The great Senegalese filmmaker -- the first and most important cinematic voice to emerge from post-Colonial Africa -- is dead at the age of 84. A.O. Scott's Times obit ran yesterday, as did the A.P. obituary, and Scott's further appreciation is in today's Times. Wesley's overview of Sembene's career will be in tomorrow's Globe (I'll retrolink when it goes up). Here's a good webpage for beginners, and there's always Wikipedia.
Sembene started making movies later than other post-WWII giants like Truffaut, Fellini, Kurosawa, but you could argue that he's more important than all of them put together, because there simply wasn't an African cinema before him. With 1966's "Black Girl" and especially 1968's "Mandabi" ("The Money Order"), he applied a social realist narrative style to narrative concerns directly impacting Senegalese and African audiences: racism, post-colonial corruption, women's rights, the search for a cultural identity untainted by Western values.
Which makes his movies sound like medicine, when they're anything but. Rather, they're alive and bursting with characters, some humorous, some tragic, all striving to be heard. Sembene's last film, "Moolaade," is about women in a rural village who resist the tradition of female circumcision, but a wiser, more joyous, yet more unsettling depiction of the push and pull of human life you will not find.
Not many of Sembene's films made it to American theaters, and they're hard to find on video (the riotous 1975 bourgeoise satire "Xala" is available, as are "Mandabi" and "Black Girl" -- all highly recommended. "Moolaade" has been on DVD but is currently unavailable; look for used copies). For that reason, he's not as well known as he should be in the West. That didn't seem to bother the filmmaker, whose use of local dialects and oral tradition was meant to reach as many of his countrymen and fellow Africans as possible. "Africa is my 'audience,'" he once said, "while the West and the 'rest' are only targeted as 'markets'.
So he didn't need us. But we need his movies.
