EMITAI Movie Review

Dieu de Tonnerre
God of the Sun

On a weekday afternoon in New York in the early 1970s, I wandered into the now-defunct Fifth Avenue Cinema where I watched—along with three other patrons who were scattered through the tiny theatre—this Senegalese film about an African tribe's encounter with French colonialists near the end of World War II. As the French exploit and systematically destroy the tribe—the Diolas—by turning them against each other, the elder members of the tribe engage in a dialogue with the gods, lashing out at them for their impotence as protectors. The gods—actors in costume—are defensive and bullying, but no match for the furious elders who clearly expect more from their deities. The scene is simply but elegantly staged, bold, daring, and devastatingly satirical—as is the rest of Emitai (God of the Sun), the third feature film by Senegal's Ousmane Sembène but the first that I encountered. In the lobby after the film, the four patrons (including me) became acquainted quickly, sharing that pleasurable jolt of unexpected discovery and the knowledge that we had experienced something truly revelatory, albeit in a nearly empty theatre. Looking back, however, it's probably remarkable that the film played in a commercial theatre in this country at all. Would it now? One worries about the chances of Third World cinema finding any American theatrical venues in the crowded, youth-obsessed marketplace of the 1990s. Yet thanks to video, this extraordinary picture continues to live and breathe. It remains one of Sembène's key works, a strongly worded warning of the evils of colonialism, and one of the seminal moments in the history of African cinema.

NEXT STOP … Mandabi, Ceddo, Guelwaar

1971 103m/C Pierre Blanchard, Robert Fontaine, Michel Remaudeau; D: Ousmane Sembene; W: Ousmane Sembene; C: Michel Remaudeau. NYR