"Camp de Thiaroye," New Yorker Films, 1987

It's a raw and subtle saga, co-directed with Parisian-trained filmmaker Thierno Faty Sow and shot in Sembene's classical, methodical style, that excavates a repressed episode of down-home horror from the days following WWII. What actually happened at Camp de Thiaroye in 1944 could be read as an abstract of colonialist friction; it conforms so expressively to the themes of Sembene's earlier films going back 20 years that one could be tempted to suspect he fashioned it from whole cloth. "Camp de Thiaroye" centers on the Senegalese infantrymen (drafted to fight on behalf of their colonizers, the French) who returned from the war expecting to be repatriated to their individual villages; instead, they were sequestered in the eponymous transit camp and made to feel more like POWs (several are Buchenwald alumni) than victorious soldiers. It's a purely political dynamic -- not ever terribly personal or psychological -- so each character occupies his own point along the scale stretching between collaborationism (a raw idea right after the fall of Vichy) and unbridled revolution. As the voltage between the dispirited men and their French guards rises, culminating in the seizure of the camp by its prisoners, Sembene's reconstructed history lesson takes on the bitter menace of the familiar "Great Escape" prison-camp genre feeding upon itself like a cancer. Of course, it climaxes in a massacre -- dated in a title, "Nov. 30, 1944, 10 Hours" -- which Sembene portrays with a hellish brio that's as close as he's ever come to hyperbole.

[Additional photo: "The Tall T," Columbia Pictures, 1957]

"The Films of Budd Boetticher" (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) and " Camp de Thiaroye" (New Yorker Video) are now available on DVD.

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