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In This Issue

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Catch the Dragon Fire!

Episode 92

No Place to Hide Cameras and celebrities aren’t the only things flashing in this suspenseful novel about Cannes

Go, Cat, Go Jerry Naylor remembers his rockabilly roots

Words of the Week

Inclement Bob Black leaders warn Clement attacks may backfire in the mayoral runoff

Pride and Prejudice From rear-windshield decals to anti-immigrant paranoia

Suspect Behavior

 

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by Michael Sicinski

The recent passing of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni prompted inevitable reconsiderations of the lasting value of their cinematic careers. Sadly, for every intelligent appraisal of the modernist art-cinema these men represented, there have been 10 backlash screeds (“they made the movies so not-fun!”). But earlier this summer, the world lost another of the great masters of modern world cinema, Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène. Often called “the father of African film,” Sembène is not nearly as well known in the West as Bergman, or Antonioni for that matter. But he is every bit their equal in terms of rigor, intellectual acumen and the significance of their contribution to world cinema.

Thankfully, the Belcourt is offering the chance this month to delve into Sembène’s fascinating, aggressively modern world. Of the films featured in its Sembène retrospective, two locate political problems below the waistline, albeit in vastly different ways. Xala (screening Saturday and Sunday) is a wry allegorical comedy in which an impotence curse debilitates Senegal’s crooked ministerial arrivistes. Sembène’s final film, Moolaadé (Aug. 25-26), is an impassioned feminist rejection of so-called female circumcision, and has been widely hailed as his crowning achievement. Ceddo (Aug. 18-19), the third film in the series, is a small-scale epic of religious intolerance notable for its even-handed critique of Muslim governance.

Sembène’s relative obscurity in the U.S. has nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with geography. In the West, most of us have been trained to think of African culture as the ultimate spinach dish, so stiff and dignified and blandly edifying that even hardnosed intellectuals could be forgiven for looking the other way. Surely part of this attitude comes from the fact that many African films, Sembène’s among them, adopt radically different modes of address than those of Western cinema. Sembène’s art draws upon the oral traditions of the griot, as well as centuries-old folktales that find the present colliding with other time frames—ancestral time, religious time, circular as well as linear, vertical as well as horizontal. What’s more, Sembène was influenced by Brecht’s “Epic Theatre,” incorporating its playful instructional models and disruptive event structures. The result is a cinema that looks and feels as radically “other” to Hollywood entertainment as it possibly can.

At the time these films were made, questions of anti-colonial art, “Third Cinema,” and “political modernism” had a place in the film world. Now, one wonders whether Sembène’s achievements—Xala’s biting satire or Ceddo’s deliberately shabby “aesthetic of poverty”—will soon be completely illegible, looking like “poorly made” films with “no plot.” Even Sembène’s final film, Moolaadé, was denied a seat at the grown-ups’ table at the Cannes Film Festival, shown in a sidebar to make room for Oldboy and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. This is all the more infuriating because Moolaadé is a beautiful, morally defiant film that is also unwilling to belittle its opponents. Like all of Sembène’s films, it finds forgiveness to be the very soul of civilization.

Of the three films remaining in the Belcourt’s series, only Xala is available on DVD.