In search of Sembène by Barrie McClune

JAMS 2 (1) pp. 107–119 Intellect Limited 2010

Journal of African Media Studies Volume 2 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams.2.1.107/1

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KEYWORDS African filmSenegalese cinemafilm distributionfilm exhibitioncelluloid gapOusmane Sembène

BARRIE MCCLUNECalifornia Newsreel

In search of Sembène

ABSTRACTThis visual essay begins at the National Homage to Ousmane Sembène in Dakar, Senegal in July 2008 and follows my search to find out whether Sembène’s work is accessible to the Dakar public. From conference rooms, to museums, to market stalls and living rooms, I explore what has happened to Sembène’s work in the city he made his home, and thereby raise questions about the future of African film-makers and African audiences.

INTRODUCTIONOn 8 July 2008, hundreds of people assembled in Dakar, Senegal to pay homage to the ‘Father of African Cinema’, Ousmane Sembène (Figure 1), one year after his death. Among the high-profile attendees were Danny Glover, Richard Bohringer and the President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade. After hours of heartfelt speeches and slow red carpet processions, the Place de La Souvenir emptied and the fanfare was over. At this point a much smaller group of about sixty participants gathered for an academic confer-ence on the legacy of the legendary film-maker and writer. Following a whirlwind of twelve papers, the conference floor was opened for questions. A certain M. Fall stood up and said, ‘[Sembène’s] films [are not seen] […] outside of classes. Exhibitions and research [conferences] are the only places we can see them’. He continued, ‘I bet, if you pick 20 people at random leaving this conference, the majority will not have seen [Sembène’s] films!’

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I decided to take this comment as a starting point for an exploration of the place of Sembène’s films in Dakar.

THE FORMAL FILM SECTORWeeks of searching the city of Dakar for any copies of films made by the Senegalese ‘Father of African Cinema’ proved a frustrating task. The museum exhibition that accompanied the ‘Homage National’ displayed, in a glass case, a newly released DVD collection of Sembène’s oeuvre. Paradoxically, the museum did not sell copies of the films and the guardian could not say where one could purchase them. So I went to the Centre Culturelle Française, which offers an annual membership for 12,000 CFA (£14.45). Most African films produced after the year 2000 and with a European distributor are avail-able for rental through its library. However, very few Senegalese film-makers are represented in the collection, and Sembène’s films Faat Kiné (2000) and Moolaadé (2004) are glaring omissions. The Centre Culturelle Française also contains an outside projection area where they put on film series presenting local work, including Senegalese classics (Figure 2). The centre screens these films for free to the public. The Centre Culturelle’s location in the mostly com-mercial downtown means expensive taxi rides for the audience. In addition,

Figure 1: Painting of Ousmane Sembène, erected at the Place de la Souvenir special exhibition on Ousmane Sembène in Dakar, Senegal.



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the consciously academic framing betrayed the fact that this was not your average audience: most likely academics and cinephiles, and a notably high attendance of white Europeans.

Besides the Centre Culturelle Française, there are only two function-ing cinemas in Dakar, the Cinéma La Liberté and the Cinéma El Hadj, and even these are under threat of closure. The Cinéma La Liberté has been subjected to many different state exhibition policies since its founda-tion in 1963. In 1974, when the Société d’Importation et de Distribution Cinématographe was founded, the state bought all the cinemas in an attempt to indigenize the exhibition industry. However, in 1991, Structural Adjustment Programmes, designed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, forced the industry to privatize (Sène 19 June 2008 interview). Despite new owners being contractually required to keep the sites going as cultural institutions, the buildings have been sold to commer-cial developers one by one (Sy 17 June 2008 interview). There have been more than twenty cinema closures in the last 10 years in Dakar alone. The Cinéma La Plage has been converted into a shopping centre (Figure 3). The Cinéma Le Paris is to become a hotel (Figure 4). Others have been trans-formed into churches or mosques.

Mamadou Sy, the programmer for the Cinéma La Liberté, argues that Senegalese films have no audience and that many of his colleagues who

Figure 2: Audience members at the Centre Culturelle Française in Dakar, Senegal watching Barcelone ou La Mort/Barcelona or Death for the July 2008 film series.


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Figure 4: The Cinéma Le Paris in Dakar, Senegal, which recently closed.

Figure 3: The Cinéma La Plage in Dakar, Senegal, which recently closed.



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work in the film industry have recently lost their jobs. He believes the waning audiences (which are leading to these closures) are related to the dilapidated state of cinemas in Dakar (Figure 5). As he narrated in 2008:

Sometimes I walk into the theatre and wonder how it is that people can pay to come to this cinema […]. If we could redo the chairs, make it like new, show some nice films, avoid the competition that televi-sion channels are posing us, I am sure that people would come to the cinema again.

Sy explains that the theatre makes 1,000,500 CFA (£1200) a week but that the rental price of the films is 500,000 CFA (£600). After paying electricity bills and employee salaries, he is barely able to make ends meet. To try to lower his costs, he has replaced the 35-mm projector with a video projector, and he screens VHS tapes that he has copied from rented DVDs (Figure 6).

Sy acquires and screens 23 movies a week for the Cinéma La Liberté (Figure 7). Most titles are new Hollywood releases that are being simultane-ously publicized on French television channels, and which Sy screens with French television commercials. In this way, in a strangely inverted publicity process, the French television channels that show film previews of Hollywood films help determine what films are going to be screened in Dakar cinemas. Sy does not bother screening French films as he says he has never found them to be popular with the audiences. However, he does follow new Indian releases through a Bollywood satellite channel and he regularly orders these titles from a cinema programmer in Mauritania. For asiatiques – Kung Fu flicks – he goes to a local rental store. Sy makes extra cash by screening sports events. The European Football Cup, for example, made him more money than a week of screening movies (Sy 17 June 2008 interview).

Many assume that it is the structural constraints created by monopolis-tic foreign distribution companies that explain why Senegalese publics and Senegalese films remain unacquainted with one another. To such claims, Mamadou Sy (17 June 2008 interview) provides an interesting answer:

African films don’t work in Senegal. We have tried them many times. Our last experience was with Moolaadé by Ousmane Sembène, but the film did not make in audience returns half of what a foreign DVD would make. And the DVD rents for much less. The clientele will not adapt to African films.

There are a couple of notable exceptions to the continued failure of African films in Senegalese cinemas, suggesting that audiences are not simply attracted to the big-budget foreign films that currently occupy booking slots. The Ivorian film Bal Poussière/Dust Ball (Duparc, 1988) drew such crowds that the front window of one of the cinemas was shattered by spectators trying to push their way into the cinema (Sy 17 June 2008 interview; Ndiaye 30 June 2008 interview). Sy explains this film’s popularity as follows: ‘It’s a funny story. It is about a man with five wives, a story that touches Africans’ (Sy 17 June 2008 interview). This suggests that Senegalese films would be more popular if they were made within the genre of the social parody, and that – if there were a great enough demand for Sembène’s films – distributors, exhibi-tors and audiences would have found a way to get them seen (probably by pirating and widely distributing them).


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Figure 5: Mamadou Sy hopes to remodel the Cinéma La Liberté with these discarded cushions from a remodelled Paris cinema.



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Figure 6: Mamadou Sy in the office of Cinéma La Liberté where he copies films on DVD to VHS.

Figure 7: The projection room of the Cinéma La Liberté with a celluloid projector that is no longer functioning.


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Figure 8: An outdoor screening in Grand Yoff, an area in Dakar, Senegal.

In spite of the commercial orientation of the two for profit theatres, the other cinema house, Cinéma El Hadj, has a non-profit wing, Image et Vie, which serves as a liaison point for film-makers, distributors, exhibitors, stu-dents and cinephiles who are concerned about the lack of exhibition space for African films. Partly founded in response to the closure of cinemas, Image et Vie’s focus is on educating children by utilizing mobile cinemas in popular neighbourhoods (Figure 8).

The director of Image et Vie, Hallioune Ndiaye, uses theatre, a popular and familiar art form amongst children, as a mechanism to engage children in active, critical participatory viewing of films. Funded by a combination of local and French ministries, Image et Vie hires an acting troop that introduces, interacts with and concludes the film screenings, encouraging children to be active viewers. When not working on Image et Vie, Ndiaye does the programme for Cinéma El Hadj. He says that while he does pay African directors for the right to screen their work, all of the foreign (Hollywood, Bollywood and Kung Fu) films are pirated.

THE INFORMAL FILM SECTORAs is evident from Mamadou Sy and Hallioune Ndiaye’s accounts, pirating is rampant in Dakar. All of the films projected in the two existing cinemas



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Figure 9: Samba Niang, who is in charge of the acquisition of DVDs in an electronics store in Dakar, Senegal.

are pirated, and most of the movies shown on television – judging from their quality and from what film-makers such as Arfang Sarr narrated in interviews – are also pirated. There are no formal movie or music stores where one can legally purchase films; however, items are widely availa-ble informally at market stalls. An examination of the DVD collections at stalls in Sandaga market showed that Sembène’s films were nowhere to be found. The stalls were stocked with VCDs of American college basketball seasons, American series such as Boston Legal, and collections of Hollywood action films. The fact that the VCDs can hold between 30 and 70 movies or episodes surely adds to their popularity. Amidst the DVDs of Hollywood, Bollywood and Kung Fu films, one can find, notably, an impressive collec-tion of African films. These are not Sembène’s films, however, but rather Ivorian soap operas and filmed versions of Senegalese theatre (to which entire stalls are dedicated). Fifty-six episodes of a popular Ivorian teledrama cost around 3000 CFA (£3.60).

I found only one store – an electronics store – with a small selection of Senegalese films, among which were a few films by Sembène. Selling expen-sive, imported goods such as washing machines and iPods, the store also has a collection of legally acquired CDs and DVDs. A DVD of a Sembène film


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Figure 10: Assane Diouf and his DVD stall in Sandaga market in Dakar, Senegal.

costs 26,000 CFA (£31.34), more than it costs to buy a DVD player, which can be purchased for around 20,000 CFA (£20) (Diédhiou 2008: 7). Samba Niang, the man in charge of acquisitions for the store, explained that the reason for the exorbitant prices is that he obtains these films from a distributor in France (Figure 9). The cost of the films, in combination with their transportation costs, means that in spite of their price tags, he barely makes a profit on the rare occasions these films are sold.

Other than the Sandaga and other market movie stalls (Figures 10–12), the only source of access many people have to DVDs are small rental libraries where, for 500 CFA (60p), one can rent a pirated DVD (usually of a Hollywood, Bollywood, Kung Fu or porn film) for 2 days.



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Figure 11: Close-up of Assane Diouf’s DVD stall in Sandaga market in Dakar, Senegal.

Figure 12: Bouba’s DVD shop.


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CONCLUSIONThe majority of Senegalese people are familiar with the name ‘Ousmane Sembène’, even if they are not familiar with his books and films. Sembène’s novel God’s Bits of Wood (first published in 1960 as Les bouts de bois de Dieu) is required reading in the Senegalese primary school curriculum, and Sembène’s film-making career was constantly covered in the local news during his lifetime. Nevertheless, the homage to Sembène did not seem to have any relevance in contemporary Dakar. The politicians and academics present at the event seemed to focus on films that few Senegalese people had seen and that no one knew where to find. In the month that I spent interviewing film professionals and cinéphiles in Dakar, no one could tell me where I could access Sembène’s films.

The situation should not solely be seen in a pessimistic light, however. Despite political and academic reluctance to move beyond Senegal’s cel-luloid past, there is a school of young film-makers (and an audience for their films) emerging. Image et Vie has showcased short films made on dig-ital formats by Dakarois students, and these quick-paced films hold their audiences captive. In contrast, when Image et Vie screened Ezra (Newton Aduaka, Nigeria, 2007; winner of the 2007 FESPACO Golden Stallion award for best film), less than a third of the audience remained by the time the credits had rolled. The patriotic pride in an illustrious cinematic past, the proliferation of filmed versions of Senegalese theatre productions, and the massive popularity of the Image et Vie projects all show that there is the potential for a self-sufficient and popular Senegalese film industry to develop. More diverse forms of exhibition – multiple television channels and DVD players – also provide audiences with more affordable ways to engage with films. Most importantly, the technological advances that have made film-making and film viewing more affordable for people have also meant that the local film industry can, for the first time, exist outside of a crip-pling reliance on foreign subsidies, and can begin, therefore, to address the desires of local audiences for the first time.

REFERENCESDiédhiou, Maria Dominica (2008), ‘VCD, DVD, DVX, Telemovelas, Piraterie …

Ces Leurres qui Affaissent le cinema sénégalais’, L’Observateur, no. 1420, p. 7.

Aduaka, Newton. (2007), Ezra, DVD, San Francisco: California Newsreel.DuParc, Henri (1988), Bal Poussière/Dust Ball, VHS, Abidjan: Focal 13.Guiro, Idrissa. (2007), Barcelone ou la Mort, DVD, Paris: France Prod. Simbadfi

Ims.Sembène, Ousmane (2000), Faat Kiné, DVD, San Francisco: California Newsreel. —— (2004), Moolaadé, DVD, New York: New Yorker Films.

INTERVIEWSDiouf, Assane (2008), interview with the author on 12 June, Dakar, Senegal

(interview notes in possession of author).Ndiaye, Halioune (2008), interview with the author on 30 June, Dakar, Senegal

(interview video and sound recording in possession of author).Sène, Ousmane (2008), interview with the author on 19 June. Dakar, Senegal

(interview notes in possession of author).



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Sy, Mamadou (2008), interview with the author on 17 June, Dakar, Senegal (interview video and sound recording in possession of author).

SUGGESTED CITATIONMcClune, B. (2010), ‘In search of Sembène’, Journal of African Media Studies

2: 1, pp. 107–119, doi: 10.1386/jams.2.1.107/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSBarrie McClune lives in San Francisco and works for the non-profit educa-tional film distribution company California Newsreel.

E-mail: [email protected]



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In search of Sembène by Barrie McClune