Ceddo

 Ceddo (Chee-doe) is an ambitious historical parable, an attempt by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene to epitomize African history in 117 minutes.  In European medieval theater, for instance, so-called mystery plays, the world and its history are considered sub specie aeternitatis -- that is, as aspects of a universal or world-theater in which God's providence is dramatized as acting through history,  In this sort of dramaturgy, figures are stylized as types and historical developments reduced to clashes between these archetypal characters.  History appears as a system of coordinates on a path toward salvation (or, perhaps, apocalyptic destruction); figures who represent "everyman" or personify historical forces are shown in encounters with one another that allegorize these processes, presenting them as schematic "stations" in human affairs.  Ceddo (1976) has this aspect:  Sembene intends to dramatize the historical forces, as epitomized in violent encounters, that are foundational to modern Africa.  There's no doubt that Sembene, who frequently invokes "Pan-African" aspirations in his writings and interviews, intends Ceddo as an epic, an intensely dramatic and spectacularly colorful, account of the forces from which contemporary African society has emerged.  (Sembene's "Pan-African" project can be criticized as utopian and essentialist; it's not clear to me how pygmies living in the rain forests of the Congo are entangled in historical and social processes in Nigeria, for instance, or Mali.  It would be vain, I think, to suggest a Pan-European project of this kind, a universal history or world-theater, supposed to account equally for the dynamics of history in Denmark, for instance, and Croatia. However, one must accept an artist's ambitions in their own terms and though I doubt the efficacy of the Pan-African ideology -- the idea would be racist if advanced by a non-African -- Sembene obviously believes in this construction of history and advances this concept in allegorical form in Ceddo.)  Ceddo is one of three films issued as Criterion disks in a box-set that seems designed to commemorate the 2023 centenary of Sembene's birth in 1923.  The reader should consult my reviews and notes on the other two films, also presented in this Blog, the very funny and disturbing Emitai, no doubt the funniest picture about a massacre ever made, and the astonishing Xala.  

In Sembene's vision, African history in the early modern era, the time formative of colonialist interventions on the continent and the present post-colonial dispensation, results from the violent clash between several forces:  in Ceddo, Sembene dramatizes the Islamic mission  in Africa as a struggle between Muslim Imams and their faithful, the indigenous animist villagers organized under royal or kingly prerogatives, and the relatively ineffectual Roman Catholic Christians also competing to convert African villagers to their faith.  Complicating the interactions of these religious and political forces, each given symbolic representatives in the film, are Western (European) traders involved in the distribution of manufactured goods, in most cases guns and ammunition, in exchanges in which the currency is human flesh -- that is, the slave trade.  European trade in commodities such as cloth and weapons is shown to exploit the clash between religious cultures, a clash that yields conflict and, therefore, slaves which fuel historical change in a series of complicated feedback loops -- the more religious conflict, the more war and, therefore, the more slaves, a trade that fuels additional conflict by dumping weapons into the hands of the competing parties.  This sounds arid in theory and, in fact, parts of the film are somewhat dull -- there's a lot of speechifying, although in a peculiarly African rhetorical style involving huge and operatic gestures and the deployment of dozens of folk-wisdom apothegms (many of which are baffling).  But Sembene has devised a plot that is simple in outline, but complex in its presentation to dramatize his theses as to the historical forces at work.

In a rural area of Senegal, sometime between the 18th and 19th century (events are symbolic and not historical so Sembene keeps the time and location vague), a village of animist (idol-worshippers) farmers is under the rule of a lavishly dressed, unctuous, and, seemingly, dim-witted King.  The King has forged an alliance with a local Imam and wants his people to convert to Islam -- although his own religious status is left unclear.  The villagers are generally called "Ceddo" which means "outsiders" or "rebels" -- in this case, the term means "non-Muslims who worship fetish objects."  The villagers resist the increasing dominance of the Islamic brotherhood and, in fact, one of them has kidnapped the King's daughter, a beautiful princess.  He is holding the woman, who seems strangely compliant with the kidnapper's scheme, in the bush, near the village.  The woman lounges on a hammock, sometimes mostly naked, and doesn't make any effort to escape.  The kidnapper has dug a trench about 50 feet from the woman's hammock which is under a shade-tree.  A griot or herald of some kind keeps watch for rescuers sent by the king to recapture the princess.  The kidnapper, armed with a flimsy bow and arrow, crouches under a pile of earth in his trench, waiting to ambush the men sent to rescue the young woman.  (This young woman, as will be apparent at the film's climax, is an allegorical representation of "young Africa".)  The two knights who volunteer to succor the princess are readily dispatched one after the other in cartoonish duels -- Sembene stages these confrontations like Keystone Kops scenes.  (Each man returns to the village draped over his horse.)  The Ceddo decide to stage an uprising against their oppressors.  There is an implication that they sell some of their own family members into slavery to acquire muzzle-loaders, weapons that are hard to charge and inefficient against arrows and spears.  Sembene's Africans have the tendency to follow the line of least resistance -- in their uprising, they attack the Catholic priest who seems to have only one disciple, killing him and burning out his shack chapel with crossed sticks on its thatched roof.  Alarmed at these signs of aggression among the Ceddo, the Imam orders his gang to massacre some of the villages and burn their huts.  This is accomplished, the Ceddo are herded into two sex-segregated groups of people huddling together in the hot sun near the place where the Imam and his thugs are gathered under a shade tree.  Fumbling with his yellow prayer beads, the Imam baptizes the Ceddo providing each of them with new Islamic names.  The princess escapes from her notional captivity (she's always been free to do what she wants),  dresses herself in an elaborate and elegant cloak and gown, and goes into the village.  This sets up the climax, said by critics to be surprising, although, in my view, the outcome of things is pretty much obvious, at least, from the midpoint in the film.  Sembene has repeatedly said that the future of Africa lies in her women -- a thesis demonstrated by the film's climax.  (Here Sembene engages in wishful thinking, a fantasy that is similar, on a  reduced scale to the May Day and Red revolution that Bertolucci stages for his roughly contemporaneous, and similarly operatic, epic, 1900).  

In outline, Ceddo seems relatively clear.  In fact, the movie is willfully obscure and full of odd shifts in tone, dizzying flashbacks and flashforwards, and inexplicable events.  The picture is not easy to decipher and, even, some rudiments of its plot are unclear.  It's hard to understand why the Princess is being held hostage.  The King, an important figure in the film's first hour, more or less vanishes without a trace in the second half of the movie -- we learn he's been killed by the Imam and his gang.  This is offscreen and demonstrates the King's fundamentally marginal status to the historical proceedings shown in the movie -- African kings, Sembene seems to maintain, are impressive but wholly ineffectual at least during the era of  historical transition depicted in the movie.  The White priest and slave trader are caricature figures -- the slave trader, in particular, looks like a hillbilly as shown on an old bottle or can of Mountain Dew; the guy slouches around in a huge floppy hat and loose pajama-like clothes.  When one of the knightly rescuers is brought back to the village, we see someone measuring the earth for his grave, using a span from wrist to elbow, thus, requiring the figure to creep along the ground like an inchworm.  Two knights are killed and require burial but we see only one grave being prepared although the dialogue includes villages grousing about having to dig two holes.  The soundtrack shuttles back and forth between American Negro spirituals (as they used to be called), traditional music that sounds like it's played on a zither, and snappy up-tempo contemporary Jazz.  After the priest is inexplicably killed (he has no influence on anyone), the film engages  in a dizzying and audacious flash forward;  we see a trompe l'oeil ceiling with an African figure seeming to fall through the void surrounded by soaring choirs of disciples and, then, documentary-style shots of a modern Roman Catholic Mass complete with congregants receiving the Eucharist; the Mass seems to be associated with a funeral and, I think, we see the little hapless pre-colonial priest in the casket, buried, it seems, 250 years after his death.  (I can't exactly ascertain the meaning of this baffling prolepsis -- it seems to demonstrate the triumph of Christianity, but, of course, Senegal is overwhelmingly Muslim.  Sembene has a sympathy for Christians as shown in his novel Xala -- a couple of figures are Catholics -- but I don't know what he is trying to show here.)  For some reason, the disconsolate slaves, sitting in a semi-comatose state in one of the huts, are branded in a lurid scene with the French fleur-de-lys -- although the French are not yet anywhere in evidence.  (Sembene seems to be making a point about later French colonialist oppression, the subject of his Emitai).  Examples can be multiplied but the film is perplexingly full of stuff that doesn't exactly make sense.  However, none of these peculiarities are unintentional or lapses in Sembene's judgment -- he seems to intend any confusion that the film induces.  In larger term, Sembene's point is that African history is dream-like, full of sleepwalkers and figures who pretend to importance but are without any real agency.  The dominion of the Imams is symbolized by the Ceddo villagers bearing tribute to the midget Imam, bringing huge piles of twigs to the Muslim brotherhood -- the King says that the Muslim scholars can use fires made from the twigs to study their holy scriptures.  

The movie is spectacular in the way it marshals groups of people, staging various processions and confrontations in an impressive and stately manner.  The costumes are spectacular and the Sahel landscapes are sinister, dour, and have a malign beauty about them -- baked under the sun, we see baobab trees like grim monsters poised against the bare grey and brown horizons.  Ceddo is probably a masterpiece, but it is also very challenging for its viewers.