86: Ceddo

            Again, I’ve attempted to tackle a film while fully acknowledging my language limitations.  This time it was Ousmane Sembene’s tribal drama Ceddo (1977), with its primary language Wolof.  I must say that my minute understanding of French, in which the film is subtitled, wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped.  As such, this occurrence served as an informative juxtaposition to my experience with Turkish Delight (1973; #88).  Still, I believe I came away from Ceddo not having completely missed its occasional finer points.

            In seventeenth century Senegal a tribal king has converted to Islam, while his warriors, the Ceddo, have retained their tribal religion.  As both Muslim and Christian leaders attempt to convert further numbers, members of the Ceddo class kidnap the daughter of the king, hoping to ease religious pressure.  The tribal village is also under the watchful eye of slave traders, who use the buildings as bases of operation to capture non-tribal natives.  The kidnapping only incurs further religious tension, and members of both sects grow uneasy when attempts to rescue the girl result in deaths.  Eventually councils and meetings give way to violent conflict. The struggles culminate in the princess returning to the village, only to use one of the white men’s guns to kill the Imam, just as the Ceddo are being forced to convert. 

            I think that the problems of this film are structural; it’s unbalanced to say the least, with most of its best material coming after the half-way point of its runtime.  Some very good films have this same problem, but here the lopsided action runs in conjunction with the issue of approach.  Most good films about religion focus on a single individual struggling either to come to terms with God, or to worship Him in a way condemned by an external system.  Their best moments focus on small elements of ritual or aspects of an individual’s faith.  Ceddo tends to focus on the macro political elements of religion, largely ignoring individuals and ritual until its later scenes. 

            By the time it gets around to its best moments this film may have lost the better part of its audience.  The motivations of the characters are never explored on a personal level, making their grandstanding during councils seem inauthentic at best.  Granted, the language barrier may have contributed to this opinion, but I rarely felt compelled to believe in any of the film’s early moments.  The camera work of Georges Caristan may have contributed to the flat emotions of these scenes, as he rarely employs angles or movements that engender any such stirrings. 

            Sembene covers some of the visual shortcomings of his film with uses of unconventional music. Contemporary gospel renderings of American Negro spirituals foretell and comment on the potential future for the Bushmen captured by the slave-traders, simultaneously likening the religious persecution onscreen to the racial persecution of 19^th and 20^th century America.  Again, these segments are powerful, but don’t balance well with the narrative aspects of the lopsided picture.

Language: Wolof

Runtime: 120 Minutes

Available with French subtitles @ Youtube.com

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off