Mambety

DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBETY RETROSPECTIVE

Le Franc (1994, 45min)
The Little Girl Who Stole the Sun (1999, 44min)

Sept. 18 | 7pm | Texas Union Theatre

mambety

Considered insolent, daring and an arrogant anti-conformist, Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambety mesmerized the film world with the use of nonprofessional actors, inventive camerawork, dazzling sound and editing, and a penetrating symbolic and metaphoric depth previously not reached in African cinema.

While the "fathers of African cinema" (Ousmane Sembene, Jean-Pierre Dikongue-Pipa, Oumarou Ganda, Souleymane Cisse) reverted to the deceptively simplistic narrative forms reminiscent of the Russian Kino-Pravda school of Dziga Vertov, the Italian Neo-realism of Zavattini, De Sica and Rossellini, or even the Rouch’s Ethnographic Cinema and the French New Wave, Mambety worked to entirely reinvent cinema, to stretch the possibilities of visuals and sounds. As he stated in an interview with author Frank Ukadike, "One has to choose between engaging in stylistic research or the mere recording of facts. I feel that a filmmaker must go beyond the recording of facts."

Recognition of Mambety reaches beyond his artistic talent and unique cinema perspective to his humanism, which surfaces in the iconic images of his films. By chronicling the fiasco of post-independent Africa through the eyes of the continent’s most marginalized, or the "little people" (whom he described as "the only true, consistent, unaffected people in the world, for whom every morning brings the same question: how to preserve what is essentially themselves?"), Mambety condemned the African power structure for its greed, incompetence and shortsightedness. It was the African elites, Mambety implied, who squandered the historical opportunity the continent’s independence provided and turned what could have been a great historical experience into a quagmire of depravation and degradation.

In Le Franc (1994), the first film in Mambety’s uncompleted trilogy, Contes des Petites Gens (Tales of Little People), the French government’s devaluation of the local money, the CFA Franc, by 50% serves as the backdrop to the story of Marigo, a poor musician, who hopes to better his life by winning the lottery. When Marigo actually wins, we follow him on his odyssey to redeem the lucky ticket through the dilapidation, poverty and deprivation of Senegalese everyday life. With the lottery metaphor, Mambety suggests that for many life is becoming more and more of a lottery: a game of speculation and greed, not of core moral values.

In the second part of the triptych, La Petite Venduese de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, 1999), Mambety reimagines a world built on self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. The film follows Sili Laam, a poor and crippled young girl who attempts to break into the world of street newspaper salesmen, a world controlled by chauvinistic, territorial boys. Sili Laam shines in her resilience and her refusal to accept the marginalized position she has been dealt.

Through Marigo and Sili Laam, Mambety glorifies the survivors, who in their own modest ways resist the oppression of everyday life in Africa. These free-sprits seek space and scope and ways to explore a more noble aspect of being. No wonder Sili Laam’s motto is "Allons Y," "Let’s Roll!" With this motto, Mambety’s characters escape the confines of African society to join the dignified, self-reliant and free men and women of the world.

–Olivier J. Tchouaffe
Olivier J. Tchouaffe was born in Yaounde, Cameroon. He is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Radio-Television-Film of The University of Texas at Austin.