All the Senegalese movies on Criterion

this doesn't count towards my annual pro wrestling post quota

Most of these are short. Asterisks are by anything particularly recommended.

OUSMANE SEMBÈNE

Railway and dock worker Sembène started his artistic career as an author—his books include God’s Bits of Wood, about the 1947-48 French African rail strike and which Christgau put in his top 11 (underrated) novels, a placement that Raymond Williams fans and feminists will find easy to justify—before going to Soviet film school and becoming Africa’s most acclaimed director. Watch *Black Girl (1966) first, a movie that requires very little knowledge beyond “Senegal became independent of France, but that wasn’t the end of colonialism” to appreciate, and is so self-evidently great it might make you want to watch every Senegalese movie on Criterion. Then you can take in the documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema (1994) by the Malian critic and filmmaker Manthia Diawara and the great Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (who in his diaries credits Sembène with saving his life after an asthma attack) without having to worry about major spoilers. Diawara follows a 70-year-old Sembène around Dakar, the slave port of Goree, and Africa’s top film festival in Ouagadougou, where John Singleton beams as Sembène invites him around to his house. Early in the documentary, Sembène admits he still prefers literature to cinema, but the doc makes it clear he’s an all-artforms guy, and he’s comfortable casually chatting about shots and blocking when demonstrating how he uses a beam-framed view of the ocean from his porch as an imaginary screen.

Borom Sarret (1963) makes a game attempt to get all of Dakar into twenty minutes by following a surly cart driver through the working-class Médina and the modern Plateau. It's heavily indebted to neorealist models and a bit too Marxism 101 in laying out the driver’s false consciousness like a sociology textbook illustration. But it has outstanding shots and scenes, especially one where a somewhat insincere looking griot gets the driver’s hard-earned francs for some praise songs. Mandabi (1968) follows a coarse but honest man on his RPG-like quest to cash a money order (which requires an ID card, which requires a birth certificate, which requires knowing when you were born.) The satire is a bit programmatic, which doesn’t mean it’s not funny. *Tauw (1970) is a much more open work, avoiding fatalism even though most of the paths open to the protagonist will not end well. It gets at the sheer stress that unemployment causes, and how striving to maintain some scrap of dignity adds to the toll.

PAULIN SOUMANOU VIEYRA

Much less well-known than Sembène or Mambéty, Vieyra (1925-87) never made a fiction feature; much of his work is admittedly of niche interest, but if you’ve read this far, maybe you’re in that niche. Vieyra became one of the first black African filmmakers with *Africa on the Seine (1955, with Mamadou Sarr), a non-narrative work following international students around the Latin Quarter. The narration is overwritten (welcome to 1950s France) but there’s a ton of historical value, not least in noting what makes passers-by stare and what doesn’t. The title of A Nation Is Born (1961) flips that of a much more racist attempt to establish a foundational cinema myth for a country. Like the best mythmaking, Vieyra’s work is effectively hokey, though the most stirring words come from President Senghor’s national anthem. The fascinating *Lamb (1964) is about Senegalese wrestling. Vieyra starts by showing youngsters training in takedowns at the beach and moves to huge grandstands with citizens from all levels of society watching and gambling. He gets across how much culture there is in “popular culture”—from the combatants cutting promos that borrow from griot traditions to the endless dancing. Môl (1966) follows a fisherman's quest to get an engine for his boat. This one suffers the most from being narrated rather than synchronously recorded, but the footage of the actual process of fishing is hypnotic.

Birago Diop, conteur (1981) is mostly for fans of the poet/playwright, but it’s amusing to see how someone with poems in the national curriculum was so indifferent to his literary work that he focused on his day job as a vet. Behind the Scenes: The Making of Ceddo (1981) documents a Sembène-directed historical drama that was banned during one of his periodic feuds with Senghor (accounts differ as to whether it was due to its anti-clericalism or its preferred transliteration system.) It shows Sembène to be a micro-manager, which is probably necessary on the budgets he had—the special effect he employs for a branding is very clever. He says smart things about African culture and how it can be supported or appropriated by governments and foreigners, though they’re no wiser than his long-suffering wife’s tactful comments on his American fame, such as it is. Iba N’Diaye (1982), about the major Senegalese painter, is compromised by the quality of the surviving film. It’s still enjoyable because N’Diaye is one of Vieyra’s most personable subjects, plus there’s a cameo by elephant in the room Senghor, who shows up to an exhibition and is not impressed.

DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBÉTY

*Touki Bouki (1973) has long been the consensus Great Senegalese Film, though Black Girl has been closing on it in recent Sight & Sound polls. Unfortunately Mambéty only made a handful of other movies; the only one on Criterion is his first, *Contras’ City (1968). From the French New Wave he adopted jump cuts and sarcasm, but his spirit is more punk than anything, as seen in his stubborn refusal to shoot facades horizontally. And yet he’s much more willing to be lyrical than Sembène, especially when showing work: a head being shaved, or a woman putting a towel on another's head to help her carry a huge bucket of water on top of it.

Touki Bouki deserves its reputation. It’s a social satire, a counterculture movie, a Euro avant-art film, a heist flick, a statement of nationalism and a demonstration that nationalism is fucked. It doesn’t attempt to blend these modes smoothly; it just jumps from one to another because that’s the way the world seems to work, resembling Donald Glover’s Atlanta as much as anything. It has one of the great wrestling promos, delivered nude. It’s packed with symbolic meaning without claiming that understanding those symbols is sufficient for understanding the post-colonial world. (Warning for animal lovers: some humped cattle were extremely harmed in the making of this film.)

MATI DIOP

Paris-born Diop, Mambety’s niece and Wasis Diop’s daughter, came to notice starring in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum before embarking on a directorial career that’s so far culminated in the great 2019 feature Atlantics, which is on Netflix and so falls outside our current purview. The short Atlantiques (2009) is kind of a dry run, with different characters and not much plot but covering the same themes: primarily immigration and ghosts. The weird, funny *A Thousand Suns (2014) appears to be a documentary focusing on Magaye Niang, star of Touki Bouki, forty years later arguing with everyone he meets; it’s almost a Dakarian Curb Your Enthusiasm. Then it turns into a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film for a few minutes. The other Diop shorts on Criterion aren’t Senegal-related: Big in Vietnam (2012) is a pretty good attempt at an Asian-style art film; Snow Canon (2011) is a pretty bad version of a Euro-style art film; and Liberian Boy (2005) is four minutes.