The Revelatory Work of Souleymane Cissé

“I will never forget the effect of my first viewing of that film,” said Martin Scorsese in 2023. It was “one of the great revelatory experiences of my moviegoing life. I felt like I was watching a myth in the process of its own creation.” In Bambara, the national language of Mali, Yeelen means “brightness” or “light,” and the film tells “a tale that is all tales in its scope, tragedy, and triumph,” writes Nathanael Hood in a brief primer for Notebook on the story’s roots in West African mythology.

Set in the Mali Empire long before it was invaded by Morocco in the sixteenth century, Yeelen is based on the Bambara legend of a young man, Nianankoro (Issiaka Kane), who sets out to discover the secrets of nature with the help of his mother and uncle. His father, a sorcerer, has a vision in which he is killed by his son, so he decides to kill Nianankoro first.

“Just as there’s no mistaking the story’s Oedipal overtones,” writes Slant’s Ed Gonzalez, “there’s an Eden-like vibe to many of the film’s more elemental sequences. Cissé can evoke the wondrous magical powers of the film’s Bambara people with as little as a dog and an Albino native walking backward in time.”

Claire Moses reports in the New York Times that Cissé was in fine spirits on Wednesday morning, cracking jokes as he spoke at a press conference in the run-up to this year’s Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, widely known as Fespaco. The twenty-ninth edition will open on Saturday and run through March 1, and Cissé was set to preside over the jury. After talking to reporters, he took a nap and simply did not wake up again.

Raised a Muslim in Bamako, Cissé studied in Dakar, and when he returned, he worked as a projectionist for a community center in the Malian capital. “One evening,” he told Yasmina Price in a 2023 Notebook interview, “a particular newsreel fell into our laps—we didn’t know what it was before screening it, but it was in fact the report on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba . . . It was a shock! I do not have adequate words to explain how much I was affected and stunned. This was the moment when I realized that cinema was an extraordinary tool of communication and expression. And just like that, the journey began.”

He won a scholarship and studied at the Russian State University of Cinematography in Moscow, and then, back in Mali, worked as a cameraman on documentaries and shorts. In 1972, he directed Five Days in a Life (1972), a medium-length film about a dropout who becomes a thief.

His first feature, The Young Girl (1975), “suggested a naturalistic aesthetic which, even as it carried on to subsequent works such as Baara [Work, 1980], was later challenged within the films themselves through unexpected flashes of more disruptive cinematic techniques,” writes Price. “Ultimately evading categories he never abided by, Cissé’s films synthesize the qualities of social realism with an affinity for experimentation and devotion to symbolism, spirituality, and ambivalence. He carries the inventive temperament of a dreamer armed with a firm political orientation.”

In Baara, a manager of a factory in the city offers a job to a poor young man from the country, and both men will be witness to the severe mistreatment and exploitation of the workers. “The primary formal strategy of this calm, objective film is the accumulation of vignettes,” wrote Chris Fujiwara in 2001. “Each interlude has a suspended quality that’s sometimes threatening, sometimes relaxed and lovely; together the dispersed scenes give a full sense—astonishing for such a brief film (only ninety minutes)—of a fragmented people in a state of undeclared civil war.”

Finyè (The Wind, 1982) is set against the backdrop of a student revolt against a military regime, and in Waati (1995), a young Black woman flees South Africa after her father is killed by a white landowner. Several years passed before Cissé returned with Min Ye (Tell Me Who You Are, 2009). “Originally planned as a ten-hour miniseries,” wrote Leo Goldsmith at Reverse Shot, “Min Ye seems to take some of its form and idiom from Malian television serials, with their lurid, twisting plotlines, expressive soap-operatics from their performers, and functionality as a popular platform for social debate.”

In 2023, the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes presented the Carrosse d’or, its “tribute to a filmmaker who has left their mark on the history of cinema,” to Cissé, an award that occasioned Price’s interview. “It is crucial to understand that we are in dire straits in Mali—there is so little cinematic infrastructure,” Cissé told her. “For the coming generations we must create structures that will permit them to project themselves into filmmaking and be on par with filmmakers from other parts of the world!”