In a Western film market saturated with Übermensch police propaganda in the form of superhero movies, and an art cinema stuffed with placifying bourgeois masturbation, it's easy to forget the revolutionary power cinema can hold. And yet images continue to cut through state disinformation—whether it's the proliferation of videos on TikTok depicting the war crimes being committed in Gaza, or the utility of social media during the Arab Spring protests between 2010-2012. It was that same directness of moving images as a political tool that led Senegalese author Ousmane Sembène to pick up a film camera. In doing so, he paved a path for genuinely revolutionary cinema.
Few names are more synonymous with African cinema than Sembène, notable as the director of the first Sub-Saharan African film to break into the international circuit: the anti-colonial masterpiece Black Girl (1966). This new Criterion box set, Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène, features three political texts taken from his prolific 1970s period, Emitaï (1971), Xala (1975), and Ceddo (1977). Each serves as a fierce polemic against the corrupting ideologies of religion and capital, the erosion of local African culture, and the still-lingering shadow cast by colonialism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all three were banned upon release across Africa—most particularly in Senegal.
Fittingly, Emitaï opens with a dedication “to all the militants of the African Cause”. Set in a Diola village in Senegal during World War II, Emitaï centres on the atrocities committed by the French Vichy government, from their brutal forced conscription of the eligible local men, to their confiscation of the Diola rice reserves. This is a village populated solely by old men, women, and children, all of whom are in mourning, and all of whom are on the cusp of starvation, trapped in service of a “white man's war” that bears no relation to their lived reality. For the men left behind, their resistance is as violent as it is futile, while the women remain in military custody—a result of their brazen concealment of the village's rice crop.
In Sembène's hands, the righteous fury of the text is found in the contrasts of his visual storytelling, forever clashing the vicious precision of the French authorities with the natural harmony of the Diola people. Sembène lingers on perspective shots taken from behind swaying leaves, or staring down the point of a narrow boat; a stark contrast with the groups of colonial forces pushing through tall fields of rice toward the camera, instantly recognisable in their officious red hats and khakis. However, it's the power of ritual and cultural tradition that sticks in the memory most, exemplified in a funeral rite that joins together the separated men and women through distant song, immense in spite of its melancholy. As red lights descend, and spirits and goddesses appear out of the ether, it gradually becomes more and more clear that the end times are nigh for these people.
The next film, Xala, starts on a more hopeful note. Backed by a kinetic drumbeat, a cadre of political instigators raid a government building of its statues and busts, before ejecting the incumbent white Francophile politicians as a party rages in the streets. Any celebration is short-lived, however. It's not long before the demure Frenchmen call on their fleet of armed forces to disperse the protest, before reclothing the revolutionary African insurgents in the garb of the European political establishment, hemmed in with briefcases (furtively opened, stuffed with cash) and strung up with bow ties. “Long live Africanity!” their joint voice rings out, but white money still rules.
After playing the “ousting” of the French overseers as a whip-fast borderline-silent comedy, Sembène spends the rest of Xala's two-hour runtime focused on Hadji Beye (Thierno Leye), an esteemed governmental board member. Hadji, engorged with his newfound power, is about to marry his third wife, a ceremony that has brought no deal of joy to wives one and two, nor his outspoken teenage daughter, who answers in Wolof when he speaks in French. It's under these circumstances that Hadji is struck down by the titular “xala”, a curse of impotence, though its origin is unclear; a deistic reaction to his rejection of a phallic wedding ritual involving mounting a giant mortar and pestle, a psychic battle of the sexes, or something more pernicious stemming from his burgeoning Westernisation. And yet even working in a more playful satiric mode, Sembène still packs a punch with his final images—loaded with sour retribution and sordid recompense.
The final film in the collection, Ceddo, continues many of Sembène's same preoccupations from this era. The opening, as with Xala, takes place almost entirely without dialogue, quietly observing humble scenes of village life; a woman washing herself in the river, a couple lifting the roof of their hut as the sun reaches its zenith, and the more macabre image of two slaves being transported, tied together crudely with sticks. Scored by some slinky, zig-zagging Cameroonian jazz funk, each player's movements are exaggerated, whether it's the slaver indicating to his lacky what to do if anyone scarpers by firing a shot in the air, or a priest of the white cloth quietly performing his religious rites, strolling forward and back. Ironically, much of the rest of the film is concerned with the power of language, whether it's the bonding ties of verbal tradition, or the codifying strictures of Sharia law.
Just as Emitaï dealt with a singular act of rebellion against a repressive regime, Ceddo sees the titular class of Senegambian warriors rebel against the religious and cultural strictures imposed by the steadily encroaching Muslim occupants by kidnapping local King Demba War's (regular Sembène player, Makhouredia Gueye) daughter, Princess Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye). It's likely the weakest of the three films, owing to its strangely winding structure, but Sembène still exhibits a preternatural knack for edifying images. One particular sequence, in which the local Ceddo men have their heads forcibly shaved with blunt razors and are dragged in front of the Imam to be given their new Muslim names is searing in its power, peppered with striking close-up reaction shots. Of course, one of the men we see renamed is given the new name: Ousmane.
Taken as a whole, this collection shines a light on the factors that have most influenced the trajectory of pre- and post-colonial Africa—particularly Sembène's native Senegal—taking in the brutal strong-arming of Vichy France, and the insipid string-pulling that followed in the early years of “independence”. The extras assembled on the box set are a little limited admittedly—for Xala, a twenty minute discussion of Sembène's work between Mahen Bonetti, founder and executive director of the African Film Festival, and writer Amy Sall, for Xala, nothing, and for Ceddo, a 1981 making-of documentary by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra—but this still represents one of the best ways to dig deeper into the filmography of a master filmmaker whose work has been overlooked as often as it has been misunderstood.
Special Features
- New 4K digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-rays
- New conversation between Mahen Bonetti, founder and executive director of the African Film Festival, and writer Amy Sall
- The Making of “Ceddo,” a 1981 documentary by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Yasmina Price
Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène releases in the UK on June 3, courtesy of Criterion
