(Series begins with Faat Kiné, Thurs-Sun Aug 2-5.)

Africa does not have a cinema. It has a few directors, a few films, which, in their total sum, do not constitute a definitive branch of world cinema. Ousmane Sembene, Africa's most famous director, has made just nine features in 40 years. Twenty-seven years after he completed his masterpiece, Xala, Sembene's cinema is still a precious and vulnerable thing.

Africa does have a literature, however, and this is where Sembene starts: in the rotund tradition of the African novel. After his first book, Le Docker Noir (1956), he was well on his way to becoming an important African literary figure. Then in the early '60s he decided to leave this established territory for the uncharted region of cinema. The literary audience, he realized, was limited to Europeans and upper-class Africans who could afford books. Sembene wanted to address and entertain people who matched his working-class background (he was a bricklayer, soldier, factory worker, and dock laborer before he published his first book).

Sembene began his new career with three shorts, the most significant of which was Borom sarret (1966), the story of a cart driver who makes an impossibly small living carrying poor people from one sad destination to the next on his donkey-pulled wagon. The beauty of this film is derived from the state of turbulent transition. Like all of Sembene's films, Borom sarret is not extravagant, but exact--in just 20 minutes, he reveals the total shape of everyday life in Dakar as if it were a model city on an architect's table.

Sembene's first feature film, Black Girl (1966, based on his novel), details the terrible loneliness and humiliation an African immigrant girl experiences while working as a maid for a wealthy French family. The film is elegantly thin, with very little waste of time or space.

"[Capitalism] has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations," writes Karl Marx, "...and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, the callous 'cash payment.'" This pitiless rupture--between local, traditional African society and global capitalistic society--is at the heart of Sembene's cinema, especially his second feature, The Money Order (1968).

The Money Order is about a very traditional man who has two wives and too many children, and is unemployed. He has not adjusted to the new order of industrial production, and spends his days waiting for Allah to improve his circumstances. One day he receives a money order of considerable value from his nephew. The money order does not relieve him from poverty, but instead directly exposes him to the heat of the new economy. He soon loses all of the money to "wolves" who don't care about honor, customs, or Allah--only "cash payment."

In Emitai (1971), the cold logic of capitalism brings down not one man but a whole village, which once lived by the truth of the seasons and the soil. At one brilliant point in the film, the dying chief of the besieged village calls forth the Gods and begs them to help his people and destroy the invading French army that wants to steal their rice and incorporate them into the capitalist mode of production. When the Gods do nothing, he yells at them, "If I die, then you die." He then dies, and that is the end of the Gods.

Though critical of capitalism, Sembene's films are not nostalgic. They don't dream about a final return to the old way of life, but about forging a new world with increased liberties for all. His latest film, Faat Kiné (2000), focuses on this new world which offers fresh opportunities for women. Faat Kiné is about a businesswoman who by her own will and means rises to the top of the new society. Successful, modern, fiercely independent, and honest, Venus is posited as Africa's true salvation, the one who will finally awaken the continent from the nightmare of post-colonialism.

The Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky once said that cinema is the art of sculpting time; Ousmane Sembene has never made a film that wastes his materials. Every moment and space in his tiny, vulnerable cinema (from the cart driver to the businesswoman) is used to discuss the heavy fate and crazy hope of a world that is rarely seen on our movie screens.