For the uninitiated, Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman’s Sembene! offers a valuable entry into the canon of African cinema and its founding father: the late, great Senegalese pioneer Ousmane Sembene. Forgoing the liveliness of Alex Gibney’s Finding Fela!, Sembene! finds its own rhythm: part-retrospective, part-academic study in the spirit of the director’s work.
The film opens with a critical quote from its subject: “If Africans don’t tell their own stories, than Africa will soon disappear.” Focusing on the public intellectual that Sembene was, the film eventually loses a kind of flavor it could have had, relying not upon the urban images of Dakar (as seen in his film Faat Kine and Borom Sarret), but the images he was known for in his portrait of more rural spaces in his films Guelwaar and his final picture Moolaade.
The picture is co-directed by a person from the western world — I’m not sure if Sembene would have approved — and his biographer Gadjigo, a professor at Mount Holyoke in Western Massachusetts who felt a certain kinship with Sembene, leaving Senegal himself. Ironically, Sembene, a self-taught reader who became a novelist, turned to cinema as a means of getting his message out to an illiterate population.
Absorbing, if not terribly insightful for long-time students of Sembene’s work, the film will hopefully whet the appetite of cinematic adventures looking to discover a filmmaker who has found acclaim in more academic circles than most. A contemporary master, the film brilliant cites the forms of representation pioneered in his landmark 1965 feature Black Girl.
Its brief running time may be a mere preview for future exploration, but personal details of Ousmane Sembene’s life are missing. There’s a cold distance between the man and his work especially in his most curious period, a kind of 10-year dark stretch after completing his “rebel” trilogy which offered a critique of Islam, urbanization and cultural corruption that even today may be considered incendiary.
Teaching during that dark period, he pulls a kind of bait-and-switch, dipping into a fund for student work to make a very similar film to that proposed by his students, explored in a chapter that’s outrageous. The film offers little insight beyond the usual talking heads, including his son and co-director Gadjigo (it’s as if his students declined to speak or flesh this point out).
Making a film about a figure as towering in the world cinema landscape as Ousmane Sembene is certainly a difficult feat, especially as we discover some of his records have gone missing. A groundbreaking documentary about a groundbreaking filmmaker this is not, but it sheds some light on Sembene even if it’s not as comprehensive as I’d hoped for, with some voices (including actors, producers, and performers) missing entirely. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good and certainly there is room for further exploration of a figure who fought for African voices to document their own history and present.
Sembene! is now in limited release.