Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Camp de Thiaroye
1988 · Ousmane Sembène · Camp de Thiaroye on Sightlines
A man in a French uniform is wearing a German helmet. It is an SS helmet, taken somewhere in Europe, and Pays will not take it off. He can't tell anyone why. The war and the concentration camps have left him with screams and grunts where his words used to be. So he walks around a transit camp outside Dakar in late 1944 with the enemy's steel on his head, and every officer who passes has to look at it.
Start with that helmet, because the whole film is packed into it. The men of this battalion are Senegalese tirailleurs, colonial infantry who helped liberate France. They have been shipped home and put in a camp with barbed wire and watchtowers, and some of them have already survived camps that looked just like it. Nobody in the film needs to say this out loud. Pays carries it on his head.
Deleuze took a word from Brecht for what Pays is doing: the gest. A gest is a posture or habit of the body that exposes a social relation. You don't have to decode it the way you decode a symbol. You see it. A Black soldier who fought for France, wearing the helmet of the men who imprisoned him, held behind wire by the army he fought for: it raises the question of who the enemy was, and it raises it on a body. Pays is not explaining anything. He is the explanation, and the film keeps him in the frame so we can't stop seeing it.
Ousmane Sembène, a dockworker turned novelist who became the father of African cinema, co-directed the film with Thierno Faty Sow. Their method is accumulation. The back pay is disputed. The rations get worse. Each grievance is small enough to swallow and each one gets swallowed, and then the next one arrives. Deleuze would call this the large form of the action-image: a whole situation presses on a group until the group has to answer it. This is classical storytelling at full power, and Sembène learned it at the source. He trained at the Gorky Studio in Moscow, and from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin he took the idea of a crowd as the protagonist. From his own Emitaï, which had already put tirailleurs and a Diola village on screen, he took the slow tableau, where the community fills the frame and argues.
But there is a difference, and Deleuze is the one who names it. In the second Cinema book he argues that classical political film, Eisenstein's included, could assume that the people already existed. The crowd on screen was a subject of history, ready to act. Modern political cinema, and especially the cinema of colonized countries, starts from the opposite fact. The people are missing. They aren't there yet. The film has to help invent them.
That is exactly the problem inside Thiaroye's barbed wire. Listen to the camp. Some of the men speak Wolof. The officers speak French. The soldiers have improvised a broken army French of their own, and English drifts in too. The mix of languages works like a map of power: who gives orders, who has to translate, who is understood and who is only overheard. Sembène builds the camp as a babel until it becomes an argument about who is allowed to speak, and in whose tongue.
Two men mark the edges of that argument. Sergeant Diatta was educated in Paris. He has a French wife and child, he loves jazz, and his French is perfect. He is the man who ought to be able to speak for the battalion in the masters' own language, and he is learning, scene by scene, what assimilation does not buy. At the other edge is Pays, who cannot speak at all. Between perfect French and no words, the battalion has no shared voice that the army will hear as the voice of a people. They are not quite French in French eyes. They are not yet citizens of a Senegal that does not yet exist as a nation. That gap is the film's real subject, and Deleuze's phrase fits it closely.
This is where the film's place in film theory matters. Rome, Open City gave Sembène the neorealist template: nonprofessional, near-documentary acting, real locations, a recent atrocity reconstructed with a reporter's restraint. André Bazin praised neorealism for letting reality keep its own weight and ambiguity in front of the camera. Sembène keeps the restraint and the plainness. What he adds is argument. Every plain scene of rations or pay is also a scene about language and rank. And from Renoir's La Grande Illusion he took the prison camp as a babel of tongues, a small model of nation and class. In Renoir the languages layer over each other. In Thiaroye they line up as a chain of command.
It matters what this does to narrative. The film has a charismatic sergeant and a haunted private, but neither is a hero in the Hollywood sense, a single will that bends the story. The protagonist is the battalion, and the drama is the slow collecting of grievances in long communal scenes. That method goes back to Ceddo, Sembène's film about naming, conversion and translation as tools of domination. Black Girl gave him the interior study of the colonized mind, the Frenchified servant whose alienation returns here, split between Diatta's fluency and Pays's silence. Thiaroye takes all of it and points it at the colonizer's own war, seen from the colonized soldiers' barracks.
The film's history bent around the same question. Sembène made it pointedly without a franc of French money, financed instead by Senegal, Algeria and Tunisia. That is an African people being invented in the act of production, three countries paying for a story France had not told. It shared the Special Jury Prize at Venice in 1988. Then it went effectively unshown in France for years. A film about who gets heard was not heard, which confirmed its argument in the bleakest way.
So when you watch it, track the languages. Notice which tongue each scene is in, who has to translate, and who stays silent. Watch Diatta's French and what it fails to get him. And keep your eye on the helmet. It asks a question the film never lets go of: what did liberation mean for the men who delivered it?
Concepts in play
- the people are missing — A battalion that liberated France, held behind wire, split across Wolof, officer French and improvised soldiers' French, between Diatta's perfect French and Pays's wordlessness, with no shared voice the army will recognize. Even the financing (Senegal, Algeria, Tunisia, no French money) invents an African collective
- the gest — Pays, shell-shocked and able only to scream and grunt, refuses to take off a captured SS helmet. The posture puts the colonial soldier's relation to both armies on his body
- action-image (large form) — The accumulation method: disputed back pay and worsening rations press on the battalion as a whole, the collective protagonist inherited from Potemkin and Emitaï
- the encompasser — The transit camp, with barbed wire and watchtowers that echo the stalags, as the encompassing milieu that weighs on every man in it