The Money Order (Mandabi) 1968 WOL SUB ENG, ITA 1080p BluRay x264 KJNU

Year:  1968
Country:  Senegal, France
Director:  Ousmane Sembene
Cast:  Makhouredia Gueye, Ynousse N'Diaye, Isseu Niang, Serigne N'Diayes
IMBD:  Link

Language : Wolof
Subtitles : English, Italian





“Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from European-ruled colonies to independent nations—was long, and cinema, an art that could speak to illiterate people steeped in oral traditions, was the anti­colonial tool that suited its protracted modulations. Released in 1968, Sembène’s second feature, Mandabi, mines that line between colonial and postcolonial, between cinema and the literary, and between languages too. The first feature made in an African language, Mandabi was shot in Sembène’s mother tongue of Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal. The film was based on Sembène’s own 1966 French-language novella The Money Order. A careful and deliberate self-adapter, Sembène also drew on his previously published fiction for four other films: the shorts Niaye (1964) and Tauw (1970) and the features Black Girl (1966) and Xala (1975).

Sembène realized his ideas initially in a literary language but also in a foreign one. He published ten books in forty years. Most concern the problem of African liberation. His short stories, novellas, and novels were all written originally in French, a fact that Sembène felt betrayed the promise of the struggle for African freedom. By writing in a colonial language, he would never reach the population he was intent on not only representing but also awakening politically: people in rural areas, people who could not read, people who spoke Wolof—that is, most of the people of Senegal, who did not speak French but were part of an African oral tradition. Thus to write in French was implicitly to write for a specific audience: the francophone West and a small elite population in West Africa. Because of global capitalist interests and Senegal’s internal power politics, Sembène stood in opposition to both groups.

Though written in French, his previous novels—Ô pays, mon beau peuple! (Oh country, my beautiful people!, 1957) and God’s Bits of Wood (1960) especially—contained a widespread use of Wolof through neologisms and direct translations of vernacular expressions, paving the way for Mandabi. And the original volume featuring that film’s source novella includes a Wolof glossary of over sixty words. In Sembène’s literature, Wolof is almost a character in its own right, foreignizing the French text. Even in his early filmmaking, Sembène continued working in French out of necessity, finding ways to subvert the language. The script for Black Girl, for instance, was rejected by the film bureau of France’s Ministry of Cooperation for production funding. He managed to get support elsewhere, but only by agreeing to present the voice-over for the protagonist’s inner dialogue in French, not Wolof—a distortion that, thanks to M’Bissine Thérèse Diop’s haunting performance, ultimately heightens the film’s evocation of the main character’s alienation. Despite these struggles, Black Girl achieved success in the international market, emboldening Sembène to assume full control of his films, one result being the opportunity to make Mandabi in Wolof (though his funders still demanded that he shoot a French-language version simultaneously).

Born in Casamance—a diverse southwestern region of Senegal where Wolof is spoken alongside a mixture of other African and colonial languages—Sembène arrived at filmmaking through labor as well as literature. In other words, before Sembène had a life’s work, he worked: by sailing between Dakar and Ziguinchor (Casamance’s administrative hub), in military service during World War II, at a Paris Citroën factory, on the docks in the Marseille harbor, where he met other African migrant workers. In 1951, he suffered a back injury from an occupational accident in France and, during his recovery, read vigorously, switching to literature of a different measure than the comic books that he had devoured as an adolescent in Dakar. He used the library of the French Communist Party, which he had joined in 1950, reading about Marxism, anticolonialism, organizing strategies, internationalism, and Black struggle.

But in all that study, he did not see what he was looking for: the Black masses in Africa. He would begin to write about them himself. He wrote his first novel, Black Docker (1956), in Marseille, drawing on his own experiences as an African worker. The opening is imagistic, describing the twin hills, called the Mamelles, of Senegal’s Cap-Vert peninsula: “Mossy in some places, bare in others, their barrenness made them ridiculous. The savanna was broken up by knobbly, parasitic cacti. The baobabs looked neglected, like twigs shed from a broom.” A woman watches, her face “wet with tears,” as an ocean liner rounds these hills, a cloud passing in front of the sunset “filtering the reddish rays, tingeing the sky a deep rust.” Seeing the ship leave the continent behind, on the way to France, is an aesthetic and sensorial experience: a wet face, mossy hills, neglected baobabs, reddish rays, rusting sky.

These lingering descriptions reveal why Sembène not only preferred literature to films in general but also, as his biographer Samba Gadjigo notes, preferred his literature to his films. His literary representations of landscape reproduce with hyperprecision the way places make one feel, creating a rhythm that allows a subtle attention to the idea of Africa that is possible only in literature. One of his most lyrical novels, Ô pays, mon beau peuple! also traffics in thick, sometimes indulgent, descriptions that cumulatively offer a kind of manifesto of the senses: “The pungent smell of flower-covered liana was interspersed with lingering odors of hot oil and smoke . . . The front-row trees bent eagerly over the glaucous water, their branches and lianas interwoven in a dazzling chaos, a truly anarchic vegetal webwork.” In God’s Bits of Wood, perhaps Sembène’s best-known novel, this sensory focus expands to a panoramic mode that considers political action from multiple angles, recounting a historic railroad strike that took place in colonial French West Africa from October 1947 to March 1948. Notably, the women of Bamako in Mali, and of Thiès and Dakar in Senegal, join the struggle, playing an important part in Sembène’s account of African people as political agents.

Published the same year that Senegal gained independence from France, God’s Bits of Wood shares its gender and anticolonial political concerns with Black Girl, which addresses the impact of imperialism through European contact. In a departure from Sembène’s earlier focus on the terror wielded by colonial powers, Mandabi is about oppression within Africa and the ways it is manifested in tradition, religion, and corruption. The horrors inflicted by the French colonial government still linger, of course, but they now have moved from the foreground to the background. Mandabi, then, must be understood as the crossroads in Sembène’s search for his true audience (who were also participants and collaborators), plotting a contrast between a “traditional” Africa and the bureaucracies of neocolonialism led by a new African elite.

Mandabi follows the patriarch Ibrahima Dieng (Makuredia Guey) as he tries to cash a money order sent to him by his nephew Abdou, who has been working in Paris as a street sweeper. The fidgety Ibrahima is unemployed, with two wives and seven children to feed, but he is preoccupied with keeping up appearances. On the surface, the title suggests that the film is about money. Who gets it? How do you access it? What does it do to people? Sembène described the film as Brechtian, invoking a performance practice that relies on defamiliarizing the familiar in order to bring out the hidden inequities of social life. As a satire, the film reveals a difficult, complex world full of suffering. Though the money order gives rise at first to the great hope that Ibrahima’s material suffering will be relieved, this vicissitude of fortune instead sets off disorder. At the post office and then the police department, Ibrahima is sent on a wild-goose chase to procure the documents necessary to collect the money. With no identity card, no driver’s license, and no draft card, he can’t cash the order. Mandabi depicts the infuriating experience of having one’s livelihood continually blocked by administrative details.

In the context of a society still emerging from colonialism, this bureaucratic rigmarole is clearly more consequential than the levity of the film’s tone sometimes suggests. Ibrahima’s plight is not just a matter of getting some much-needed cash—though that is urgent enough, since this man and his big family are in significant debt, and living on credit. For an uneducated man like Ibrahima, shut out of the new country’s bureaucracy, these economic woes go hand in hand with political disenfranchisement. It’s not just wealth that Ibrahima and his family lack but the language that can secure it, and the power that it brings. “Only the penniless deny the pleasure gained from money; money has no roots, but it grows in our hearts,” sings Ibrahima’s second wife, Aram.

Like many of Sembène’s films, Mandabi explores the politics of gender in African society, offering a genuine critique of patriarchy. The filmmaker was perhaps what the Black feminist critic Joy James would call “profeminist,” a term, analogous to “antiracist” today, that she applied to W. E. B. Du Bois to acknowledge his attention to women’s rights and opposition to patriarchy and misogyny, while also pointing out that these stances sat firmly within an overall masculinist worldview. A middle-aged family man who easily falls prey to corruption, Ibrahima represents a social type that Sembène regarded with a mixture of criticism and sympathy. Part of his gender critique comes across through the technical elements of the film, which he shot, somewhat reluctantly, in color. Ibrahima is often framed in close-up, sweaty and gaudy, obsessed with keeping up appearances in the face of growing debt—his persona is all shine. Sembène thought a lot about how to shoot and highlight the details of Black skin. What backdrop, setting, and lighting would best capture the nuances?

The differences between the book and the film are sometimes major, sometimes slight. In the novella, the postman arrives on a bike, whereas in the film he is on foot. The book begins: “His body was running with sweat. His shirt clung to his skin. His face was shining. Breathing heavily, his mouth open, the postman struggled through the sand with his bicycle.” This bodily discomfort is transferred to the film’s opening scene, in which the prideful Ibrahima gets a shave, every pore visible. Though the film is still an indictment, the comedic elements of the story come across more strongly on-screen than they do on the page. Many characters possess qualities that are so over-the-top as to seem almost absurdist: Ibrahima’s masculine pride, the nosiness of the neighbors whose waffling attitudes shift along with his imagined wealth, the callousness of the literate elite. By contrast, the book tends toward the tragic, propelled by omniscient descriptions of the psychological impact of precarity.

In many ways, the film itself, like Black Girl before it, provides an argument for why Sembène turned to movie­making in the first place: illiteracy. But not simply illiteracy as such; rather, illiteracy in a postcolonial society that requires reading for the procurement of documents essential to political and economic life. (Recall the police officer in Sembène’s 1963 short film Borom sarret, who demands of the cartman, “Show me your papers”; or the letter read to the protagonist by her employers in Black Girl.) Under these conditions, reading becomes not a solitary but a social phenomenon, in which individuals must find circuitous ways to have language read and written in order to interact with state authorities. Significantly, the instigating incident of Mandabi the film is the arrival of a letter. Along with the money order, Abdou has enclosed a message to Ibrahima that interrupts the protagonist’s routine life along with those of his family and his neighbors. He becomes the talk of the town, the message spreading orally through a community that can’t read it. “What color is the paper?” Ibrahima asks about the letter in the book. The epistolary form, the unreadable letter, serves as a frame for book and film alike, signaling both promise and eventual disappointment.

In Mandabi, Sembène cast himself as the public writer who reads Abdou’s letter aloud for Ibrahima, a move that crystallized another role he played for his entire literary and cinematic career: translator. After Mandabi, Sembène would go on to make Emitaï (1971) predominantly in Dyula, a language spoken in several West African countries, including Burkina Faso and Mali, highlighting the pan-Africanism at the core of his film practice. A multiplicity of African languages and cultures crowded his films, dehegemonizing the colonial language. Sembène understood and reaped the potential of a cinema that spoke to ordinary Africans in their own tongues—but, having written for so long in a language not his own, he also knew that the discomfort that comes with inhabiting a foreign language can produce its own desire for knowledge and for change. Just as he knew there was something urgent missing when he wrote and filmed in French, those of us who do not understand Wolof will be missing something in Mandabi, and this may spark a new consciousness in us. Perhaps Sembène’s most elegant task as translator was to render in cinematic terms the silence that is marked by The Money Order’s final sentence: “No one said a word.” (Tiana Reid)

[ About file ]

Name: The Money Order.Ousmane Sembene.1968.BluRay.KJNU.mkv
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:22:12 +0200
Size: 8,458,022,956 bytes (8066.199261 MiB)

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Duration: 01:32:13 (5532.819 s)
Container: matroska
Production date: Thu, 25 Mar 2021 04:21:38 +0200
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[ Relevant data ]

Resolution: 1800 x 1080
Width: multiple of 8
Height: multiple of 8
Average DRF: 24.769952
Standard deviation: 2.613532
Std. dev. weighted mean: 2.576203

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[ DRF analysis ]

average DRF: 24.769952
standard deviation: 2.613532
max DRF: 36

DRF<6:     0 (  0.000 %)
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DRF=23: 18024 ( 13.587 %) ###
DRF=24: 40595 ( 30.602 %) ######
DRF=25: 22973 ( 17.318 %) ###
DRF=26: 10291 (  7.758 %) ##
DRF=27:  7973 (  6.010 %) #
DRF=28:  6265 (  4.723 %) #
DRF=29:  5554 (  4.187 %) #
DRF=30:  3546 (  2.673 %) #
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DRF=34:   240 (  0.181 %)
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P-slices std. deviation: 2.400968
P-slices max DRF: 35

B-slices average DRF: 24.958981
B-slices std. deviation: 2.616411
B-slices max DRF: 36

I-slices average DRF: 21.417277
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[ Edition entry ]

Hidden: No
Selected by default: Yes
Playlist: No
Chapters:
00:00:00,000-00:10:52,402: Chapter 1 {und}
00:10:52,402-00:18:24,228: Chapter 2 {und}
00:18:24,228-00:26:44,436: Chapter 3 {und}
00:26:44,436-00:37:32,459: Chapter 4 {und}
00:37:32,459-00:46:14,146: Chapter 5 {und}
00:46:14,146-00:53:57,776: Chapter 6 {und}
00:53:57,776-01:05:28,258: Chapter 7 {und}
01:05:28,258-01:14:30,800: Chapter 8 {und}
01:14:30,800-01:22:53,760: Chapter 9 {und}
01:22:53,760-01:32:12,318: Chapter 10 {und}

This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 21-05-2025 00:56:44