#1049: HONDO, Med: Soleil Ô (1970)

HONDO, Med (France)

Soleil Ô [1970]

Spine #1049
Blu-ray

A furious cry of resistance against racist oppression and a revolutionary landmark of political cinema, this feature debut from Mauritanian director Med Hondo is a bitterly funny, dazzlingly experimental attack on capitalism and the legacy of colonialism. Soleil Ô follows a starry-eyed immigrant as he leaves West Africa and journeys to Paris in search of a job, a community, and intellectual engagement — but soon discovers a hostile society where his very presence engenders fear and resentment. With this freewheeling masterpiece, Hondo crafts a shattering vision of awakening Black consciousness.

102 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

in French

1:37:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2020

Director/Writer

Med Hondo was 34 when he wrote and directed Ô Soleil.

The Film

Racism exists. Xenophobia is extant. White supremacy will seemingly never disappear. Primal rage is real.

Hondo’s feature film debut wanders at times. But the power of his ideas and experiences pierce through the haze of a slightly disassociated cinema with sharp edges.

Robert Liensol is the cucumber-cool protagonist; until he’s not … his wants are simple, but the persistent colonialist attitudes of the white French play against that, and thus revolutionary struggle is a given.

There are many powerful scenes: the conversion where they denounce their mother tongues; the scene where Liensol and a gorgeous white woman (Yane Barry, Hondo’s girlfriend at the time) play cutesy on the Champs-Élysées to the horror caught on camera of the real faces of the French passing by … and of course, the “metatheorization” scene which Sonogo talks about below …

The scenes which are accompanied by the Cameroonian Georges Anderson’s “Apollo” are quite effective … including a man playing an American Gottlieb pinball machine — Airplane:

“Le flipper,” they call it. Put in your one-franc piece, bouncing from bumper to bumper, lighting up the board.

It’s a lot of fun — unless you’re the ball …

Film Rating (0-60):

55

The Extras

The Booklet

Essay by Aboubakar Sonogo: I Bring You Greetings from Africa.

“Hondo uses a digressive structure as a way of freeing his narrative from the despotism of the Aristotelian form while mirroring the wandering and associational properties of human thought. Soleil Ô conjures its own language, drawing from forms of African orature in which departing from the main topic and later returning to where one has left off are part of the very jouissance of storytelling. Take as an example the scene in which our protagonist is sent to visit a sociologist who is investigating the status and value of African migrant labor in the French economy and society. The scene functions as both a. metatheorization of the case studies of migrant life figured in the film and a critique of the extreme violence concealed in the disembodied technobureaucratic language accounting for it. Instead of playing the roughly six-minute episode as a whole, Hondo breaks it up over almost a half hour of screen time, repeatedly leaving it to explore other loosely related topics: a pedagogic illustration; a powerful and damning documentarizing scene on deplorable migrant living conditions; multiple scenes in which the protagonist looks for a job, with violent rejections; a scene on strikes and demonstrations that explores working-class solidarity; an accidental encounter with the president of an unnamed African nation; a gathering of students and migrants; etc.”

Commentary

None.

Introduction

By World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese.

Excerpts

From interview with director Hondo, conducted by his cinematographer François Catonné in 2018.

His grandfather was a griot. He first film he ever saw was Mara Maru (1952) with Errol Flynn. He studied film theory in Marseilles without ever really touching a camera.

Extras Rating (0-40):

34

55 + 34 =

89

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