elders as well as of the priestesses who perform the ritual. The film’s structure is antiphonal (given Mr. Sembène’s Marxist background, you might say dialectical), allowing the defenders and opponents of tradition to have their say before justice and enlightenment prevail.

Like all of Mr. Sembène’s films — he made 10 features in all — “Moolaadé” is grounded in African daily life. And yet, to a non-African viewer, it rarely feels exotic or strange. As an artist, Mr. Sembène was both a populist and a universalist.

“He showed us a way out of tribalism,” said Mr. Diawara, an expert on African cinema (and the co-director of a 1994 documentary about Mr. Sembène) in a recent telephone interview. “Sembène’s films are translatable. They’re never going to be blockbusters, but you can show one of them in China, in France, in Africa, in the United States, and people will know what it’s about.”

Mr. Sembène was thus a thoroughly African artist, one who achieved global stature by virtue of his concentration on local matters. He may, indeed, have found a bigger audience at international festivals outside Africa than he did at home. But that may have more to do with global conditions of distribution than with the movies themselves, which are lively, funny, pointed and true.

Mr. Diawara recalled a story that Mr. Sembène liked to tell about his travels across Africa in the ’60s. Mr. Sembene had finished showing his film “Money Order” in a small town in Cameroon when he was approached by a local policeman, whose attention made him a little nervous.

“Where did you get that story?” the officer wanted to know. Mr. Sembène replied that the plot, which chronicles the chaotic and corrupting effects of money from France on a Senegalese family, was his own invention. “But it happened to me,” the policeman said.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

RIP.

i've read god's bits of wood but somehow i never made the connection!

RIP :-(

Saw Xala a few weeks ago. I agree it ws very funny, and one of the most memorable endings to any film I'll see this year I'm sure (there is a really fantastic song in there too, spent soemtime trying to track that down with no luck). Moolade should be fairly easy to find, and ws my first one from him.

Very interested to read his novels as well.

Xala ...one of the most memorable endings to any film I'll see this year ever

Some great [Strangelovian?] scenes in Xala, like when the protagonists's colleages tell him to curse them in French, not Wolof.

I finally saw it...was a little surprised by the stilted acting. Some scenes dawdled, especially in the second third.

New York retro (and I think it will be touring):

http://www.filmforum.org/films/sembene.html

i plan to see most of these. excited!

what are the highlights? i picked one or two out, but forget, and then didn't care enough to go back.

I hope it comes to DC!!

of the ones I've seen, Black Girl, Xala, Camp de Thiaroye and Guelwaar. Ceddo may have best rep among those I haven't.

i've seen Camp de Thiaroye -- great -- and Black Girl -- devastating

NY retro opens today, here's Hoberman:

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0748,hoberman,78462,20.html

loved the "imported drinking water" bit in xala, as well as the conversation between the first two wives at the wedding

The novel might be worth you're time .. the film is faithful but makes certain cultural things that may seem fuzzy clearer.

Also, critical dissection of Ceddo:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/33/ceddo.html

oh, Sembene is one of the 'converts' in the last scene.

Moolaadé, his last film, is out on New Yorker Video today.

Moolade finally out on DVD! It's the best kind of didactic film.

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-african-king-20080911

...it’s important to emphasize that Sembene’s intellectual legacy, despite its cogent critiques of Western arrogance, also has ample room for disgust toward indigenous African inequities. Sembene and his cinematic progeny (and Mambéty should be counted among the latter despite what Busch and Annas term “their subliminal rivalry) are animated by a willingness to balance disgust for the condescension of Westerners with an equal disdain for the duplicity of African elites. During a conference on his work held at Smith College in 1990, Sembene insisted that “in the whole of Africa since independence, some 30 years ago, the new African bourgeoisie has killed more African intellectuals than did 100 years of colonialism, or else they have driven them into exile until, intellectually, they are destroyed.”