Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Emitaï
1973 · Ousmane Sembène · Emitaï on Sightlines
Start with the tree. The village elders sit beneath it and consult their gods, and the gods do not seem to answer. Ousmane Sembène holds the scene in wide, patient frames, so we see the whole assembly at once: the old men, the sacred ground, the waiting. Far outside the frame, a war is being fought in Europe. Its demands have already reached the Casamance in the form of French officers. They want the young men as soldiers and the rice harvest as tribute.
The gap between what the situation demands and what the elders can do about it is where Gilles Deleuze can help us watch.
Writing about cinema in the 1980s, Deleuze split films into two broad regimes. In the first, which he called the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it. A threat arrives, the hero answers, and the world is restored or transformed. Most of the movies we grew up on run on that circuit. In the second regime, the time-image, something has broken. The characters still perceive, but they can no longer act adequately on what they perceive. Deleuze called the hinge between the two the crisis of the action-image, and he placed it historically in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Emitaï is set inside that war and made in its long shadow. The elders under the tree are a picture of the crisis. They are not cowards, and they are not fools. When catastrophe comes, they do what their world has taught them to do. But the action they have inherited no longer connects to the force pressing on them. A prayer is addressed to a power that is supposed to answer, and here the line seems to have gone dead. Sembène doesn't mock them. He frames them with gravity and asks us to sit with them long enough for a question to form: if not this, what does the crisis demand?
The women give one answer. They hide the grain. Then they hold their ground, silent and immovable. Notice how Sembène films this. He doesn't pick out one woman as the heroine whose face carries the drama. The resistance belongs to the group, seen whole in those wide tableaux. Deleuze had a word for a crowd rendered as a single feeling body: the dividual. Think of a whole community wearing one expression, the way a single face wears one. The women's silence is that expression.
Their stillness is also what Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called a gest: a posture that exposes a social relation. Sitting still, saying nothing, refusing to hand over the rice. The posture makes the colonial relation visible on the screen. The officers have orders and the authority of an empire. The women have the rice, which is theirs, and they are not moving. The drama lives in their bodies and in how long they hold.
This is where the lineage matters. Sembène trained in Moscow, at Gorky Studio, under Mark Donskoy. Donskoy's Childhood of Maxim Gorky looks at peasant life from ground level with unhurried, humanist patience, and you can feel that patience in Emitaï's observation of the village. Behind Donskoy stands Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, which has no individual hero: the crowd carries the story. Sembène rebuilds that collective protagonist out of a Diola community. From Rossellini's Rome, Open City he takes neorealism's working method: nonprofessional actors, real places, an occupied population resisting. André Bazin praised neorealism for letting the world appear with its own ambiguity instead of cutting it into a predigested message. Emitaï's long-held wide frames show some of that respect. They show us the whole situation and leave us to decide where to look.
Sembène's own earlier films lead here too. Borom Sarret cast untrained Dakar residents in real streets. La Noire de... framed a single exploited African body, tersely and frontally, as a political emblem. Mandabi was his first film in an African language, Wolof. Emitaï scales all of this up, from one body to a whole village and from Wolof to Diola.
Deleuze also draws a distinction that shows what Sembène changed in his Soviet inheritance. In Eisenstein, Deleuze wrote, the people are already there: the film shows a people that exists and is marching toward its destiny. In modern political cinema, especially cinema from colonized countries, the people are missing. They still have to be invented, and the film takes part in inventing them. Emitaï sits right on that line. It borrows Potemkin's mass protagonist, but this mass is divided. There are elders who pray and women who refuse, and there are young men taken away to fight for the same power that is taking the rice. The village is not yet one people facing the colonizer. It is a set of different answers to a question nobody has settled.
That is why the film cuts both ways. It indicts colonial extraction, and it also asks whether the old way of meeting a crisis can survive this one. A polemic would only need an enemy. Sembène needs a people, and he shows how far that people still is from existing.
Language is part of the invention. Making the film in Diola, with Diola villagers, says whose cinema this is. Sembène knew the stakes from the inside: he had himself been conscripted as a tirailleur sénégalais, one of the colonized made to fight for the colonizer. France took the film seriously enough to pressure its former colonies to suppress it, and for years it went unseen across much of Francophone Africa. A film that only described a people would not have worried anyone. This one set about forming a people.
So what did Emitaï do to film? It moved the largest form of the action-image, the collective struggle, onto ground where the collective can't be taken for granted. It made stillness and refusal into drama. And it showed that the patient wide shot could be a political instrument, a way of making the viewer hold a whole community in view and ask what it will become.
When you watch it, notice who shares the frame and who is left out of it. Watch the elders' waiting and the women's silence as two answers set side by side. And ask the film's own question along with it: when the old gods go quiet, where does a people's next act come from?
Concepts in play
- the people are missing — Sembène inherits Potemkin's mass protagonist, but the Diola village is split between elders praying under the sacred tree, women hiding the grain, and conscripted young men, so the film has to work toward a people instead of depicting one that already exists; it is made in Diola with villagers and was suppressed across Francophone Africa
- crisis of the action-image — The elders consult gods who no longer seem to answer; their inherited response to catastrophe, prayer under the sacred tree, no longer connects to the colonial demand for men and rice
- the dividual — The women's silent, immovable resistance is filmed in wide tableaux as one collective affect rather than through an individual heroine
- the gest — The women's stillness and silence after hiding the rice is a posture that makes the colonial relation of extraction visible
- action-image, large form (collective) — The encompassing colonial and wartime situation (conscription, requisition of the harvest) presses on the whole village, and the collective protagonist descends from Potemkin; Sembène reworks this form instead of resolving it heroically