AiM 2007 is dedicated to the memory of the great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, frequently hailed as "the father of African cinema", who died earlier this year at the age of 83.
A pioneering figure whose career spanned four decades and 12 films, Sembene was often praised for his political commitment, but he was also a gifted director who made some of the classic films of African cinema. By the time he turned to filmmaking in the early 1960s, Sembene had already established himself as an important author but it is as a filmmaker that he gained his reputation.
His short film, Borom Sarret (1962), was the first film made by a sub-Saharan African in Africa; Black Girl (1966) was the first feature by a sub-Saharan African; Mandabi (1968) was the first film in an African language. However, it would be misguided to limit Sembene's achievements to his pioneering firsts. He was a thoughtful and daring film-maker, and his work displays an extraordinary aesthetic range.
AiM 2007 is screening two of Sembene's greatest films. Black Girl clearly reveals the influence of Italian neo-realism, which marked Sembene's work during much of the 1960s. A very moving and beautifully constructed film, it captures the gradual breakdown of a fragile young Senegalese woman who works as a childminder for a French couple. If Black Girl reveals Sembene's debts to neo-realism, the unforgettable, haunting images of a young boy with the mask covering his face in the closing sequence also reveal his ability to move beyond realism.
This desire to experiment with form is clearly visible in his work of the 1970s, perhaps most notably in Xala (1974), the opening film at AiM. A caustic satire on the African bourgeoisie, Xala depicts the travails of a businessman who appears to have everything, only to fall victim to the curse of impotence (the xala) on the night of his wedding to his third wife. The conceit of the xala allows Sembene to use (often very bawdy) comedy in order to make his political point about the impotence of the African bourgeoisie. Visually stunning, from the Brechtian realism of the long, opening sequence to the anger and brutality of the final scene, Xala lives long in the memory.
In the final 30 years of his life, Sembene made just four films, which largely retreated from the experimentalism of his middle period. However, this was not the terminal decline of a once great cinematic vision, for some of his most passionate, intelligent and strikingly beautiful work dates from this period: from the exploration of repressed memories of colonial trauma in Camp de Thiaroye (1988) to the celebration of women's right to control their own bodies and their own lives in his final film, Moolaadé (2004).
Sembene's work has been copied, rejected and reassessed by several generations of younger African filmmakers, and AiM 2007 offers a snapshot of the diversity that has followed in his pioneering footsteps. A self-educated man who was by turns intransigent and compassionate, he was an accomplished and inventive artist whose political passion was conveyed in an endlessly evolving style. Over the summer, cinephiles mourned the deaths of two great European filmmakers, Bergman and Antonioni, and Sembene does not suffer by comparison with either of these masters. AiM 2007 provides Scottish audiences with a wonderful opportunity to experience Black Girl and Xala. Hopefully, it will also inspire them to discover the rest of this pioneering director's work.
David Murphy teaches at the University of Stirling and is the author of Sembene: Imagining Alternatives In Film And Fiction.
Africa in Motion (AiM), Edinburgh's African film festival runs from October 25 to November 4
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