Senegal,
1977, 120 min
Shown in 1993 / 1997
CREDITS
- dir
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Ousmane Sembène
- scr
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Ousmane Sembène
- cam
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Georges Caristan
- editor
-
Florence Eymon
- cast
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Tabara Ndiaye, Mamadou Ndiaye Diagne, Mustapha Yade, Ousmane Camara, Alioune Fall
- source
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New Yorker Films, 16 West 61st Street, New York, NY 10023. FAX: 212-307-7855.
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COMMENTS
Ousmane Sembène appeared in person to receive the 1993 Akira Kurosawa Award. Screened in the Indelible Images program 1997, selected by Danny Glover.
OTHER
The cinema of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène is cast in pageant form, in which the visceral elements of culture, politics and religion clash on an uncluttered stage. In 1977s Ceddo, which has the deceptive simplicity of a medieval morality play, Sembène examines European cultural imperialism in the 17th century, the period of slave trading and the introduction of Christianity and Islam to West Africa. Sembène draws freely from the tradition of the Greek plays, which lend themselves naturally to debates between opposing forces and the selection of champions. In the film, the influence of the large, central village's white Christian priest and single native convert is waning. A cadre of Moslems have succeeded in converting the royal family, but not the ceddo (the peasants). In protest against the proselytizing Moslems and the suppression of the ancient fetish religion, a champion of the ceddo initiates a plot by the ritualistic kidnapping of a princess. He then stakes out a public arena and awaits all challengers. In his ability to “seize small details of the present and expand them into awesome portents of the future,” the Village Voice added, “Sembène, with wondrous simplicity, achieves an operatic orchestration of raw forces similar to Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.” The resulting work crosses cultural barriers to expose the past and the present forces at work in Senegal.
FACTOID #328
Saul Bass, the genius graphic designer behind the introductory sequences to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, designed the posters for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
