Rest in Peace Ousmane Sembene

[Adam]

Not so well known in the USA, but a very significant filmmaker and writer who died on 9 June 2007.

http://web.mac.com/chambanotes/iWeb/Site/B...8A717D52C6.html

OBITUARY: Ousmane Sembene

IN RESPONSE TO MANY REQUESTS, YOU CAN SEND A MESSAGE OF CONDOLENCE TO OUSMANE SEMBENE’S ASSISTANT CLARENCE DELGADO (cineas@yahoo.fr

OR cineseas@sentoo.sn)

HERE IS SOME MORE INFORMATION COMPILED FROM SEVERAL OBITUARIES. THE WORK OF OUSMANE SEMBENE

STANDS AS AN EXAMPLE FOR US ALL.

-- ST.CLAIR BOURNE

Born into a fisherman's family in the southern region of Casamance in 1923, Ousmane Sembene is one of the foremost filmmakers in world cinema. He is also a prominent African novelist. Prior to entering the arts, Sembene did a stint in the French army, and worked on the construction of the Dakar-Niger railway where he took part in the great strike that inspired him to write his 1960 novel God's Bits of Wood. He became a writer after joining Presence Africaine, a Parisian literary society. His subsequent literary works were done in French. Sembene, realizing that relatively few Africans would be able to read his books in that language, decided that he would be able to reach a wider audience if he made films. He studied film at Gorky Studio in Moscow, turning to the medium because, as he put it in 2005, “everything can be filmed and transported to the most remote village in Africa.”

In 1963, he made his directorial debut with Borom Sarret, which chronicles a day in the life of an impoverished cart driver. Set over the basic story is another theme that allows the audience to see that the real cause of his poverty are the corrupt politicians heavily involved with neo-colonialism who strive to deliberately prevent the poor from improving their lifes' lot.

After making three short films, he submitted the script for “Black Girl” to the Film Bureau of the French Ministry of Cooperation, an agency set up by the government of Charles de Gaulle to assist African filmmakers. The script was rejected, and while Mr. Sembène was able to complete the film independently, some of his later films would run into trouble with both French and Senegalese authorities. “Mandabi” (“The Money Order,” 1968), was attacked in Africa for its portrayal of political corruption and economic devastation, and “Emitai” (1972) was suppressed in France for five years because of its harsh depiction of colonialism.

“Black Girl” (1965), his debut feature, is commonly referred to as the first African film. Combining realistic narrative techniques with elements of traditional African storytelling, it tells of a young woman named Diouana who commits suicide after traveling to Europe with her French employers. Diouana’s identity crisis foretold some of the central themes of Mr. Sembène’s later work — he directed 10 features and numerous shorts — and of the nascent African cinema more generally. The tensions between tradition and modernity and between newly independent African nations and their erstwhile colonial masters are sources of drama and comedy in his films, which are nonetheless focused on the lives of ordinary people, frequently women.

“Xala” (1974), which many critics consider his finest film, takes a humorous look at polygamy, traditional African medicine and the contrasts between urban and rural life. Neither mocking nor nostalgic in its treatment of traditions, it is as much driven by the personalities of its characters as by its ideas about African life. At the same time, the characters’ foibles are clearly symbols of political and social dysfunction.

A similar logic obtains in later films like “Guelwaar” (1993) and “Faat-Kiné” (2001). Writing about the latter movie in The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell noted that some of its scenes could have been “whipped up into a tempest of tear-jerking” but that Mr. Sembène’s “trademark empathy” and sense of detail served as antidotes to melodrama. Even when he addressed painful and controversial subjects — as in “Moolaadé” (2004) which chronicles a middle-aged woman’s campaign to halt the practice of female genital cutting in her village — Mr. Sembène tempered moral fervor with warmth and humor. “He could criticize Africa, he could criticize racism and he could criticize colonialism,” said Manthia Diawara, professor of comparative literature and Africana studies at New York University, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “He never spared anybody.”

In spite of occasional controversy, Mr. Sembène’s mastery and originality were celebrated both in Africa, where he served as an inspiration for later filmmakers, and internationally. He won prizes at the Venice Film Festival in 1968 (for “Mandabi”) and 1988 (for “Camp de Thiaroye”), and at Cannes in 2004 (for “Moolaadé”). He was a founder, in 1969 of FESPACO, the biennial festival of film and television held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Cheick Oumar Sissoko, a fellow filmmaker and the Malian minister of culture, said that with Mr. Sembène’s death, “African cinema has lost one of its lighthouses.” Mr. Diawara added: “He really is the most important African filmmaker. The one that all subsequent filmmakers have to be measured against”.

New York Times; June 12, 2007

AN APPRAISAL

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.

http://africanaffairs.suite101.com/blog.cf..._ousmane_sembne

Obituary: Ousmane Sembène

Africa's "Father of Cinema" Dies at 84

© Sean Sinclair-Day

Jun 13, 2007

Sembène will be remembered as a seminal master of African filmmaking but his literary talents were also highly remarkable and influential.

On June 9, 2007, Ousmane Sembène, one of Africa's filmmaking pioneers died at his home in Senegal at the age of 84. Many even referred to him as the "father" of African cinema. As a writer, he was also influential attaining the same recognition as Africa's giants of literature, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

Expelled from school at an early age, Sembène still developed a love for reading that would turn him into a self-educated writer. Sembène collected material for his stories through his diverse experiences working in France and Africa as, among other things, an apprentice mechanic, plumber, carpenter, docker and bricklayer. In 1944, he was drafted by the French Army in World War II.

By the 1960s Sembène had realized the potential for film to reach wider audiences than literature and traveled to Moscow to study filmmaking. His first feature-length film, "La Noire de..." (1966) is commonly referred to as the first African film.

Former Senegalese president, Abdlu Diouf, saw Sembène as a "fervent defender of liberty and social justice." While his cinematic endeavours would occasionally cause controversy with French and Senegalese authorities for his representations of French colonialism and African corruption, he was celebrated internationally and inspired many African directors.

Ousmane Sembène will be remembered by his peers as a man who encouraged Africa to realize its identity and confront its cultural destiny during the continent's postcolonial emergence. His impressive oeuvre consists of five novels, five collections of short stories, four short films, nine features, and four documentaries

Quotes from Ousmane Sembène:

"The development of Africa will not happen without the effective participation of women. Our forefathers' image of women must be buried once for all."

"At a moral level, I don't think we have any lesson to learn from Europe."

"I benefited from a synthesis of values - in the house, the compound, the country and Koranic and French schools. We conserved our own culture; we had nightly gatherings with tales. Now I call it my own theater."

"Bread came wrapped in French newspapers. Each time my father unwrapped a baguette, he asked me to read to him."

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Oh this is really sad. I have "Guelwar" on tape. I've seen a number of other Sembene films. They get you.

RIP

MG