Cinematheque Onatrio presents – Ousmane Sembenen

Cinematheque Onatrio presents – Ousmane Sembenen

I have only seen 2 of Sembenen’s films prior to this series and these two films were top of my list for the best 10 films those years.  Finally, Toronto gets a chance to view a retrospective of his films, and satisfaction is guaranteed. 

His films are powerful, timely, moving and riveting while entertaining as well.  For a full lost of films, screen times and ticket pricing, check the cinematheque website at:
http://www.cinemathequeontario.ca

Though frequently referred to as “the father of African cinema,” it would be more pertinent to refer to Ousmane Sembène as the father of indigenous cinema—a global rather than continental distinction. While Sembène’s films, no less than the novels which preceded them, deal specifically and penetratingly with the unique history of the African continent and its tortured relationship with the Europe that both enslaved it and equipped it with certain tools to free itself from enslavement, his form of radical, politicized cinema has become an eminently movable and teachable mode of filmmaking for indigenous filmmakers worldwide. Proudly displaying those aspects of his people’s culture and society that were typically excluded from Westernized depictions of his native land, Sembène also borrowed the styles and motifs of Western literary and cinematic traditions—chiefly irony, satire, and a faith in the liberating power of secularized modernity—to drive home his points. Sembène was as bitingly critical of those “backwards” elements of his own culture as he was of the brutality and discrimination visited upon the African continent by the forces of colonialism, and it is this complex double critique that has made his work so vital and controversial for more than four decades. Born in Senegal in 1923, Sembène found employment as a construction worker in Dakar in his teens before being drafted into the Free French forces in 1944 (an experience that would later inform his searing historical drama Camp de Thiaroye). After being radicalized by a series of local labour disputes throughout 1946 (which he would later immortalize in his acclaimed 1960 novel God’s Bits of Wood) Sembène stowed away on a commercial freighter to Marseilles, where he worked as a docker for five years and became active in the communist-led trade union movement, eventually joining the French Communist party. Turning to writing after a serious injury on the docks, Sembène published his first novel, Black Docker, in 1956; returning to Senegal in 1960, he quickly established himself as one of the country’s leading novelists. Despite his literary success, Sembène believed that his work was not reaching the great majority of his fellow people, which led him to the cinema.

Sembène’s first short, Borom Sarret (1963), already bears his signature: an observational yet poetic structure that evokes his literary work (several of his films would be adapted from his own novels and short stories) while also reconfiguring it for the unique properties of the cinema. His feature debut, La Noire de . . . (1966)—which was recently voted #83 on TIFF’s Essential 100 list—proved a sensation, winning France’s prestigious Prix Jean Vigo and focusing worldwide attention on African cinema. Emboldened by this success, Sembène dared to abandon the French language and make a film in his native Wolof language, the biting, Kafkaesque tragi-comedy Mandabi. Sembène would go on to make four more films in Wolof as well as other African languages—a political as well as cultural act, as the reclamation of indigenous language from the impositions of former (and implicitly current) colonizers has proven to be one of the most pressing post-colonial issues, both in Africa and worldwide.

Sembène, however, was no cultural essentialist. Scathingly condemning colonial and neo-colonial brutality (La Noire de. . . , Emitaï, Camp de Thiaroye), he was also unsparing towards the corruption and opportunism of the indigenous elites that arose in the post-colonial era as well as the cruel, patriarchal holdovers from the indigenous past—chiefly polygamy and, in his celebrated swan song Moolaade, the barbaric practice of female circumcision—that continue to bedevil a contemporary Africa caught perpetually between the best and worst of both tradition and modernity. It is this relentless clarity, coupled with righteous anger and an almost effortless artistry, that has made Sembène an inspiration not only to African filmmakers past and present—a legacy that is still very much alive, as evidenced by our programme of contemporary shorts from an exciting new generation of African filmmakers—but to filmmakers from New Zealand to Nunavut (could Atanarjuat—The Fast Runner exist without Sembène’s example?).

No matter his oft-invoked designation as “father,” Sembène was anything but an old fogey. Unlike other filmmakers of his age—he made his last film at the age of eighty—Sembène was not allowed the luxury of a comfortable, reflective dotage: the issues he addressed were too pressing, too immediate and necessary to allow for withdrawal. The invigorating rage that had fuelled Sembène from the beginning of his career sustained him until the end, and his remarkable example continues to inspire new filmmakers to resurrect old stories previously unheard the world over.