Black Camera: Safi Faye's Mossane: A Song to Women, to Beauty, to Africa by Beti Ellerson (Spring 2019)

Safi Faye's Mossane:

A Song to Women, to Beauty, to Africa

Beti Ellerson 

Black Camera: An International Film Journal

African Women in Cinema Dossier

Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring 2019), pp. 250-265

Abstract

Mossane (dir. Safi Faye), completed in 1990 and released in 1996, is a timeless piece. That is the nature of legends, of myths, of allegories. Destiny has been inscribed, fate already determined. Having created a narrative imbued in Serer mythology, structured around the fate of a fourteen-year-old girl, who because of her stunning beauty, is returned to the Pangool spirits through the waters of the Mamangueth, Safi Faye’s cinematic endeavor was to decide in what way to tell the story and how to visualize it. This article frames the film Mossane within the context of Faye’s corpus of works, especially as it relates to prevailing themes that foreground women’s experiences within the rural sector and countryside, socio-economic matters, education, issues at the intersection of tradition and modernity, rituals and ceremonies and the importance of oral tradition as a foundation for visual storytelling. Set in Faye's Serer homeland, Mossane compares to her early Serer-focused films that draw its cast/participants from the village. While it is her only film in which the scenario and narrative are entirely fictionalized, the themes of class, the quotidian experiences of the rural-dwellers, oral tradition, struggles based on land and nature, the storyteller, are recurrent topics in Faye’s oeuvres. In addition, the article speaks to the manner in which Mossane addresses the right of women to have power over their own bodies and desires and the choice to marry who they choose, by framing the analysis of women's rights in the context of the broader discourse on the peasantry, education, custom and modernity. 

 

Subheadings

The Legend
Myth, oral tradition, storytelling
Visualizing the ancestral spirits, the Pangools
Yandé Codou Sène: the griotic voice of history and conscience
The peripatetic beggar boy as metaphor
A song to beauty
Beauty’s oppositionality
An ode to women
The quiet empowerment of rural-dwelling women
Lessons learned, lessons taught

LINK: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/blackcamera.10.2.18

BLACK CAMERA: AFRICAN WOMEN IN CINEMA DOSSIER BY BETI ELLERSON:

African Women on the Film Festival Landscape: Organizing, Showcasing, Promoting, Networking with Falila Gbadamassi (Fall 2019) 

Safi Faye's Mossane: A Song to Women, to Beauty, to Africa (Spring 2019)

African Women of the Screen as Cultural Producers: An Overview by Country (Fall 2018)

On-screen Narratives, Off-screen Lives: African Women Inscribing the Self (Spring 2018)

Traveling Gazes: Glocal Imaginaries in the Transcontinental, Transnational, Exilic, Migration, and Diasporic Cinematic Experiences of African Women (Spring 2017)

African Women and the Documentary: Storytelling, Visualizing History, from the Personal to the Political (Fall 2016)

Teaching African Women in Cinema, Part Two (Spring 2016)

Teaching African Women in Cinema, Part One (Fall 2015)