"Whose neck shall I stand on to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don't want anything lower than I am. I am low enough already. I want to rise, and to push everything up with me as I go."
In the early 50s, half-a-dozen blacklisted communist film artists defied HUAC to make a film sponsored by Mine Mill (one of the most militant American unions during the hey-day of the 30's, later expelled…
Sembène dramatises the French colonial atrocity of the 1944 Thiaroye massacre (involving the killing of West African infantrymen just returned from Europe where they fought to liberate France and spent years as POWs in concentration camps) as a devastating corrective to the ahistorical exceptionalism with which Nazism is still regarded in the West. In contrast to hegemonic representations of the evil of Nazism as an aberration with no historical precedent, the decolonial dialectics of Sembène’s film resonate with the conclusions…
A masterpiece of combat cinema.
"Here there is, at the level of literary creation, the taking up and clarification of themes which are typically nationalist. This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because it molds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is…
