Danny Glover on the great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène:
"Ousmane Sembène was one of the world’s most passionate filmmakers, and the novelist who perhaps best captured the turmoil of modern West Africa. He was a staunchly political figure who, in an era of violent power plays, used storytelling as a means of leverage. He was a visionary who understood the power of imagination as a form of resistance against the colonizer, and as a means of cultivating awareness, integrity, and compassion for a better future. He was a leader who helped create a filmmaking labor union, a film festival, and a literary magazine. He was, in sum, one of Africa’s most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. And to me, he was both a hero and a friend.
I remember when I first saw 'Black Girl' in the 1960s, when I was a student and at the same time reading Frantz Fanon’s 'Wretched of the Earth'. That mask! The way Sembène’s ever-observant yet mysteriously unobtrusive camera captured the slow emptying of soul that was Diouana’s death. Our relationship began there, though he couldn’t know that until we actually met in August of 1988 at his home in Dakar. I had come specifically to Senegal to meet Sembène. I remember him serving the Senegalese dish called yassa over a grain that was grown precolonialism called funio, and explaining the origins of the grain. So in that small way Sembène was teaching, giving voice to the past and history.
Yes, Sembène was an African storyteller, but it wasn’t the color of his characters’ skin that resonated with me (though it remains true, nearly 50 years after Sembène first picked up a camera, that those of us with dark skin are still fighting to overcome racism in the global movie-making system). Sembène’s movies were not solely about race. He told the stories neglected by the international media, stories of people living and loving, through tragedy and triumph, on the margins of society. More consistently than any artist I know, Sembène gave voice and agency to everyday people coping with and battling against everyday injustices—allowing us to anoint our own heroes and simultaneously revealing the mechanics of the systems responsible for those injustices. Systems that encourage cruelty, not compassion, and narrow-mindedness instead of imagination. Sembène’s films and novels suggest a better way."
(Foreword to "Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist", Samba Gadjigo, 2010)
Clip from:
Black Girl (1966)
Director: Ousmane Sembène
morgan rogers is more orchestration, just like eze, but they can’t really be trusted with full control and build-up responsibility at the elite possession level.
honorable mentions are arda güler and xavi simons, or even that bloke bilal el khannouss.
arteta perfect 10/8 hybrid to replace ødegaard is wirtz or musiala. they give everything øde does but with more running power in transition. nico paz is there but he’s too young and still learning how to control games, even though he’s so calm on the ball. bayern nor liverpool
@isthatscully football isn’t “less about athleticism” or “more about skill” now….it’s about how completely the two have fused. the game doesn’t separate them anymore; it tests whether they’re integrated.
I think balance is less something we achieve and more something life is already doing continuously through adjustment, while “us” is the layer that interprets, resists, or distorts that ongoing regulation afterward into stories of success or failure.
i think deep down i wanted to be a biologist and psychoanalyst. i’m not drawn to one side more; i’m interested in the interference….what is preserved, and what is distorted, when a lived experience passes between biological explanation and psychological interpretation.
James Blood Ulmer, the innovative guitarist who fused avant-garde jazz with funk and the blues, has died at age 86.
Access the free article here: https://t.co/14pQSUTJDv
In each case, intelligence is not the possession of answers, but the ability to remain alive to what cannot yet be contained to return to it changed, and to keep returning, even when change hurts.
i’ve been thinking lately that intelligence is the capacity to be moved by what exceeds you and to respond in ways that expand, over time, your future responsiveness to the unknown. temporary contraction is not its opposite; it is sometimes its cost. what matters is
what distinguishes intelligence from mere vulnerability, a rock eroded by wind, a wound that only repeats is memory with direction: the past reorganizing the present not toward safety as an end, but toward a more attuned, more capacious future. to be moved is not enough; one