Ousmane Sembene - Third Cinema - Sub-Saharan Africa

Ousmane Sembene

Ousmane Sembene
1)Sembene is the most important director in sub-Saharan Africa
2)according to Mast and Kawin.
    Sembene adapted many of his own stories and novels into films.

I couldn't get the picture that i really wanted of when she first meets the French woman from the clip. 

His film Black Girl (1966)
Is a study of an African woman who feels deceived and corrupted when brought to the south of France to work as a cleaning lady.

Film programmer Ashley Clark explains,
 1)"Black Girl ... can be understood as the product of a lifetime
     of negotiating challenging power relations.
 2)Sembène subsumes this wellspring of complexity into the radiant, statuesque form of his central
   character, Diouana, who is first seen lonely and shaken at the docks, having arrived in France from
   Senegal on a boat whose horn blares like a demonic warning clarion against viciously whipping
    winds.
3)The film’s first words—articulated in Diouana’s plaintive voice-over—are: “Has anyone come for
    me?” A point-of-view shot takes us into her head space as she watches the hustle and bustle with a
    dispassionate gaze; it’s an unspectacular yet thrilling moment, fully immersing us in the world of an
    African character.
4)It’s clear, immediately: this is her story. (It’s worth pointing out that funding constraints forced
    Sembène to dub Diouana’s minimal yet poetic interior monologue in French, a compromise that has
   the powerful dramatic effect of reflecting the psychic weight of colonialism: she must craft her inner
   self in a language she cannot speak.)
5) In her new home, Diouana is first treated with brusque tolerance,
6) which soon gives way to hostility from the matriarch (Anne-Marie Jelinek)
7)  and indifference from her husband, an ostensibly pleasant but palpably useless man who fails to
     support Diouana as she slides into depression.
8) Having been promised work looking after her hosts’ three children,
9)Diouana is instead restricted to a routine of grinding chores,
10)and subjected to overt racism in dinner party scenes set around her employers’ dining table; t
11)These are horrifying due to their blank understatement.
12) In one of the film’s most upsetting moments, Sembène’s camera remains clinically distant as a
    corpulent, lascivious guest stares at Diouana’s behind, then is unable to restrain himself from planting
    a nonconsensual kiss on her frozen face.
13)Meanwhile, other guests—clearly well-to-do “liberals,” by the way—speak patronizingly of Africans
     in Diouana’s presence (“With independence, the natives have lost a natural quality”)."

In following scene, Diouana recalls how she was chosen to work for a rich, French couple.

Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, 1966):
Not the clip we saw for class - but a nice trailer with small review Click Here It briefly includes the bit.

This is a great picture of when the newly elected get huge brief cases of money. 

Sembene's Xala (1975)
1)is another of his more well known films.
2) In the film, El Hadji, a businessman in Senegal, is cursed with crippling erectile dysfunction.
3) El Hadji's impotence speaks to the failure of neocolonialist governments.

The following scene shows how the neocolonialist powers have maintained their political  influence by corrupting the ruling elites of Senegal.  

Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975):

Opening scene - this is the clip we saw for class Click Here

Here is an article on the film called "Black Man Time: ‘Post’-Colonialism as Conspiracy in ‘Xala’"
Click Here for article