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Jonathan Rosenbaum previews the first film in eight years from Senegal's Ousmane Sembene
I blush to admit that I've still seen only half the eight features to date of Ousmane Sembene, made over a 33-year period as a supplement to his dozen or so volumes of fiction. Yet considering how difficult it generally is to track his remarkable and varied work on film or video, that comes ridiculously close to qualifying me as an expert. (The fact that it typically takes a couple of years for a new Sembene film to reach these shores is commonly perceived as an African as opposed to American form of inertia, but I would think the responsibility for this state of affairs might be shared.)
The first and in many ways still the greatest of all African filmmakers - give or take a masterpiece or two each by Yousef Chahine, Souleymane Cisse, and Djibril Diop Mambety, among others - Sembene, born into the Senegal working class in 1923, started out as a gifted novelist who turned to filmmaking at the age of 40 chiefly in order to address more Africans. Yet because he's a storyteller who regards film more as an extension of his prose than as an abstract calling, one of the clearest pleasures to be derived from his work is his propensity for reinventing the cinema - his own and everyone else's - every time he embarks on a new feature. There are a few obvious signs of stylistic continuity, such as a no-nonsense way of leaping into...