Borom sarret

Ly Abdoulay has a horse -- played by Albourah, and a cart with a squeaky wheel .Every morning he gets up and goes downtown to look for work hauling around people and cinder blocks. Sometimes they pay him.

While he goes through his routines, he conducts an inner monologue of anger, fear and whining.. That's all of it in the course of this 18-minute short subject. You could argue that it's not a great movie -- and I do -- but it's an important movie because it is the first directed by Ousmane Sembene, and thus the first movie directed by a Black film maker in Africa.

20 minutes long. Black and white. Focusing on one cart driver. Sounds pretty c**p, huh? Wrong! The film makes excellent satirical points on the class divide, as well as providing some excellent, if somewhat crude, camera work. However, it's depth puts many movies to shame.

In 1963 director Ousmane Sembene made this short (20 min), in 1966 followed by the feature length "Black girl" (65 min). "Black girl" is about discrimination, "Borom sarret" is about poverty. It is a kind of African Loach.

We meet a carter in Dakar who has mostly non paying clients. Some are too poor to pay, others are too lousy to pay. One of the last kind is a sharp dressed black man who wants a ride to the genteel district of the city.

The film is socially concious with comical undertones. It are the clients of the carter who keep the film lively, just as in "Night on earth" (1991, Jim Jarmusch).

Funny is the way the film makes use of music. Scenes in the poor part of town are accompanied by African music, scenes in the rich part of town are accompanied by European classical music. At the end of the film the carter concludes he feels more comfortable in his poor part of town.

Ousmane Sembene (1923 - 2007) is one of the most famous African filmdirectors and is sometimes called "the father of African film". The question if "Borom sarret" (1963) is the first African film made by someone from Africa or that this honor belongs to "Song of Khartoum" (1955, Gadalla Gubara) is rather irrelevant in this respect.

Included in the same Criterion set as Ousmane Sembène's first feature film, "La Noire de..." ("Black Girl") (1966), this earliest short film by him may necessarily be a let down by comparison, but considering that it's credited as the first film ever made in Africa by a black African, it's an impressive production and beginning of Sembène's oeuvre. As in "Black Girl," "The Wagoner" is photographed in black and white and a crisp if relatively no-frills style, sound was added in post, and most of that is the internal monologue of the protagonist complaining how they feel like a slave and prisoner in their modern lives.

"The Wagoner" follows a horse-drawn cart driver through Dakar, as he's repeatedly not paid by passengers, gives what little money he does have to a panhandling singer, runs into trouble with a policeman for bringing his cart into the rich French quarter of the city and, ultimately upon his return home, wonders where his wife is wandering after she abandons him with the baby and in search of food. If this were a comedy, this hapless lead would be the stooge--the butt of a series of metropolitan jokes at his expense. Nothing goes his way, and he seemingly spends most of his day complaining in voiceover narration about it.

Besides the additional footage allowing more time to develop a narrative and postcolonial themes in "Black Girl," it also featured a plotline involving an African mask that both underscored the picture's social commentary and its own making. Art-within-art. "The Wagoner," on the other hand, moves as straightforward as the wagon. While engaging enough for a first film, it's evidently just that, as Sembène appears to be discovering a new world in film, and the spectator is just along for the ride.

A poor man struggles to make a living in Dakar via his horse drawn cart, which he uses for a taxi. We hear his inner thoughts as he wonders when people will pay him, and how he's going to make repairs to one of his wheels. It's 1963, just three years after Senegal was liberated from the French, and in one scene we see the Place de l'Obelisque that commemorates this fact. It should be a time of freedom and opportunity, and at one point we hear this optimistic sentiment:

"Who's singing the praises of my ancestors, those brave warriors of yesteryear? The same blood runs through my veins. Just because this new life has me working like a slave doesn't mean I'm any less noble than my ancestors."

However, we soon see that despite the withdrawal of the French, things haven't changed for the downtrodden, like this man. He's taken advantage of by a wealthy man, and a police officer leaves him in a very precarious state relative to how he's going to support his family. His sentiment changes:

"Yesterday was the same, and the day before that. We work for nothing. What'll I say at home? What will I say? How will I pay for my cart now? I might as well die!"

At just 18 minutes, it's not fleshed out, but director Ousmane Sembène left quite an impression with a film that feels like a wonderful short story. There is great power in the restraint of his ending too - we can use our imaginations, as the man will be doing, to think about what his wife will be off doing to feed the family.