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To the memory of Peter Brunette—a great film critic, and my dear friend.
Contents
Introduction
Howard Alk: TheMurderofFredHampton
Ousmane Sembène
An Interview with Marcel Ophuls
Bernardo Bertolucci and 1900
Pell Mel Brooks . . . and He Is Mild
Interview with Hal Ashby regarding ComingHome
Roberta Findlay: Woman in Porn
Short Visits with Three European Masters
Interview with Martin Ritt
Two Interviews with Margarethe von Trotta
Bill Forsyth: Speaking with Scotland’s Finest Filmmaker
A Rare-and-Brief Glimpse of Director Akira Kurosawa
Norman Mailer: Where Tough Guys Spend the Winter
Volker Schlöndorff and Margaret Atwood: TheHandmaid’sTale Depicts Futuristic Puritans in Harvard Square
Three Short Encounters with Gus Van Sant
Hybrid Identities: An Interview with Agnieszka Holland
Errol Morris and Stephen Hawking: The Universe in a Mind
Two Interviews with Gillo Pontecorvo
Two Short Interviews with Liv Ullmann
Two Interviews with Jim Jarmusch
Interview with Frederick Wiseman
A Talk with Benôit Jacquot
Two Interviews with John Waters
Set This House on Fire: William Styron and Charles Burnett
Voices in the Middle East Index
Introduction
May I contextualize this volume? I would not have interviewed filmmakers for the three decades covered here, 1973–2005, sought out twenty-eight directors from around the world, if it had not been for the ascendancy of the “auteur” theory of cinema and my ascribing to its premises.
The story is a well-known one. It was in the mid-1950s that, in France, the writers (and future filmmakers) at Cahiers du Cinéma adopted a polemical position that it was the director who is the creative force behind a film of worth, and who must be acknowledged as the essential Artist. The “auteur.” Film is a collaborative art, but all others involved in the making of the film— the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the actors, the technicians— are working under the forceful orchestral arm of the directorfilmmaker.
In the 1960s, the “auteur theory” was brought to America by Andrew Sarris, the influential film critic for the Village Voice. He wrote enthusiastically about directors, often very unusual ones, whom his readers should know about. I was a Sarris devotee, and my “Bible” became his 1968 book, The AmericanCinema, in which he streamlined American film history into an exalted story of great American filmmakers. But it wasn’t only Sarris. Many other critics in the 1960s shifted the focus in their reviews to the person in the director’s chair, including Pauline Kael.
For the first time in the history of cinema, directors who were championed by critics were engaged for public appearances, asked to ruminate about their careers. In the late 1960s, when I was a
graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Hollywood veterans George Stevens and King Vidor were invited to our campus to speak, and each showed one of his essential movies. My first live filmmakers! But at Wisconsin, “the Berkeley of the Midwest,” I had other things in mind. I became embroiled in the seventies with campus issues, which included protesting America’s war in Vietnam, supporting strikes of Black students, and the unionizing of teaching assistants. I looked for similar themes to be taken up by filmmakers.
The first two interviews in my book reflected my concerns, as a “radical” White student, with issues of Black liberation, at home and around the world. Howard Alk came up to Madison from Chicago to show his blistering documentary The Murder of FredHampton, and we spoke of the death of the young Black Panther leader by Illinois police. The legendary Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène stopped in Wisconsin on his American tour, and he discussed the anticolonialist struggles of West Africans trying to make movies. I was delighted to have these conversations with Alk and Sembène, the latter a collaboration with Patrick McGilligan. But a co-interview with Maureen Turim with France’s Marcel Ophuls, also on tour in Madison, got contentious and argumentative at times. Despite Ophuls having made the monumental The Sorrow and the Pity, we youthful left-wingers showed little sympathy for what we saw as a middle-of-the road liberalism in his work. (Looking back now, we certainly could have been more polite, more respectful to a filmmaker of consequence.)
Meanwhile, Hollywood through the Reagan eighties was far more conservative politically than today. When I moved East from Wisconsin and, in 1978, became a professional film critic in Boston, I sought out the then-rare Hollywood “mavericks” who dealt openly with social issues. I spoke with Hal Ashby, who was the director of ComingHome,the first overtly pacifist Hollywood film to address the war in Vietnam. I interviewed Martin Ritt, whose NormaRaeand The MollyMaguires were made in support of labor unions. Ritt was also the only White Hollywood filmmaker who consistently made antiracist films about Black subjects, including Sounder . Finally, visiting Europe on assignment, I was thrilled to speak with Italy’s
Gillo Pontecorvo, the person behind the revolutionary call to arms, TheBattleofAlgiers.
The Cahiers French critics, I came to realize, were generally hostile to filmmakers who used the cinema for Important Themes and didactic purposes. And I had a division, too, with my American critic mentors. For much of the 1970s, I was the opposite of Sarris and Kael, who were centrist liberals, as I demanded above all of filmmakers a progressive political agenda. That can be seen even in my interview with Mel Brooks, whom I accused of making frivolous comedies. “To say there is no message in them is, I think, to be unfair and shortsighted,” Brooks defended himself.
Slowly, my hard-edged radicalism softened, as I began attending the New York Film Festival at the end of the 1970s. I interviewed European filmmakers such as R.W. Fassbinder and Bernardo Bertolucci, and their politics, though avowedly Marxist, were never more important to them than the sexual obsessions of their characters.
I spoke with Eric Rohmer, whose films dealt only with the rarefied French bourgeoisie. Rohmer, in truth, was a political conservative. And yet I liked his films. And where was overt concern with politics in the oddball, humanist world of Scotland’s Bill Forsyth? The baroque expressionist universe of Werner Herzog? Or the samurai tales of Akira Kurosawa?
Through the 1980s and 1990s, my conception of a “maverick” filmmaker became far more inclusive. I still admired politically minded filmmakers. But I made room to interview directors who placed on screen their private idiosyncratic universes, sometimes hermetically sealed off from the world at large. I am talking of John Waters and his black-humor gay Baltimore, and Gus Van Sant and his subterranean Portland, Oregon. Frederick Wiseman and Errol Morris made documentaries that were nominally on the left and yet were never ideological. And where politically did I place the anarchist-libertarian novelist Norman Mailer, whom I interviewed on the set of a movie he was directing?
Every filmmaker above, political and less so, is male. What of my commitment since the 1970s to feminism? Unfortunately, none of
the handful (then) of women directors ventured to the University of Wisconsin in the years I was a graduate student there.
Only when I was a film critic in Boston was I finally able to interview contemporary women filmmakers. I started oddly in 1979, with the first interview to be done with Roberta Findlay, the sole woman then directing pornographic features. And I met with Agnieszka Holland from Poland, whose films touched on the political world around her much more than so-called women’s issues. In 1984 and 1983, however, I twice sat down with the avowedly feminist German director, Margarethe von Trotta. Here, I encountered thematic obsessions radically apart from what concerned male directors.
For most “maverick” women filmmakers, the personal is what is political, and nothing is more personal than what happens to a woman’s body. This theme is put in a larger context of a dystopian future society in the film of The Handmaid’s Tale, for which I interviewed both the German male director, Volker Schlöndorff, and Margaret Atwood, Canadian author of the feminist novel adapted for the screen.
This volume ends with a return to my earliest concerns as a “radical” student interviewer: racial justice, colonialism. On the set in Virginia, I spoke with Charles Burnett, the esteemed African American filmmaker, about his film Nat Turner, a Troublesome Property. The soft-spoken Burnett admitted his admiration for Turner, mastermind of a murderous rebellion of slaves against their White masters and families: “His decision to do something so positive made the country a better place. Nat Turner was more American than those who denied him.” In 2005, Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad talked to me about the formidable task of making political films within the confines of the Palestinian Territories of Israel. “Now there are about a hundred people who live by producing their own work,” he said proudly, “[including] tough, professional actors who’ll do anything to survive in this field.”
The best of luck to them! Finally, when conducting interviews, sometimes two are better than one. May I thank those who participated with me in several of the discussions, all Madisonians at
one time: Patrick McGilligan, Maureen Turim, and the late Peter Brunette and Michael Wilmington. Also non-Madisonian Bill Nichols.
Howard Alk
TheMurder ofFredHampton
There are no credits on the important documentary The Murder of FredHampton (1971), for those behind the film wanted nothing to distract from their telling of the story of the murdered leader of Chicago’s Black Panther Party. They filmed Hampton in the time before his shooting by police and government agents and finished the film after. The actual credits would number only two, reflecting an almost exact division of labor between producer, codirector, cocameraman Michael Gray and editor, codirector, co-cameraman Howard Alk, the latter the subject of this interview.
Alk, who lives in Ottawa, Canada, is a native Chicagoan, a cofounder in the late 1950s of Chicago’s original Second City troupe. Of his earliest films, he is most proud of editing a crude but potent 1959 documentary short called “The Cry of Jazz.” Alk says, “It was made by a bunch of Black cats in Chicago. The film was embarrassingly primitive but it was a film which was prophetic about the Black–White situation.” Alk did second camera on Don’t Look Back (1967), D. A. Pennebaker’s film on young Bob Dylan, and he coedited Dylan’s Eat the Document (1972), a pseudo-documentary. What makes him proud? “The thing that gasses me is that the Panthers took MurderofFredHamptonto China, where it is showing now.”
The interview occurred during Alk’s visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Behind one-way silver shades, he looked a bit
like a fast-moving rock promoter.
Question: How did you and Michael Gray1 meet to make a film about Fred Hampton?
Response: I had been in New York after the 1968 [Democratic] convention working on an American Civil Liberty Union’s film answer to [Chicago] Mayor Daley. I was very dissatisfied with that work, with people like John Kenneth Galbraith talking about moral outrage. This guy named Michael Gray came up and asked me to cut his footage of the convention. He had undergone some sort of political catharsis by being hit on the head while shooting. We agreed we would not make another convention film but a film about people in Chicago to whom that shit had been happening for a long time, and for whom the convention was no news at all.
The Panther office had opened that week in Chicago. I went in and explained what we were about, and they said, “Sure.” It didn’t strike me as odd that the Panthers were in favor of getting their information out. There was no question of conning them. Our purpose was not to make an “objective evaluation” as the networks would have done. Our object was to let the Black Panther Party be seen.
Howard Alk editing The Murder ofFredHampton. Courtesy of Jesse Alk.
Question: Before your Fred Hampton film, you and Gray made AmericanRevolutionII(1969).
Response: That’s right. In addition to the Panthers, we met a bunch of Appalachian hillbilly shit-kickers called the Young Patriots. They were trying to make the change from a street gang into some kind of political organization which would serve the people. They were having a hard time but knew of the Panthers. We were shooting both groups simultaneously. The two met, and the film became the story of the Rainbow Coalition of Chicago, which was Appalachian Whites, Puerto Ricans, and Blacks. The Coalition frightened official Chicago enormously. The police were terrified.
Question: What happened to your film?
Response: American Revolution II did very well critically but very badly theatrically, except in Chicago. I never did recoup the money necessary to make it. It finally got into the hands of some tits-and-ass distributor which had become an artistically viable organization by handling the film Joe (1970). They realized that ARIIwas a political film, and they put it on the shelf with no way to spring it out. What we finally did was allow bootleg prints so it could be shown.
It was clear that the Black Panther Party was not understood by White America and much of Black America. Al[bert] Grossman, who used to be Dylan’s manager, gave us money. He said of Fred Hampton, “That man’s got to be heard.” In addition, it was commendable courage and commitment on the part of Michael to put [himself] $70,000 in hock in order to make sure the film was completed.
Question: Had you the experience of watching Fred Hampton speak in Black neighborhoods?
Response: Yes, I had, and it was really terrific. A lot of people seeing the film have the same idea that people had who knew Fred. That is, they love him. They are in the presence of a man who tells the truth. It seems to me that Black audiences have been accurate in determining who tells the truth and who bullshits. I think most people believe when Hampton talks of “White power
for White people” that he is not a racist. But racism is a byproduct of capitalism.
The film centers mostly on Fred as a teacher, leader by example. There is no personal material in the film. He and Mike and I felt it would be irrelevant and distracting to show a thing like, “What is Hampton like when he is not doing his job?” It was because he was doing his job that the state killed him. Fred Hampton was the enemy of the state. He made me an enemy of the state. You can quote me on that.
The material you see for the most part was Fred in public assembly, relating to a mass of people as you would speak from a stage. He didn’t care about the camera, though. He was a serious man, not hung up about a movie being made about him.
Question: What was Hampton’s background?
Response: Fred came from Maywood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he had been, before moving to the Panther Party, a youth leader of the NAACP. He was very much loved in Maywood, a predominantly White suburb, instrumental in getting people elected responsive to the people.
Question: Maywood is the site of the mock trial shown in the movie.
Response: The people of Maywood made their courtroom available for the mock trial set up by the Panthers as an instructional event. Those playing “pigs” are community people from Maywood. The guy who suggests a policy of repression and genocide is a councilman who Fred helped elect.
Question: Was the mock trial arranged because the film was being made?
Response: No. The Panther Party was into a whole series of people’s courts. There was [also] a people’s inquiry after Fred was killed as a public event. The Panthers just called up and said, “Hey, did you hear about the mock trial?” They would tell us when something important was happening. One time they called me and said, “The pigs are coming down to our office tonight. Are you up to standing with us?” The day of the murder they called Mike and said, “Get over here and shoot every foot of the apartment.” That footage was seen by the grand jury.
Question: Have you had people accusing you of being manipulative in your documentary in building up a case that Hampton was murdered?
Response: Nobody has accused me of that to my face. Some reviewers have hinted that we may have been involved in special pleading, although I think that the case is very tight that is made, inescapable. Now you may approve if you are so inclined of [Cook County state’s attorney Edward] Hanrahan’s actions.2 But I don’t think you can take refuge in the position that the murders [of Hampton and Panther member Mark Clark] were a defensive act on the part of poor attacked policemen.
Question: In the film you allow the law officials to present their own cases.
Response: It’s a question of giving people a fair shake. Everything Hanrahan says in the film is in chronologically correct order. I don’t fuck with him in filmic terms. When he begins to crumple and bullshit and backtrack, it happened that sequence. I’m not that interested in getting people to scream “Right On!” and go crazy. I’m not even that interested in Hanrahan. I’m interested in the reasons that Fred was murdered, and in changing a system not responsive to the needs of the people.
Question: Don’t you think that many people who voted for Hanrahan for state’s attorney in the 1972 Democratic primary knew he was a murderer and yet voted for him anyway? And how do you think he will do in the upcoming general election?
Response: It’s a very discouraging situation. Sure, there were a lot of people who thought Fred caught what was coming to him. There were even Black wards which went strongly for Hanrahan. Surveys were taken to find out why, and people said, “Well, we heard the name.” He’s going to be reelected.3
Question: Why do you think the Panthers didn’t retaliate against Hanrahan?
Response: The heat that would have come down on the Black community would have been unspeakable. The Panthers have made it clear that they are oxen on whose backs the people can
rise if they choose. Their concept of the vanguard is to offer themselves, let the shit come down on them. It’s an outrageously courageous position.
Question: For your film, did you have trouble securing television documentary footage of the events surrounding the murder?
Response: A great deal of trouble, a great deal of money, a great deal of hassle. First of all, footage [we needed] was missing. Some of it had been subpoenaed by Hanrahan the week of the murder. It was an interesting subpoena because it was partly for footage yet to be shot, an unheard-of kind of a subpoena. In another case of footage which mysteriously disappeared, a copy had been sent to Huntley–Brinkley [at NBC]. Some of the missing footage had been on TV. CBS had run six minutes of the official re-enactment of the shooting by the police on national TV. Therefore it had to be made available for sale. We had to go through the process of finding it, confronting them with its existence.
Footage was inordinately expensive, somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 to the networks. I don’t know how that compared to their normal stock footage sales prices. I only know if you are going to make this kind of film, you have to, somehow, beat the problem of getting “bread.”
Question: How do you respond to someone who complains that The Murder of FredHampton is technically and aesthetically a faulty movie?
Response: Mike and I didn’t really think if it was going to look pretty or not. In some cases, we were shooting too fast. In the office scene, where we were waiting for the cops to come and raid the place, there was twenty-five minutes notice. It was dark. There were no lights. That’s Plus X film pushed to 800. For technical errors, the film can be faulted totally. There is sloppy camerawork, all kinds of sloppy shit, and bad recording. Bad Art. A bad film if you want to discuss film aesthetics. But it makes no pretense of being a “movie.” It’s a political document, a sharing of material. Yet I think you get a sense of Fred, the man. And I think the case against the State is tight. You can’t make a case of
murder as an absolute. But you can make an absolute case for perjury. And the implication of murder is as close as it could be gotten by using the film media.
Question: Have you tried to sell The Murder of Fred Hampton to distributors?
Response: The film was seen by an enormous number of distributors. The responses ranged from “We couldn’t possibly handle this film because those [customers] will tear up the seats in the theaters” to “Documentaries don’t make money.” Well, there are documentaries that have made money: TheSkyAbove, the Mud Below [1961], Mondo Cane [1962], the [Jacques] Cousteau-type films. Maybe documentaries such as mine don’t make money. It may be a total error on our part, given the nature of the system, given the fact that people are made acutely uncomfortable by this kind of film, to think that such films will ever be distributed to the mass of people.
Question: What kind of film would you ideally want to do?4
Response: The film I would most like to make at the moment is one that it is not my vision imposed on the people at the other end of the camera but coming from them. I would like to go around the country presenting people with the proposition, “OK, we’re making a movie. It’s cool. You can do whatever you want because this is only a movie. But assume you had the power to run the community, what would you do? Let’s play a little game called ‘Running It.’”
Question: There’s a scene in The Murder of Fred Hampton which maybe hints at the kind of vision you would like to show in your movie: the breakfast program for children offered by the Panther Party.
Response: Mike shot the breakfast program, and that’s the way the breakfast programs were! All the horseshit suspicion in the media that the Panthers were feeding those children’s minds with “offthe-piggery” wasn’t true. The point was to feed people who needed to be fed. Some people were willing to dedicate themselves to serving the people. Fred Hampton was a man who
was serving the people. In Chicago, since Fred’s murder there are more Panther programs than ever before, four or five times more medical centers, ten times more breakfast programs.
Question: What can we learn from the lesson of Fred Hampton and the Panthers?
Response: White people are suffering from a lack of models. Black people had Malcolm [X] and Fred. They have Huey [Newton]. Models of free men, cats who stand in free space and say to their community constituency, “We’re here. If you’re up to it, step in.” To the real American youth out there (as opposed to the wilted flower children, the underground newspaper bull-shitters, the “counter culturalists”), people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin are disgusting. And to real revolutionists, people like that are a disgrace. For Abbie Hoffman to talk about “Revolution for the hell of it” is an appalling goddamned thing, as Fred Hampton told him.
Notes
This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Take One, May 1973.
1. Michael Gray (1935–2013) moved to Los Angeles, where he cowrote the skillful screenplay for The China Syndrome (1979), directed Wavelength (1983), a science fiction film, and was a producer for the TV series Starman and Star Trek: The NextGeneration.
2. Under Hanrahan’s orders, fourteen Chicago police staged a December 4, 1969, raid on the West Side home of Fred Hampton, ending in Hampton’s death.
3. Actually, Hanrahan (1921–2009) was defeated. According to Wikipedia: “The combined votes of Republicans and African American Democrats sufficed to elect his Republican opponent in the general election.”
4. Howard Alk (1930–1982) would direct Janis (1974), a documentary about Janis Joplin, edit Hard Rain (1976), a TV movie about a Bob Dylan musical tour, and shoot and edit Dylan’s feature Renaldo and Clara (1978). He died at fifty-two of a heroin overdose in Dylan’s Santa Monica studio, perhaps a suicide.
Ousmane Sembène
Interview by GeraldPeary andPatrickMcGilligan
Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène is an evocative conversationalist, a committed political activist, and Africa’s most important filmmaker, based on his first five films.1 He has an international reputation, and his volatile works have often been banned in Africa, typically through pressure of the French bureaucracy, which vigilantly watches over its former colonies. Only Sembène’s second feature, the muchcelebrated Mandabi (1968), has been widely distributed in Africa outside of Senegal.
Sembène was born in the rural southern region of his country, where Emitai (1971), his latest film, takes place. Emitai’s story of unwilling African natives being recruited by the French colonialist establishment parallels his own life: he fought in the French army during World War II as a forced enlistee. He remained afterward for a time in France, employed as a dockworker in Marseilles, and became a union organizer while training to be a writer. Sembène has published five acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories. His most famous novel, God’s Bits ofWood(1960), documents in semifictional form the historic Dakar–Niger railroad strike of 1947. His last novel, LeMandat(1966), was the basis for Mandabi,about a simple, uneducated man in the city who is reduced to hopelessness in his circular confrontations with government bureaucracy.
The filmmaker toured the United States in the fall of 1972 in order to raise funds for his next film project. He stopped in Madison, Wisconsin, for a day, showed Emitai at the university, and was
interviewed about his life and career. An adept translator put Sembène’s answers in French into articulate English.
Question: You were a highly successful novelist. Why did you make the switch to filmmaking?
Ousmane Sembène directing an actress.
Response: I’ve just finished another book but I feel it is of limited importance. First, 80 percent of Africans are illiterate. Only 20 percent of the population can possibly read it. But further, my books indispose the [African] bourgeoisie, so I am hardly read at home.
My movies have more followers than the political parties and the Catholic and Moslem religions combined. Every night I can fill up a movie theater. The people will come whether they share my ideas or not. I tell you, in Africa, especially in Senegal, even a
blind person will go to the cinema and pay for an extra seat to pay a young person to explain the film to him.
Personally, I prefer to read because I learned from reading. But I think the cinema is culturally more important, and for us in Africa it is an absolute necessity. There is one thing you can’t take away from the African masses and that is having seen something.
Question: But are the films by native Black Africans being watched at home?
Response: In West Africa, distribution remains in the hands of two French companies that have been there since colonial times. Because of the active push of our native filmmakers, such as our group in Senegal, they are forced to distribute our films, though they do so very slowly. Of the twenty movies we have made in Senegal, five have been distributed. It’s a continuous fight, for we don’t think we can resolve the problems of cinema independent of the other problems of African society.
Neocolonialism is passed on culturally through the cinema. And that’s why African cinema is being controlled from Paris, London, Lisbon, Rome, and even America. And that’s why we see almost exclusively the worst French, American, and Italian films. Cinema from the beginning has worked to destroy the native African culture. A lot of films have been made about Africa but they are stories of European and American invaders with Africa serving as décor. Instead of being taught our ancestry, all we know is Tarzan. Many of us perceive Africa with a certain alienation learned from the cinema. Movies have infused a European way of walking, a European style of doing. Even African gangsters are inspired by the cinema.
African art has continued, even as the black bourgeoisie has aped American and European models. True art remains in the villages and rural communities, preserved in the ceremony and religion. It is from believing in this communal art that we can be saved.
Question: What are the particular circumstances of making films in Senegal?
Response: We produce films in a country where there is only one party, that of [President] Senghor. If you are not within the party, you are against it. Thus we have lots of problems, and they will continue while Senghor is in control.2 For instance, his government just vetoed the distribution of the film of a young director, the story of a Black American who discovers Senegal.
We are approximately twenty filmmakers in Senegal. Last year we made four long films produced through our own means. Financing is our most complex problem. You can find a very small group of people who have money which they might lend you in exchange for participating in the filming. Perhaps you can locate a friend who has credit at a bank. Emitai was shot on money I received on a commission from an American church. We do not refuse any money, even from a church.
We began by making our films on 16mm, much more economical. But the distributors would refuse to project the films in the cities because of the 16mm, so we had to adapt to their game. Our films are shot on 35mm for the city theaters, then presented in 16mm for the rural areas where there is no 35mm. Emitai has been banned everywhere in Africa except in Senegal, where it was allowed only after a year of protests. We tried to show Emitai in Guadeloupe, but the ambassador from France interceded. The film had one night of exhibition in Upper Volta3 but never again. When I was invited by the government and students of the Ivory Coast, the French ambassador went to the head of the government. I was told that it wasn’t an “opportune time” to show this film. They were all very polite, so I didn’t say anything. I took my film and left.
Question: Has Emitaiever been screened in France?
Response: Every time I want to show the film, the date falls on a “day of mourning for de Gaulle.” De Gaulle dies every day for my film.
Question: Can we go back to your second feature, Mandabi. Who were the actors?
Response: They weren’t professionals. The old man who plays the main role [Makuredia Guey], we found working near the airport. He had never acted before. I had a team of colleagues and together we looked around the city and country for actors. We didn’t pay a lot but we did pay, so it was always difficult to choose. There was also the influence of my parents, my friends, and even the mistresses of my friends, and we had to struggle against all that. You laugh, but I assure you it was very difficult. Once the police called and this fellow arrived who was their representative. He came to tell us he had a friend who wanted his mistress in the film. I was forced to accept or else it would have cost me. It is concessions like this one that make work difficult.
We rehearsed for one month in a room very much like this lecture hall. Mandabiwas the first film completely in the [Wolof] Senegalese language, and I wanted the actors to speak the language accurately. There was no text, so the actors had to know what they were going to say and say it at the right moment. I composed the music for Mandabi,and tried to make it of maximum importance. After the film was presented in Dakar, people sang the theme song for a while. But the song was “vetoed” from the radio, which belongs to the government. We in Senegal are looking for music that is particularly suited for our type of film. I think here is where African cinema still suffers certain difficulties. We are undergoing Afro-American music and Cuban music. I’m not saying that’s bad, but I prefer that we would be able to create an African music.
Question: Are you satisfied with your conclusion to Mandabi?
Response: I don’t think I really have to like the ending. The ending is linked to the evolution of Senegalese society; thus, it is ambiguous. As the postman says [in the film], either we will have to bring about certain changes or we will remain corrupt. I don’t know. Do you like the ending?
Question: Some would say it is the duty of the political artist to go beyond a picture of corruption and to present a vision of the future, what could be.
Response: The role of the artist is to feel the heartbeat of society. But the power to decide escapes every artist. I live in a capitalist society, and I can’t go any further than the people. Those for change are only a handful, a minority, and we don’t have that Don Quixote attitude that we can change society. One work cannot instigate change. I don’t think that in history there has been a single revolutionary work that has brought the people to create a revolution. It’s not after having read Marx or Lenin that you go out and make a revolution. It’s not after reading Marcuse in America. All that an artist can do is bring the people to the point of having an idea in their heads that they share, and that helps. People have killed and died for an idea.
I have no belief that, after people saw Mandabi, they would go out and make a revolution. But people liked the film and talked about it. People discussed Mandabi in the post office or the market and decided they were not going to pay out their money like the person in the movie. They reported those trying to victimize them, which led to many arrests. But when they denounced the crooks, they would say it was the government which was corrupt. And they would say they were going to change the country.
Question: Mandabi is a city film. Why did you address Emitai particularly to the peasantry?
Response: In African countries, the peasants are even more exploited than the workers. They see that the workers are favored and earn their pittance each month. Therefore, the element of discontent is much more advanced among the peasants than the workers. This fact doesn’t give the peasantry the conscience of revolutionaries, but it can lead to movements of revolt with positive results. There are peasants involved in commercial activities who are beginning to understand economic exchange. To tear apart this discontent, Senghor distributed three billion francs to the peasants.
Question: What is the historical background of Emitai?
Response: I came myself from this rural region, and these true events of the Diola people inspired me. During the last World
War, those of my age, eighteen, were forced to join the French army. Without knowing why, we were hired for the liberation of Europe. Then when we returned home, the colonialists began to kill us, whether we were in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Algeria, or Madagascar. Those of us who had returned from the French involvement in Vietnam in 1946 came back to struggle against the French.
Question: Aren’t the women the true heroes of Emitai,as they were also in your revolutionary novel, God’sBitsofWood?
Response: As Emitai shows, when the French wanted our rice, the women refused but the men accepted the orders. Women have played a very important part in our history. They have been guardians of our traditions and culture even when certain of the men were alienated during the colonial period. The little that we do know of our history we owe to our women, our grandmothers. In certain African countries it is the women who control the market economy. There are villages where all authority rests with women. And whether African men like it or not, they can’t do anything without the women’s consent, whether it’s marriage, divorce, or baptism.4
Question: What were the circumstances of filming Emitai?
Response: The Diolas are a small minority with a native language about to disappear. For two years, I learned and practiced it. Then I set out to make contact with the chief of the Sacred Forest. I needed to bring a gift offering. He preferred alcohol, but I myself drank it along the way. When I arrived and was hungry, the chief ate without inviting me. Afterward, he said, “You know well to speak to a king you have to bring something.” The chief is not chief by birth, incidentally, but initiated after receiving an education and training. There have been moments when the Diolas elected leaders who then left in the middle of the night.
The people in the movie are people from the village. I had a limited time to tell my story, so I couldn’t permit them to do only what they wanted. We would rehearse beginning fifteen minutes before the filming, but all the movements were free. I bought red
bonnets for the young people to wear as soldiers. They refused at first because such bonnets are reserved for the chief.
Question: Did you consciously move from the individual in Mandabi to the collective hero of Emitai?
Response: I’m not the one evolving. It’s the subject which imposes the movement. This story happened to be a collective story. I wanted to show action of a well-disciplined ethnic group in which everyone saw himself as an integral part of the whole.
Question: Have the Diola people seen Emitai?
Response: Before premiering the film for the Senegalese government, I went to the village to project it. I remained three nights. All the villagers from the whole area came and, because they have no cinema, their reaction was that of children looking in the mirror for the first time. After the first showing, the old men withdrew into the Sacred Forest to discuss the film. When I wanted to leave, they said, “Wait until tomorrow,” then returned to the forest. They came back the second evening [for a second screening]. The third evening, there was a debate. The old men were happy to hear that there was a beautiful language for them, but they weren’t happy with the presentation of the gods. The gods still were sacred and helped the old men maintain authority. The young people accused the old of cowardice for not resisting [the French colonialists] at the end of the war. The women agreed, but were very proud of their own role.
Question: And the reaction in the cities?
Response: Many asked why I wanted to make a film about the Diolas. You have to know that the majority of maids in Senegal are Diolas to give you an idea of the superiority felt by others in relation to them. The African bourgeoisie have two or three maids. It isn’t very expensive. To see Emitai, the maids left the children. They invited each other from neighborhood to neighborhood to see the film. Finally, the majority Wolofs went to see the film and realized that the history of Senegal and the resistance was not just the history of Wolofs. The Diolas are part of Senegal, and so are other ethnic groups. And when the Senegalese government finally decreed that they were going to
teach Wolof, they were in a hurry to add Diola. I don’t know if it was because of the film, but that is what happened.
Question: Even if you are modest in believing so, your films are influential political instruments in Senegal. Could films made in the USA have the same effect in this country?
Response: Alone, no. With the people, yes. You can put all the revolutionary work on the television, but if you don’t go down into the streets, nothing will change. That is my opinion.
Notes
This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (Spring 1973).
1. Sembène (1923–2007) would make eleven films in all. The last was Moolaadéin 2004.
2. Senghor (1906–2001) remained president until 1980.
3. Now Burkina Faso.
4. Sembène often dealt in his films with issues of women’s rights. Black Girl (1966), his first work, is about an African girl trapped in slavery by a French family who has brought her to their country to be a nanny. His final film, Moolaadé, is an attack on the practice in some African countries of genital mutilation.
