The Language of Real Life: Interview with Ousmane Sembène

Abstract

This interview is reprinted from Framework 36, 1989 Kwate Nee Owoo: How are you able to reproduce the language of real life working with non-professional actors? Ousmane Sembene: If you are working with actors who are not professionals, and you are trying to reproduce the language of real life you have to take special care with gestures and movement, to be careful not to destroy anything of the original atmosphere, nor destroying anything of their personality. Africans talk a lot. That doesn't mean that what they say doesn't make sense, but they do talk a lot. For instance I personally can speak/understand Wolof, Bambara, Malanke. Take for example the question of greeting. People will greet each other and go into some other matter and in the middle of the other matter they would suddenly start greeting each other out of the blue. The cinema is rational, therefore, you have to suppress the repetition of greetings, but if you tell non-professional actors this, they can't grasp it. The roundabout way of thinking, the ins and outs of thought, it is very difficult to get people to change them. So when you are rehearsing the actors, you have to rehearse the language, gesture, and look, to make sure that there is no dead space. I am a product of the Soviet film school, and there we learnt about the Italian method, the French method, and the English method. For instance, if you take English theatre, there is English theatre and Irish theatre, but the English theatre was more or less nothing like Irish theatre, which keeps you awake. The spoken language belongs to a particular ethnic group. For instance, in Senegal you will have people who can speak several languages, and in that case, you may have the gestures of one language going with another language, and you have to learn to deal with that. Also you may have people moving within the same conversation from one language to another language quite unconsciously. Now this question of redundancy or of people repeating themselves. You'll find that if you're working with peasants, for instance, they would tend to repeat themselves, and sometimes put in a lot of unnecessary words. So in the first rehearsal, I allow them the freedom to talk until they get this thing out of their system. Then during the second rehearsal you explain to them that some of this must be tightened up or cut out. KO: But in Camp De Thiaroye [DZ/SN/TN, 1988], I found this repetition of lines sometimes quite refreshing actually, I mean the way in which sometimes, with a different flavor, or even with a touch of humor, a character repeats or reinforces what another character has just said. OS: Also you must remember that first of all we are dealing with the army, and the army is an interesting phenomenon for most of us. Most of us don't know any more about the army than the uniform. So it's interesting to show how the army functions, and these guys in the army are ordinary human beings. One would repeat what the other fellow has said, naturally to show that one is actually participating fully in the conversation to show that you are agreeing with him. If I was making this film in a Western style, then I would cut out all of that. KO: Well for me this is the most crucial and central and problematic area of our struggle as filmmakers or artists to develop an African film language: the language of real life. …