Among the tributes to the late Ousmane Sembène, the grand old man of African cinema, who died at the weekend at his Dakar home, aged 84, perhaps the saddest observation was that his cinema - which arguably kick-started filmmaking on his continent (his debut feature, 1965's Black Girl, is commonly referred to as the first African film) - remains unknown to so many of his own people. One could only pause sadly at one writer's observation that, in virtually any African capital, one can easily pick up bootleg DVDs of Pirates of the Caribbean or Ocean's 13 - but not of important African filmmakers such as Sembène or Souleymane Cissé or Idrissa Ouedraogo.
It's not quite the picture one expects, somehow. Though their works typically go unexhibited in the English-speaking world, we like to imagine our favourite foreign filmmakers as national heroes, not as prophets without honour. Nevertheless, it is the case - and for this, the world of film festivals must assume some responsibility. The notion of selection is by definition exclusive, and cleaving as it does to arthouse rather than commercial filmmaking, leads to some serious misrepresentations of what a national film culture actually is.
For example, a coterie of US film critics, largely based around the Village Voice, the Chicago Reader and Film Comment, and a long list of festival programmers, have long proclaimed Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien the "greatest living narrative filmmaker". This means little to the vast majority of American filmmakers, since virtually none of his eighteen features have had a theatrical release in the US - but perhaps more surprisingly, it also means almost nothing to the vast majority of Taiwanese, to whom he is a name and little more. His films are by no means national events; most play in Taipei for a week or two, on a couple of arthouse screens, to small audiences, and that is all.
Likewise his younger (and, I think, lesser) compatriot Tsai Ming-liang - feted on the festival circuit, garlanded with awards and reverence. Yet his international renown remains a source of bafflement to his fellow Taiwanese. Given this disregard, it's no coincidence that each filmmaker has been forced to look internationally for financing - Hou to Japan and, more recently, to France; Tsai to Malaysia (he is Malaysian-Chinese) and, yes, the dependable French.
One could say the same of South Korea's Im Kwon-taek - another eminence grise, having just racked up his 100th feature film, and who became something of a favourite at Cannes during the 1990s, becoming the first South Korean director ever in competition there. Domestically, though, his films have bombed - this latest, titled Across The Years, being no exception. Or Iran's Abbas Kiarostami, indisputably one of the greatest living directors - yet badly overshadowed, at home, by his country's thriving commercial sector, by locally-made comedies and dramas as noisy, melodramatic and insubstantial, as his films are quiet, understated and profound. But festivals would lead you to believe, not only that he exists at the heart of Iranian cinema, but that, apart from him and a few other directors (Jafar Panahi, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf), no Iranian film industry exists.
All this bespeaks a greater problem. The time when leading arthouse filmmakers - a Fellini, say, or a Bergman - also commanded a broader commercial audience, outside of festivals, has passed. This coincides with the movement of so-called "serious filmmaking" from the centre of the cultural debate, to its periphery. In the 1960s, to swim in the cultural waters, to be part of a certain class of society, inevitably meant being familiar with the latest Godard - in much the same way one read the new Philip Roth novel, or visited the latest Joseph Beuys or Nam June Paik show; likewise, in the 1970s, with Fassbinder (a popular filmmaker, both at home and abroad) or Herzog. But those days, alas, are no more.
It's hard not to feel depressed by this. Those of us who watched and loved Sembène's films, preferred to believe that they were as well-loved, as instructive, as useful to African viewers, as to ourselves. We were of course mistaken. What is most common around the world, it seems, is a simple lack of effort: humans, by and large, want only the easiest, most readily-available and easily-digestible forms of entertainment. And that is provided by the dominant culture - in filmic terms, by Hollywood.
This is not, of course, to imply that this is right. Sembène's works, so humane and insightful, should be seen by everyone who was interested, not only in cinema, but in life. But they will not be. Most aren't even available on DVD. (Though there is a six-film set, with French subtitles, available from M3M: consider it a gesture of reparation from those former colonial masters.) Now he is gone, and his passing - like "the fall of a baobab," said his peer Baba Hama - might be a little easier to bear, were we assured that his works would endure.
