Question: How does the process of creation occur for you?

Sembene: It is very difficult to explain the question of creation, in that I myself don't believe in what one might call a formal manner of inspiration. I think that if I must create something I pose questions somehow or other at my level--why this subject and not another, why I should do this and not something else, what is the objective, what aspect of human beings do I want to reveal, in a general setting. If it is a personal film, I concern myself further with knowing if the problem I'm raising would interest everyone, and how to go about making it of interest to others.

And there, I think that for me it is at that moment that the work of investigating the very level of human beings, of the nature of this subect with individuals, with other subjects, begins. I don't know if I'm making myself understood; creation is never detached from the social context of the man himself.

Question: You've said that you personally aren't interested in making "cinema direct" or "cinema verite" [types of documentary film]. What is the difference between your films and "direct cinema"?

Sembene: I'm not sure what's meant here by cinema direct or cinema vérité. As for Jean Rouch [French documentary filmmaker],

he says, "I place my camera in the street, the subject enters, and that's it." I don't think that's true at the level of cinema. One is obliged to select, to point out, to edit, to collate, to make a collage from beginning to end, and one must make a segregation of images, because if you place your camera at the corner of the street, everyone is going to pass by, but if you project that in front of people, there's nothing new there. One sees the street, one sees the automobiles, one sees the people--perhaps they stop to speak, but that means nothing. Jean Rouch and [Edgar] Morin do that, I've seen it. Perhaps it's right, but I don't believe so, because they're taking up these ideas again from Vertov--Vertov the Russian who in 1917 after the revolution spoke of cinema direct in trains and other things. Perhaps in his context, that was one thing.

But in the context of Africa, I think that a kind of cinema can be created, but the director is obliged to select and to sort out, so that there's a head and a tail to what one is narrating. And I think that at this time direct cinema has no chance for life. The people who go to the theater or to the cinema or what not, they want, I think, to be told a story--I don't know whether that's good or bad. At any rate, they want to have a subject. It depends on how you regard them. At least if it were an underground cinema, a parallel cinema, it would have a chance to live. It touches perhaps the cinephiles, those who love cinema, who think they're satiated with narratives, and who seek another form of truth-masturbation, saying, "That, that's very good!"

You see, I think cinema vérité is like the product of a bad painter who buys an empty frame and who goes among flowers and there hangs the frame, saying, "I have a very pretty picture," ignoring all there is around, that's that. Someone who buys a frame, who goes in a very pretty garden and who frames the flowers and says, "Here's a pretty picture. Here."

Question: You've said that at the moment you begin, you ask yourself questions such as, "Is this relevant or not," but where do these questions come from? What is there before that?

Sembene: Everything is there! For example, at the moment I'm working on a scenario. It will soon be six months that I've been working on it, every morning, even here [in Bloomington, Indiana]. It's difficult for me to say, it's an aspect that escapes me perhaps, why this must come first. I think that when things are collected there's a mathematical law which escapes us all. But I think it is a mathematical law. And in matters of cinema it is very technical and rigid. Because I only have a certain amount of time in which to tell a story, which can recount fifty years or twenty years of a person's life. I must tell the story of that life in an hour and a half. Therefore I've got to choose. From the moments, the actions, the looks which enfold the entire past or the period of which I can depict so little in the film. It's a different thing with literature. In a literary work you can say, "Fifty years later," one knows then that it's fifty years later. But as for the cinemaa, you can put in a written title, but it interrupts the story.

The film has to move forward. The filmmaker has to select.

But this selection process, I think a director has difficulty explaining it in a truly technical, formulaic manner.

Question: But where do you find your stories?

Sembene: How do I find my ideas? Ah, that's another story! Perhaps . . . I have many ideas in my head, because I see things around me, and every event deserves to be recounted, it seems. But aside from that, it's usually a little bit of news, a speck of an event. I see something, I tell myself, "Wait, that's got to be told." I don't know whether or not you were at the showing of my film last night. [The film was Borom Sarett, 1963, Sembene's first film, the story of a poor horsecab driver. At one point he must transport a young father and newly-dead infant from a hospital to a cemetary. At the previous night's screening Sembene told how some people who had seen the film later came up to him and told him they had seen something similar--a man having to take his dead child to the cemetary on a public bus.] The story of that baby, I'd like to write a book about that.

The story hit me so hard that I was obligated to it from that moment on. I had to reenact the events myself, in my own mind, the tragedy of the bus, to know at what hour the story takes place, to imagine how many people are there, where they come from. You see, from this moment on, I dig, dig, dig, dig, until I find the end of my story. And I think that in my case, this is the hardest time. Because I also have to try to see why this, and why that. I write the same things over four or five times. I ask myself if I'm satisfied. Then I reformulate the questions, and I believe it's there that the mathematical side of creation enters. I remain convinced that there is a very emotional

side, but there is also an important intellectual element. Yet this mathematical element escapes even the author.

Question: When you're developing your ideas, do you begin by establishing individual images, or is it the continuity of the story which interests you?

Sembene: I think it's the continuity of the story which interests me. I don't know what's going to follow. There are times when there are people obsessing me, figures whom I didn't expect to find. You see, these people are pressing themselves on me.

For example, if I take the case of that baby, it's the individuals I see, these characters pressing, jostling one another in front of me--there's this father and son whom I don't know. I must therefore invent a father and a son. Good, I have to go to the hospital, more or less, to see what occurred previously. Perhaps a vision of one of the deaths there is going to spring to my mind. As soon as I begin to set them on an itinerary, to locate them, other ideas and characters have already begun to appear, characters who speak to me. To me. At that time I make a note of these people, I mark them as X, Y, Z, but advancing the story all the while.

Question: You've said that for several films you've prepared note cards on which the shooting script is broken down to individual scenes. For which films did you do this?

Sembene: I did it for Borom Sarett, Black Girl, and another film, Niaye. Niaye is the story of incest in a village. It was easier for me to work that way because I was working in the bush and all that. I had my knapsack. And on each card was written a character or a scene of the film. Because I'm always pressed for time when I film. When I'm filming a room, I have to film the entire scene at the same time. Perhaps even later scenes, i.e., the room as it must appear ten or twenty years after the initial scene. Therefore, I have all these cards with the characters, their dress, their dialogue, the appearance of the room, set out as much as possible. Barring accidents, I cannot modify them.

But now, in my room here, in Bloomington, I'm working on an event which took place in Africa during the last century. Good. Here I can think what I like, and that's what I do. I write it down and all that. But when the time comes for me to be out there, what I thought in Bloomington is perhaps no longer true, and doesn't jibe with, say, the lay of the land where I'm filming. But as I have all my little pieces of paper, I know what improvisation is not going to work. Because I'm in a real setting, I have to scratch things out, add others. What I've altered becomes something new. It sometimes happens that by chance, I'd already been thinking along those lines, but I'd fashioned it in a way that didn't correspond to reality.

For example, I'm at a wine merchant's, one who sells wine to the natives at the beginning of the century. He had huge jugs and he had amphorae. Good. I like his shop and, imagining myself the merchant as I prepare my script, I hang as many guns or whatever as I like all over the place. But when I go to make the story, in reality, perhaps the real shop on location has no rifles hanging. You see, for me, an image is charged with something, it should correspond to an action that must come from somewhere--if the merchant doesn't hang his rifles, if he places them on a table, then I have to change the whole scene that treats those rifles. To align it with these rifles that are on a table or wherever. And that's why the cards are utilized, because already they are serving as a memory pad.

Question: You mean at the moment you arrive on location it becomes necessary to change certain things to accord with the physical reality that you find?

Sembene: Yes, it's I, not the actors. Their phrases are the same, their acting is the same, it's the things around them which change. For example, let's say this room is, I don't know, before television. You try to shoot in this room around the TV. Bah! You have to take out the TV or at least find something to mask it with. You see . . . it's always the little things and so on which can encourage creation or make it grind to a halt

.

But still I doubt that one can actually teach the creative process. You can teach methods in a technical mannter--that was true for me. In Moscow there is a school for cinema, a school for literature, and so on. Good, there were many Africans with me who went to these schools. But I took a shortcut. I didn't stay five years, and I didn't take any courses in theory. But I would be present at all the filming, even if it was snowing. For me, that's how you learn technique, and I think it's most important. When the directors had time, I'd ask them questions: "Why this?" Good, I'd write it down. "Why that?" I'd write it down. And afterwards, when he had the time, he'd say, "This fits with this or that; look in the scenario." Good, I'd write it down, tell him, "OK, I've got it." I think that often in filmmaking schools--I'm speaking of schools where films are made, not just studied, there are so many theories on the creative process that the students pay too much attention to theory and don't think about all these problems.

Question: Can you give us an example of where you've had to improvise on location?

Sembene: Often. There are many, many examples. I spoke earlier of that child with the gun [Sembene is speaking of a scene in Emitai where the woman and children of a village which had refused to give up its corn to the French are forced to sit in the town square. At one point during the shooting of this scene, a child surprised everyone by suddenly leaving her place, wandering over to where the "French soldiers" were standing guard, and picking up one of their rifles, which had been stacked nearby. This unexpected element works extremely well in the film.]. And the same thing occurs in my last film also. I place the actor in a framework and leave possibilities open.

Because sometimes everything looks fine on paper and as long as it's on paper, it's fine. But on location, when we're shooting, we need transitional elements, and it's often the actors who give them to me. An actor might say, "Wait, what if this is done?" I look, I say OK, I see the cameraman and say to him, "Wait, we've got to do this. It's not my idea, it's his." Then he looks, says OK. We change the placement of the camera, do what the actor suggested, and we continue with out work. It doesn't cost us anything and it makes him happy. All it takes perhaps to make him feel good is this little gesture of improvisation.

For example, in my last film [Xala] I had once again as my leading actor the man from Mandabi. He had a pair of glasses which I'd never seen him with. These glasses could be taken apart, and when we weren't shooting he would take them apart piece by piece and then put them back together. Then when we were shooting he did the same thing. I said OK, we've got to film it, so we filmed it and he was happy. And I myself hadn't foreseen this action.

There are many such instances with women in my films, and it's often with women that I find myself doing the most improvi- sation. I usually give them more freedom than I give the guys. Because the women usually are playing themselves, their own roles, and on paper I'm very limited by the fact that I don't know them very well. They modify the scenario accordingly. And that also, I think, that brings something to the act of creation.

Particularly in Africa, where we shoot outdoors in direct sunlight. It's not the same in a studio, because in a studio there are a number of steps which must be taken. With studio lighting you're limited, since the zone of illumination extends only three meters before and three meters behind the subject, so he can't move more than six meters. Whereas I have over a hundred meters at my disposal. I place my camera in such a position that I leave the subject time and space to move around.

Question: How do you choose the roles that you yourself play in

your films?

Sembene: Myself? No, you see, these are tricks, there are times when actors who've promised to come--because often certain actors aren't paid, they just promise me they'll come--but they don't show up. Then I say, "OK, I can do it, I think I can do it." Though I don't plan to play a part at the beginning. Except in April a friend of mine asked me to play the leading role in his film, but that's different: it was he who asked me. But I never intend to do it in my own films. I haven't chosen to play a part in my next film, but I have to be ready in case of an absence.

Question: You mean the choice of playing a soldier in Emitai was purely the result of an accident? [There is a satiric sequence in Emitai in which the picture of Marshal Petain in the local army headquarters is replaced by one of General De Gaulle. A Senegalese native soldier, played by Sembene, finds this "changing of the guards from the "fascist" to the "republican" rather incomprehensible, and he makes some humorous comments regarding it. Sembene was himself a soldier in the French colonial army in Senegal during this period.]

Sembene: It was by accident. We had an actor who was supposed to do it, but unfortunately he couldn't come. Because this man who was supposed to act in Emitai is the village clerk, and is therefore a member of the town council, an elected position. The day we were supposed to film him there was a meeting of the town council. OK, what were we going to do? Because I'm limited for time by the sunlight, and I can't allow myself to stop shooting every time somebody doesn't show up. You know that when they're in session these council meetings can last four or five days. So I couldn't wait--I did it. The same for Mandabi and so on.

When someone's missing, you've got to take their place. It often happens in our films. You don't know it, but everyone in my crew appears in the films, even the cameraman at times. It happens that we're missing a character, so everyone says, "Hold it, the cameraman's got to do it." I take over the camera, he does it, and we continue. So that in each film there are always one or two guys from our crew who appear in it; but it's never planned that way a priori.

Question: In Mandabi you played . . .

Sembene: The scribe, yes.

Question: And I've read that in reality you do sometimes serve as scribe in your village. Is this the same thing?

Sembene: Yes, but that's, no, you see, in the village they're perhaps illiterate. In French. And there are times when things have to be written. That's neighborliness. You help out, it's not an obligation. I do it a lot, but I think it's the laws of being a good neighbor that are responsible. Because I am a neighbor in the village, and they know I am lettered in French, naturally they come to see me. I can't say no to my neighbor, for in exchange I receive a good deal of recompense. It's a village of fishermen, and sometimes they give me fish, sometimes they give me lobsters, sometimes they give me vegetables, and so on. It's not payment, it's returning a service--so by this act we're more or less joined in this solidarity.

Question: You see, I have the impression that for you it's all very simple when you explain your choice of roles. We've been taught to make theoretical statements. So we asked ourselves if it perhaps wasn't by accident that it should be the scribe here, or the soldier in the other case--because the day before you had told us of the chageover from Petain to DeGaulle, when you were in the army. So for us there was a particular significance in that.

Sembene: Yes, of course. I lived that story myself, but in the film I didn't plan to play the role. I think that in the schools . . . you see, schools are a good thing, I've always wanted there to be schools. But the relationship between the theoretical teaching and the actual work with cinema, particularly, I think is very hard. Very hard, whether it be in Africa, in America, or elsewhere. The cinema is too hard because its existence rests on money. There is its industrial aspect to consider. The producers don't want to lose money, so they don't allow certain improvisations. They really want something tidy, so they can count on the returns. In the case of Africa, we have an advantage, I think, in that we can do pretty much what we want, since most African directors up to now have been their own scriptwriters. It's they themselves who write their scripts. You see, it's still very rare in many countries today for the director to both write and direct. They are real creators. In the evolution of our cinema there is nevertheless a new method: scripts created by two filmmakers--a director and a writer. That's a good thing, but still, on location it's another story-- it's the director alone who is in fact the owner of the film.

Question The other day you said that, for you, there is a medley of film techniques that you could learn in Europe, but your narrative methods are perhaps the contribution of African storytellers.

Sembene: Yes, storytellers . . . yes, that's perhaps why the African cinema is slower. It's slower, admitted. Often, the people who are making films in Africa, the majority never attended the great European schoolss. For a long time they remained very attached to their culture, in which stories are told. We say that they are storytellers. The story is clear and simple. At first glance you say good, that's really clear, but when you dig, you find philosophy. You find that there is something within that simplicity.

Question: This story you're talking about, did you find it in the "fait divers" ("human interest") section of a newspaper?

Sembene: No, no, no. Some people told us that story. Because these people went to see Borom Sarett. They discussed the story of this boy. Good, OK, this is after 1963, but people didn't want to believe that in Africa a person could go all by himself to bury his child. But when they saw this happen, they ran to tell me about it.

Interview Conducted by Michael Dembrow and Klaus Troller

Transcribed by Kiki Dembrow

Translated by Michael Dembrow

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