ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to challenge the way in which Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene's films have at times been used to construct a somewhat truncated version of West African film history. This approach is not designed to question the significance of Sembene's pioneering work — on the contrary, but it argues that the richness and variety of his filmmaking have often been overlooked. But rather to understand better his aesthetic and thematic contributions within the wider context of some of the other films that were being produced in francophone West Africa during this period. The chapter examines Sembene's early work alongside two other 'foundational' films — Afrique-sur-Seine by Paulin Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr and Moustapha Alassane's Aoure — in order to begin the work of developing more complex genealogies of francophone West African filmmaking. By any measure, then, Alassane played something of a pioneering role in African cinema, but he has generally been relegated to passing references in historical accounts.
