In the name of the father

Film Forum remembers Ousmane Sembene.

In this bittersweet reprise of its 2001 Ousmane Sembene retrospective—and the first such reckoning since the Senegalese writer-director died in June—Film Forum provides an opportunity to reassess the career of this truly indispensable artist, often referred to as the “father of African cinema.” As before, the program includes all nine of Sembene’s features plus one of his four shorts, “Borom Sarret” (1963)—a body of work that’s as driven and politically scathing as it is compassionate and ruefully funny. His vehemence and versatility are apparent from the get-go: In both “Borom Sarret,” which chronicles a day in the life of an impoverished cart driver, and the subsequent New Wave–influenced Black Girl (1966), about a naive young Dakar woman’s tragic exploitation in France, Sembene exhibits a sweeping view of post-colonial Senegal’s turbulent identity while maintaining a keen narrative focus.

These traits prevail even in his sprawling historical epics Emitai (1971) and its three-hour thematic sequel, Camp de Thiaroye (1987, codirected with Thierno Faty Sow), which offer a harrowing account of the forced conscription of African colonial troops by the French during World War II and their subsequent piteous betrayal. Where this pair captures Senegalese traditionalism’s clash with imposed modernity at its pre-independence flash point, the period piece Ceddo (1977), Guelwaar (1993) and Sembene’s final film, Moolaadé (2005), address West Africa’s uneasy tangle of religious conflict and capitulation.

The director’s contemporary urban dramas, including Mandabi (1968) and the buoyant if languid Faat-Kiné (2000), were liable to present the same tensions as intractably internalized. The barbed satire Xala (1974), arguably Sembene’s masterpiece, weaves broad social criticism with intricate characterization: Its seemingly random web of relationships and events—centered around a smug businessman whose attempts to straddle traditional and modern values render him impotent—mesh in a climactic scene that’s as disgusting as it is philosophically appropriate.

Sembene’s status as an erstwhile novelist who forged sub-Saharan Africa’s cinema in order to reach a wider, less privileged audience is well-documented, but his whimsical fluidity, sometimes jarring emotional dexterity and subtle use of physical space as metaphor—in Black Girl’s prison-cell–like apartment, for instance, or the rolling baobab groves of Emitai—belie his late-comer reputation. For all their sociohistorical acumen, Sembene’s movies are also visual and aural feasts with an inimitable, irresistible rhythm all their own.

For that matter, their astute criticisms of poverty, racism, bureaucratic hubris, religious rigidity and class and gender disparity aren’t the lifeless harangues of an ideologue, but the reveilles of a master poet incensed that such conditions exist at all. The world is diminished without him.

---