Djibril Diop Mambéty

Djibril Diop Mambéty (January 1945 – July 23, 1998) was a Senegalese film director, actor, orator, composer and poet.Though he made only two feature films and five short films, they received international acclaim for their original and experimental cinematic technique and non-linear, unconventional narrative style. Born to a Muslim family near Dakar, Senegal's capital city, Mambéty was Wolof. He died in 1998 while being treated for lung cancer in a Paris hospital.

The son of a Muslim cleric and member of the Lebou tribe, Djibril Diop Mambéty was born nearSenegal's capital city of Dakar in Colobane, a town featured prominently in some of his films.Mambéty's interest in cinema began with theater.Having graduated from acting school in Senegal, Mambéty worked as a stage actor at the Daniel Sorano National Theater in Dakar until he was expelled for disciplinary reasons. In 1969, at age 23, without any formal training in filmmaking, Mambéty directed and produced his first short film, Contras' City (City of Contrasts).The following year Mambéty made another short, Badou Boy, which won the Silver Tanit award at the 1970 Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia.

Mambéty's technically sophisticated and richly symbolic first feature-length film, Touki Bouki (1973), received the International Critics Award at Cannes Film Festival and won the Special Jury Award at the Moscow Film Festival, bringing the Senegalese director international attention and acclaim.Despite the film's success, twenty years passed before Mambéty made another feature film.During this hiatus he made one short film in 1989, Parlons Grandmère (Let's talk Grandmother).

Hyènes (1992), Mambéty's second and final feature film, was an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit and was conceptualized as a continuation of Touki Bouki.At the time of his death, the film director had been working on a trilogy of short films called Contes des Petites Gens (Tales of the Little People).The first of the three films was Le Franc (1994).At the time of his death Mambéty had been editing the second film of that series, La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun), which premiered posthumously in 1999.His early death to lung cancer, at age 53, occurred in a Paris hospital.

He was the subject of a 2008 documentary film Mambéty For Ever.

Cinematic style, themes, and politics

The notion of hybridity is a theme that runs through many of Djibril Diop Mambéty films.Like many of his contemporaries, Djibril Diop Mambéty used the cinematic medium to comment on political and social conditions in Africa.As critiques of neocolonialism, like those of Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissé, Mambéty's films can similarly be understood in the context of Third Cinema. Yet, his often unconventional, surrealist, fast-paced, non-linear style distinguishes Mambéty from other prominent filmmakers of Francophone African Cinema who employed more traditional didactic, social realist narratives.African Studies scholar Sheila Petty notes, "unlike other African filmmakers of the late 1960s and early 1970s whose films were structured around essentialist nationalist discourse focused on the binary opposition of African values versus cultural alienation, Mambéty sought to expose the diversity of real life". According to critics like Petty, his films were an expression of an African sensibility neither locked into narrow nationalism nor into colonial French culture. Instead of rejecting or elevating one as more or less authentically African, Mambéty confronted and engaged with postindependent Africa's complexities and contradictions. Montage sequences in his films that are overflowing with symbols and sounds of traditional and modern Africa, as well as contemporary European culture, depict hybridity. In addition, his own editing and narrative style are a confluence of the ancient griotic tradition of tribal storytelling and modern avant-garde techniques. Mambéty was interested in transforming conflicting, mixed elements into a usable African culture, and in his words, "reinvent[ing] cinema".

Other common thematic concerns in Mambéty's films are power, wealth and delusion. Offering a cynical view of humanity in his last feature-length film, Hyènes, Mambéty implicates Africans themselves for a continuing dependency on the West. Through the film and in many interviews, the director suggests that Africans are short-sighted in looking to the colonial past for their future, and are misled by their unrestrained desires for material goods that ensure Africa's dependency on foreign aid. Ultimately, however, Mambéty transmitted a message of hopefulness in his final films, which elevate the "little people," as the bearers of a positive and new Africa. "The only truly consistent, unaffected people in the world," Mambéty once said of the marginalized, "for whom every morning brings the same question: how to preserve what is essential to themselves".

Vlad Dima, a professor of French studies, describes Mambéty's alternation "between synchronous and asynchronous sound" in his films as a way for viewers to move from a "visual plane" to an "aural narrative" plane. Dima provides an example of this technique as seen in the opening scene of Contras'city when French classical music accompanies the visual of the French-style Dakar City Hall building; it is then interrupted by the Senegalese flag, a disruption of the music, and a voiceover of someone saying "Dakar."

"Cinema is magic in the service of dreams."

"The word griot...is the word for what I do and the role that the filmmaker has in society...the griot is a messenger of one's time, a visionary and the creator of the future." (Africa Shoots Back)

"One has to choose between engaging in stylistic research or the mere recording of facts.I feel that a filmmaker must go beyond the recording of facts.Moreover, I believe that Africans, in particular, must reinvent cinema.It will be a difficult task because our viewing audience is used to a specific film language, but a choice has to be made: either one is very popular and one talks to people in a simple and plain manner, or else one searches for an African film language that would exclude chattering and focus more on how to make use of visuals and sounds."

"Birds know what god is like. They are nearer than Hyenas to god. They are like some kind of elephant whose wings flow in the wind, and African Film makers can be birds for reinventing the seventh art. We are perhaps poor in money but so rich by situation and hope".

Mambéty was the older brother of musician Wasis Diop and the uncle of actress and director Mati Diop, Wasis Diop's daughter. He was the father of Teemour Diop mambety and soon to be grandfather of Malayka mambety Diop.