Sembène meets Pagnol

I thought I had picked up all the cinema references in Ousmane Sembène’s first novel, Le Docker noir (1956), until I glanced through an English translation. Then I read this:

How could I have missed such a clear cinematic simile? Well, the original French text is not nearly so explicit. Instead of saying the city looked like a scene from a Marcel Pagnol film, Sembène is more allusive.

The English translator, Ros Schwartz, has joined the dots for us, informing readers that Marius and Olive (or rather Ollivier) are characters in Pagnol’s  Marseille trilogy. This begins with Marius, a 1931 film written by Pagnol and directed by Alexander Korda. Before that, however, Marius was a stage play, published in book form at around the time the film came out.

Sembène was writing in the 1950s, having lived for several years in Marseille. Would he know Marius and the rest of Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy from the cinema, the stage or the library? Or is he adopting a common shorthand for local colour? The substitution of Olive for Ollivier might just be a typo, but to call them companions when they are father and son — César and Marius Ollivier — suggests Sembène may not have known the work that well.

Yet the possibility of a connection is fascinating. Pagnol is not usually cited as an influence on Sembène, but it’s a notion that might bear further scrutiny.

text © Ian Mundell 2014

Not a word to Ma

People rarely go to the cinema in Ousmane Sembène’s first novel, Le Docker noir (1956), but they talk about it all the time. They talk about wanting to go, about not going, and about using a trip to the movies as an excuse for doing something else.

The story unfolds in contemporary France, mainly in Marseille, among the Africans who work as casual labour in the docks. The cinema is ubiquitous popular entertainment, but considered expensive. “I’m as poor as Job,” says Diaw Falla, the docker of the title. “If I go to the cinema, tomorrow I’ll be eating on credit.”

But it’s a different story when he later offers to buy sweets for a friend’s child. “I don’t want any,” the boy says, “but slip me the cash to go to the movies…and not a word to Ma, it’s just between us. I’ll fill her in once the money is spent.”

Even then, before he became a film director himself, Sembène appreciated the popular appeal of the cinema.

text © Ian Mundell 2014