Djibril Diop Mambety: un cinéaste à contre-courant

African Studies Review, Sep 2003 by Petty, Sheila

Sada Niang. Djibril Diop Mambety: un cinéaste à contre-courant. Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 2002. 239 pp. Bibliography/Filmography. Interviews. Euros 19,80. Paper.

On July 23, 1998, African cinema lost one of its most gifted filmmakers when Djibril Diop Mambety died. This important volume considers Mambety's legacy to African cinema and explores his contribution to aesthetics as a filmmaker who resisted easy categorization and consistently pushed the creative boundaries of African cinema. Sada Niang successfully undertakes the complex and compelling challenge of situating Mambety as a film artist and individual through a deft analysis of his films by contextualizing them within their cultural and sociopolitical frameworks.

The volume is organized into six chapters, a conclusion, and a collection of short interviews that cover the broad span of Mambety's work. Chapter 1 provides an excellent overview of Senegalese and especially Dakar culture, politics, and artistic expression during the period in which Mambety was born and grew up. Subsequent chapters, arranged in chronological order, focus on specific films, from Contras' City (1968) through Badou' Boy (1970), Touki Bouki (1973), and Hyènes/Hyenas (1992). Chapter 6 offers an examination of Mambety as an artist through an analysis of the two films from his uncompleted triptych, Contes des petites gens (Tales of Little People) : Le Franc (The Franc), 1994, and La Petite vendeuse de soleil (The Littie Girl Who Sold the Sun), 1999. Taken as a whole, these chapters demonstrate the progression of Mambety's view of African society and his aesthetic expression over the three decades of his career.

Niang argues convincingly that Mambety blazed a distinct path in African cinema, one that sets him apart from his peers. For example, unlike other African filmmakers of the late 1960s and early 1970s whose films were structured around essentialist nationalist discourse focused on the binary opposition of African values versus cultural alienation, Mambety sought to expose the diversity of real life ("répertorier la diversité du réel") (49). By doing so, he created a cinematic tapestry of Senegalese life in all its postindependence complexities and contradictions, championing the dispossessed and marginalized elements of society. Niang characterizes Mambety's cinematic style as one that promotes spontaneity and antilinear narrative structure as a means of creating active spectatorship. This is demonstrated in the analysis of Touki Bouki illustrating Mambety's collaborative working relationship with actors (92). In the chapter on Badou' Boy, Niang's discussion of Mambety's depiction of urban subculture and parody underscores the filmmaker's desire to recoup images and experiences marginalized in African cinema by the narrow focus on nationalism.

Niang's comparisons of Mambety's work with that of his peers emphasize the uniqueness of his place in African cinema. Of particular interest is the way in which the author reveals how Mambety's work contrasts with that of Sembène in terms of form and content. Perhaps a minor shortcoming of Niang's approach is the absence of detailed textual analysis of the films, which would have added to the understanding of Mambety's aesthetic signature.

Overall, this volume represents the most comprehensive work to date on Mambety's films. Niang carefully situates each of the films within the historical, political, and literary contexts of the period and succeeds in underlining how Mambety's complicated relationship to African nationalism molded his artistic and creative itinerary. In particular, Niang's analysis of the Wolof tale and its relationship to Mambety's work explores the filmmaker's ability to transform oral tradition, providing new insights into African filmic narrative structures. This is an excellent contribution to the field of African film and cultural studies and most definitely merits translation into English so that its readership may be increased.

Sheila Petty

University of Regina

Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada