Postcolonial Discourse and Ousmane Sembene's Cinema

This study focuses on the relationship between African cinema and colonialism and postcolonial discourse addresses the cinema of Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Sembene’s films, it was first determined which postcolonial discourses were handled and these discourses were examined by multimodal film analysis. In this study, in which four of the feature films from 1960-2004 were analyzed, the focus was on how postcolonial discourse contributed to the content of the film and which layers corresponded to morphological features and film technique in multi-layered film analysis. Directed by La Noire de ... (1966), Xala (1975), Camp de Thiaroye (1988) and Moolaade (2004) are examples of this work. The film experience of Sembene for over forty years emphasises how the postcolonial discourse has changed in the historical process, the results of pre-colonial and post-colonial themes varying.

            When the films of Sembene are analyzed, three movies (La Noire de..., Xala, Moolaade) have reached the point where the problems in postcolonial Africa are placed mainly, and in the case of a film (Camp de Thiaroye), attention is drawn to the historicity of the colonial period. It also concludes that in these films the seven postcolonial layers are not evenly processed in each film and that filming varies according to the thematic structure it deals with. It has been observed that in neo-colonialism, postcolonialism colonizer and colonized the relation of multimodal film analysis to the “background, explanation, contrast and parallel” layers is directly related. La Noire and Camp de Thiaroye have a complex narrative structure and a variety of film techniques that have contributed significantly to the discovery of different layers in terms of multimodal analysis.