Mo' Ceddo (this time with text!)

One of the more intriguing points in Rosen’s piece was the idea of narrative satisfaction versus historical modification.  When Princess Dior kills the imam it “[n]arratively…resolves the original story problem—her kidnapping—but only with complicated reversals:  Dior is finally rescued from the kidnapper, but then she rescues herself from her putative rescuer, the imam, and in alliance with those who planned her original kidnapping.  This climax enacts an historical possibility never realized in Senegalese history, a unification of the old nobility and the ceddo against foreign incursions” (732).  This disruption of history forces the (informed) audience to think. 

 

Let’s couple this with Gabriel’s idea of the hunter and game:  “In the Western-style movie, the depiction of the hunt would focus upon the ultimate act of the hunter bagging his game.  In the Third Word context, the interest would be in depicting the relationship of the hunter to the natural environment which feeds his material and spiritual needs and which, in fact, is the source of the game.  Here we are dealing with an unresolved situation, with no closure” (57).  The Third World perspective debases the Western World’s obsession with narrative satisfaction.  In Ceddo the fact that the princess survives is not the point.  An intimate, living relationship is formed between film and audience.  The spectators are meant to evaluate this warped vision of history…there is also some motivation of Third Cinema filmmakers due to the juxtaposition of Second and Third Cinema.  The ability to move away from Western perspective through the newer form of Third Cinema (which is also pridefully based on oral-tradition in the example of Ceddo) enhances points made in the narrative such as questioning the Islamic invasion in Senegal.  This blend of reading the movie as a text, as Barthes would, and assessing politics and history (of both the country and the film industry) is the crux of action through Third Cinema.  Does this align Barthes with Western view of satisfying the narrative?  If history is drained from the text, what does his view alone get from the film?  Something radically different from Sembene’s, and other directors of Third Cinema, intentions, for sure, but I doubt he’d be completely incapable of reading the film and I’d like some clarification on how he’d extract information.