| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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and his cinematic works were grounded in and driven by his own life experiences.23
Lastly, Annett Busch and Max Annas compiled a series of interviews conducted with Sembène by journalists, scholars, film critics, and others from different areas of the world over a fifty-year period. This book, Ousmane Sembène: Interviews (2008), provides English-language translations of twenty-five of his interviews, demonstrating the wide global appeal of his films as well as the universal nature of many of the themes he tackled in his literature and cinema.
Contribution of This Study
A chief aim of this study is to expand upon the works of Vieyra, Moore, Pfaff, Murphy, and all the others who have focused intellectual attention on analyzing Sembène’s cinema. Vieyra closely examined Sembène’s first six films. Moore undervalued and paid hardly any attention to cinematography in the films that she examined. Pfaff, who did the most extensive work in this area, did not cover the films that came out after 1976, namely Camp de Thiaroye (1988), Guelwaar (1992), Faat Kiné (2000), and Moolaade (2004). In addition to the fact that several films have yet to be fully analyzed, much remains to be said as well about cinematography, mise-en-scène, and symbolism. Murphy, whose book came out before Sembène’s last movie, devoted part of his volume to the analysis of Sembène’s literary texts, making it less feasible for him to thoroughly cover Sembène’s filmography. As a result, films such as Manda bi, Xala, Emitaï, Ceddo, Camp de Thiaroye, and La Noire de… have received considerable attention in the literature, whereas the latter films have thus far received much less attention. This is also the place to stress that though Manda bi and Xala in particular have inspired much attention among critics, Sembène’s later films have comparatively not been adequately examined.