Ousmane Sembene

Ousmane Sembene is born in 1923 in Casamance, southern Senegal. He went to school but is expelled in 1936 for indiscipline. His father, a fisherman, sent him to his relatives in Dakar, where he worked from 38 to 42 as an apprentice mechanic and a bricklayer. He is mobilized in the France Libre Army in 1942. Upon being discharged in 1946 at the end of the war, he went back to Dakar, and witnesses what will be the topic of one of his novels, a general strike that paralye the colony. He left Dakar in 1947 to live and work in France. Sembene worked as a docker in Marseille until 1960.

This is a time of engagement an political action. He join a labor union and the Parti Communiste Francais, and become one of the locals responsables. He reads a lot, marxist theory and novel, history and political theory. He participated in the protest movements against the war in Indochine, supports the FLN.
He published his first novel in 1956, Le docker noir (The Black Docker), on his loosely reconstructed experiences as an black African dockworker in Marseilles. His work as a writer will continue, with O Pays, mon beau Pays, Les petits bouts de bois de Dieu. The need to express something was here., between fiction, witness and history, about the African-Western relations.

Semebene returns in Senegal in 1961. Seeing again the illetrate people he wanted to write to, the idea of the cinema became necessary : not for entertainement, but as a « cours du soir ». In an oral culture, the cinema seemed to be the way to spread art and ideas. He will integrate a cinema school in 62 in Moscow, and his first short is shot in Senegal, Borom Sareti. His work was a part of the process that made that Africa was not only a consummer of pictures and art but a producer, too, talking of its own concerns. His first feature is La Noire de..., in 1966, the story of a african girls, brought in France by a couple, and used as a slave, in contemporean context. He is awarded by the Prix Jean Vigo. But in Le Mandat, in 1968, he shoot in Africa, and uses the Wolof to reconnect with african public. The european recognition in even wider, with the Special Critics Prie in Venice. Amoung the nine movies he directed, let's notice Ceddo, 1974, in which Sembene tells the story of a confrontation between muslim and traditionnals in XVIIth century, a movie against intolerance and use of religion in fights of power.

He died in 2007 the 9th of June.

http://images3.hiboox.com/images/0208/qshketzp.jpg

Filmography (feature) :
* 1966 : La Noire de...
* 1968 : Le Mandat (Mandabi)
* 1971 : Emitaï (Dieu du tonnerre)
* 1974 : Xala
* 1976 : Ceddo
* 1987 : Le Camp de Thiaroye
* 1992 : Guelwaar
* 2000 : Faat Kiné
2003 : Moolaadé


Ressources :
Web
OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST by Samba Gadjigo, Mount Holyoke College : http://www.newsreel.org/articles/OusmaneSembene.htm
http://www.ousmanesembene.com/
very short but some infos.
http://www.senegalaisement.com/senegal/ousmane_sembene.html
http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/sembene.html


Books
Niang, Sada. Littérature et cinéma en afrique francophone : Ousmane Sembène et Assia Djebar. Paris : L’Harmattan, 1996.
A call to action – The films of Ousmane Sembene, presented by Sheila Petty, ed. Praeger, Westport
Good introduction to African Cinema throug its « father », as Sembene is often called.
The cinema of Ousmane Semene, A pioneer of African Film, Francoise Pfaff, Greenwood Press, London, 1984.