Emitai

Emitai is a 1971 film made by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene (pronounced Ooz-mahn Sem-Benah).  I have known about this film-maker for most of my life -- he became prominent in the late sixties with his third feature, released in America as Black Girl (1966) and made about 12 films, ending his career with Moolade (2004) about female circumcision.  Summaries of the content of his movies have deterred me from seeing them -- he was reputedly a feminist, educated in movie-making in Moscow, and, on paper, his pictures sound like rather arid, didactic works, calculated, it seems, to either bore or offend viewers without a stake in the history of colonization and oppression in Sub-Saharan Africa.  This is a racist perspective, of course, and it is worth exploring Sembene's pictures to assess whether their merits equal the praise often lavished upon them -- indeed,  usually, a particularly fawning sort of laudation that suggests a bad conscience on the part of White critics tinged with a distinct aura of condescension.  A three-film collection issued by Criterion, unfortunately without much in the way of commentary or annotation (the history and customs presented in these films present a challenge), provides viewers with an opportunity to assess for themselves Sembene's work. (It's worth noting that Sembene is called "the Father of African cinema," although this characterization makes female critics a bit uneasy and that he was also a famous and estimable novelist who published his books in French.) 

Emitai is a 103 minute movie focused on a stand-off between French colonial troops and the Dioli (dee-joe-lee) villagers occurring in rural south Senegal during World War Two.  (Sembene is Wolof-speaking and not Dioli, although he obviously knows a great deal about these people.)  The situation is that the French need soldiers to die for them on the battlefields in Europe.  Accordingly, they have instituted a policy of forced conscription (they disingenuously characterize draftees as "volunteers" or "recruits").  In addition, the French need foodstuffs to supply their troops and, so, they demand that each family contribute several hundred pounds of rice to the war effort.  (A subtitle has someone saying that the village must produce 50 tons of rice for the French army -- this seems excessive to me, since the village, seems to have only two or three-hundred inhabitants; I suspect this statement is some kind of mistake.)  The villagers are defiant and resist.  (An opening title dedicates the movie "To all the Militants of the African Cause.")  The colonial regime in French West Africa (now Senegal) sends about forty African soldiers wearing elongated furry-looking red fez hats to enforce these levies.  The rather officious and baffled-looking native soldiers are under the command of two White men -- a hirsute fellow who says the villagers must be treated with an "iron fist" and, also, the captain, an ineffectual soldier who looks a bit like an anguished Donald Sutherland and who claims to be sympathetic to the villagers, but is, ultimately, just as bad as his sidekick.  This situation seems tailor-made to demonstrate the villainy of the French overlords and the virtue of the colonialized and oppressed Africans -- and, in summary, the film does have that aspect.  But the movie is actually very funny, a sort of black comedy, in which the Africans seem just ignorant and just as delusional as their French masters.  

In the first couple scenes, we see hapless male villagers accosted by bumbling red-hatted soldiers and hustled away to Dakar where they will be sent into the meat-grinder of World War Two, ostensibly to save the Free French and Marshal Petain.  The African "volunteers" are childishly cooperative once detained and forced to serve and they are quite willing to march around barefoot singing a tune that includes the lines "Marshal, we are coming!"  The women in the village are far fiercer and less compliant.  In Dioli villages, rice is said to be "a woman's wealth" and we have seen the females in the town engaged in backbreaking labor to plant and harvest rice from mucky fields that their men stir up with big paddle-shaped hoes.  The women are not about to donate their rice to the French cause and, at night (clumsy day-for-night footage), they load their provisions in huge baskets that they carry on their heads to some sort of refuge in the thorny-looking outback.  When the French blunder into the village, there is no rice to be found and the remaining men have taken to their heels and are hiding in the bush.  The men seem to be incompetent and vainglorious idiots.  A sort of tribal council of five elders sits around a spooky-looking dead baobab tree.  The tree is cleft and reputedly the home in our realm of about six or seven blood-thirsty deities including the titular Emitai.  So far as I can see, Sembene has contempt for this animist religious system -- and, in fact, the movie was perceived as sacrilegious and banned in Senegal, at least for a time. (Senegal is a 97% Muslim country).  The tribal elders guzzle palm wine from totally inefficient gourd cups, spilling half the stuff all over their face and on the ground as they imbibe the sacred intoxicant.  Now and then, they slaughter an unfortunate rooster or goat in hope that the deities will come to their rescue.  Sometimes, Sembene shows the gods as animated stacks of hay and straw capped with grotesque masks -- he shoots these scenes through a red filter as if to emphasize the gods' demands that their thirst be slaked with blood.  The gods dance around but offer no useful advice.  The village elders, then, conclude that the warriors should fight the French soldiers.  "A warrior must die with a spear in his hand," the elders announce.  The men attack the French troops in what must surely be the most pathetically ineffective assault ever filmed.  They chuck spears at the troops that fall ten yards short of the skirmish line, embedding themselves in the earth without harming anyone, and a couple of men fire flimsy arrows from equally flimsy-looking toy bows.  The French colonial troops fire a volley equally ineffective but, more or less, by accident mortally wound one of the elders, a guy named Djimeko.  The wounded man is hauled off the field of honor by his cronies and dragged to the grotesque dead tree where the hay-stack deities are consulted to no better effect.  Djimeko dies and is wrapped up in a red sarcophagus with an outline of his features displayed in pearly white beads.  But the French troops intervene, capturing the corpse and posting sentries next to the body in its red shroud with the horns of a bull attached to the cadaver.  Meanwhile, back in town, all of the women have been herded into the square or plaza where they are forced to sit in the hot sun.  (This is the punishment of choice in this equatorial country.)  The women used to laboring all day long with babies strapped to their backs don't really seem to suffer that much -- they mostly fall asleep when they are not singing their defiance in a monotonous sort of chant.  An afternoon and a night passes.  In the morning, the town elders at their tree (where is it? Sembene's geography is stylized -- it seems to be right in town somewhere but in a different dimension than that occupied by the Colonial troops) bicker, drink some more palm wine, smoke their pipes, and some of them decide to cooperate with the French.  (At least, one elder delivers his levy of rice to the French troops guarding the women.)  There's a riot and the women, who really can't be controlled in any way, bolt, knocking down some frail fences that demarcate the village into odd little sectors.  One of two boys, seemingly orphans, who have been hanging around the edges of the action, providing some aid and comfort to the village women, gets shot down.  The women become agitated and, ignoring the French troops, march with the corpse out to where Djimeko in his red mummy-case is rotting.  The men appear on the road carrying huge baskets of what appears to be rice on their heads.  But, instead the baskets are full of what may be raffia headdresses and not rice at all.  The women are enraged, dancing and singing by the corpses.  Out on road on the edge of town, the French troops take aim at the village men who are lined up by a ditch.  The screen goes black and there is a volley of gunfire.  

The movie is made with the utmost simplicity.  There are almost no moving shots.  Some of the acting, particularly of the two White soldiers, is absolutely (and comically) terrible.  Everything is lucidly presented and the camera is always positioned so as to provide us with a clear understanding as to what we are seeing.  Nonetheless, Sembene suggests that the men and women occupy wholly different locations -- they coexist in the same space but seem to be radically apart, on different planes of existence.  (The gods live in their red-filter zone; when the elders butcher animals for their benefit, they just casually toss the carcasses into a hollow in the sacred Baobab tree.) The movie is very funny.  Toward the end, the French have orders to substitute posters showing Charles De Gaulle, a mere brigadier general for the seven-star marshall, General Petain.  This is completely baffling to everyone except the two feckless White Frenchmen.  The troops and the villagers count only two stars on de Gaulle's lapels and, therefore, can't figure out why he is suddenly in command -- this almost causes a mutiny among the otherwise rather somnolent colonial troops.    

As they say, "one robin doesn't make s Spring," but on the evidence of this film, it seems apparent that Ousmane Sembane is a very funny, intelligent, master film-maker.