The Films of Ousmane Sembène: Discourse, Politics, and Culture by Amadou T. Fofana (review)

Reviews 209 recherche, semble l’entendre.Avec son travail artistique et ses préoccupations sociales, ce film occupe une place d’honneur parmi les productions helvétiques contemporaines, dont la qualité est reconnue par les jurys internationaux. Gettysburg College (PA) Marie-Jo Binet Fofana, Amadou T. The Films of Ousmane Sembène: Discourse, Politics, and Culture. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2012. ISBN 978-1-60497-831-5. Pp. 338. $115. Known to film scholars as the‘father of African cinema,’Sembène (1923–2007) has been the subject of critical reflection since early in his career. Fofana contributes to this field by discussing Sembène’s eleven available films, most significantly those made after Françoise Pfaff’s The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene, A Pioneer of African Film (1984). Both Pfaff and Fofana represent the moment each inhabits as critic in relation to Sembène’s film career. In 1984 Pfaff offered for the first time to an English-speaking audience critical terms in which to read the“Africanness of Sembène’s film language” (43–98) as he broke ground in African filmmaking. Almost thirty years later, Fofana examines Sembène’s early and later films in relation to one another, including Camp de Thiaroye (1988), Guelwaar (1992), Faat Kine (2000), and Moolaade (2004). Reflecting on how Sembène documented and held up for examination challenges faced by Senegalese and Africans in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Fofana reviews and broadens reflection on themes addressed by earlier critics: the socio-political and cultural context of Sembène’s work; the representation of women and issues of polygamy, incest, prostitution, and female circumcision; construction of national and cultural identity through representations of Africa and Africans; the African oral tradition and the filmmaker as modern griot. Discussion of Sembène’s later films allows Fofana to address tensions produced in neo-colonial Africa by the problematics of language, the cohabitation of Christianity and Islam, conceptualizations of the traditional and the modern, especially in terms of the role of women in a changing society, and the challenges presented by global forces increasingly present on the continent. Fofana maps the construction of meaning in films discussed through analyses of camera use, mise-en-scène, and cultural symbolism, often through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonization and neo-colonialism. Questions of politics and culture are grounded in studies from a variety of disciplines, which offers an overview especially helpful for those new to the study of Africa. Appendices provide a useful synopsis and list of the main characters of all of Sembène’s films. Fofana adds a personal touch when he describes in the preface how his early fascination with the filmmaker’s work salved Fofana’s nostalgia for his native Senegal while a graduate student in the United States and evolved into a scholar’s curiosity about how Sembène“viewed the people of Senegal and Africans more generally and how he desired to change them at multiple levels and in quite revolutionary ways” (xvi). This kinship may be one of the reasons Fofana sometimes offers his personal perspective on some of Sembène’s opinions, his trivialization of la francophonie, for example (52– 56). Fofana further enriches the volume with information from personal interviews with Sembène himself and friends and co-workers, like the note that during their interview Sembène was wearing a t-shirt saying “screen griot” (59). The Films of Ousmane Sembène serves as an accessible introduction for those new to Sembène’s films as well as a valuable resource for future scholars. Wake Forest University (NC) Sarah Barbour Gimello-Mesplomb, Frédéric, éd. L’invention d’un genre: le cinéma fantastique français, ou les constructions sociales d’un objet de la cinéphilie ordinaire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012. ISBN 978-2-296-96806-6. Pp. 220. 21,85 a. À quoi ressemble un film fantastique français? Cela semble une question assez facile, jusqu’à ce qu’on se penche sur l’histoire du film fantastique français, thème de cet ouvrage, dont la première partie traite de l’histoire du...