Xala
1st Edition
Published on 2. May 2024
120 pages
978-1-83902-599-0 (ISBN)
Description
Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji's student daughter Rama and the group of urban 'undesirables' who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite.
James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory.
Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.
James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory.
Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.
More details
Series
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
60 colour illus
ISBN-13
978-1-83902-599-0 (9781839025990)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His previous publications include Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (2013); Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (2016); Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), winner of the R. Gapper Prize for the best book in French Studies; and Frantz Fanon (2023).
Content
Acknowledgments
1. Dakar, 1974: The Politics of Setting and Film Production
2. Africanity ? Africa: For an African Third Cinema
3. Defetishising the Fetish
4. The Fading Father, or The Future is Feminist
5. Resisting the Narrative Curse: Countermoves
and Counter-Spaces
6. From Evian to Sputum: Abjection as Redemption
Epilogue: The Legacy of Xala
Notes
Credits
1. Dakar, 1974: The Politics of Setting and Film Production
2. Africanity ? Africa: For an African Third Cinema
3. Defetishising the Fetish
4. The Fading Father, or The Future is Feminist
5. Resisting the Narrative Curse: Countermoves
and Counter-Spaces
6. From Evian to Sputum: Abjection as Redemption
Epilogue: The Legacy of Xala
Notes
Credits
