Emitai

Ousmane Sembène's Emitaï premiered in 1971 though a French boycott honored in much of Western Africa prevented any wide release for the film. The film, set during the Second World War, unsparingly portrays the French as genocidal colonialists who endeavor to strip mine Senegal of its men and bounty. A nineteen minute near wordless pre-credit sequence show the French commanders and their lackeys violently impressing young men into service. The Diola rural village they hail from is the site of the action for the rest of the film. The French and their troops return a year or so later demanding to receive a "tax" in the form of rice. The male elders consult their Gods and dither, the women hide the rice and are forced to sit in the sun by their oppressors until they break and reveal the hiding place. Despite the villagers willingness to compromise ("better to be a living lamb then a dead lion"), a massacre ensues.

Emitaï is the weakest of Sembène's films from the 1970s because its last act is relentlessly static. The film just sits there regarding the women in the sun, highlighting Sembène's weakest point, his didacticism, rather than playing off it. I did laugh when he cut from a shot of the French officers to a shot of pigs running, the pigs following the swine, as it were. Eisenstein would have been proud, as, I'm sure were Sembène's former teachers at the Gorky Film Studios. The film is so encased in the dialectics of class struggle that he chooses to make no distinction between the Vichy government and the Free French. When the soldiers paste up posters of De Gaulle to replace those of Petain the message is "meet the new boss/same as the old boss."

Sembène's Marxism tends to flatten the villagers into a mute suffering mass standing politely in all too perfect circles. An exception is the village chief, Djimeko, played in a blaze of one off fury by Andongo Diabon. Djimeko is wounded in a skirmish, as his life hangs in the balance, he beseeches his Gods, including the titular Emitaï, for guidance. They question his fealty to them and deem he must die. The red-tinted sequence in which Djimeko questions and berates his deities is among the most extraordinary of Sembène's career. It best illustrates the different belief systems that lies at the heart of the film's conflict. Unfortunately, once Djimeko departs this veil, the film, despite its visual splendor, flags.