A great master has died.

Author, filmmaker, and political thinker Sembene Ousmane has died at 84, and our cinema has suffered a loss. A pioneer in both African film production and distribution (indeed, he often scheduled screenings of his films in villages, having the equipment to show his politically and socially charged material trucked out to venues without theaters), Sembene parlayed an early career as a novelist into a lasting one as a filmmaker, choosing cinema as a means of expressing his ideas to a Pan-African audience. That the rest of us got to see what he was doing was just gravy, as far as he was concerned.

Sembene’s name rarely gets trudged up when Compilers of Lists are putting together surveys of The Great Filmmakers, but it should be. Independent of his claim, along with that of Souleymane Cisse, as one of the most important pioneers of African cinema, he was a major artist, a humanist in the tradition of De Sica and Ray, but one with a pointedly political scope of inquiry and a willingness to explore both the problems and the triumphs of African society.

Sembene made films about Africa, African people, and the relationship between African people and global flows of ideas, economy, and politics. And his most controversial ideas - his rejection of western religions and their influences on African society - are perhaps his best known. Ceddo, Guelwaar, and Moolaade all address these concerns to varying degrees - the first is a period piece about forced Muslim conversion, the second a comedy (of sorts) on Muslim/Christian relations and funereal rites, and the last, perhaps his best known film now, a stinging condemnation of the abominable practice of female genital mutilation.

Yet his is a wide purview: in Black Girl he addresses the consciousness of African womanhood in France; Camp de Thiaroye is an epic vision of postwar atrocity in an internment camp for returning African WW2 veterans set up by their French colonizers. Xala, severely underseen even among cineastes, is a comedy of impotence, political corruption and decolonization.

But if his importance were limited simply to the scope of his inquiry, and not to the wholeness of his filmmaking talents, then his works might prove didactic - even pedantic. Indeed, there are some who criticized Sembene’s work for their greater popularity with western intellectuals than with African moviegoers. Like Kurosawa and Ray, his is a cinema patronized by western audiences, but like those filmmakers, his best works transcend their own built-in ‘exoticism.’ Borrowing heavily from African narrative tradition but with an eye toward modernism, his films are impressive engagements in form as well as terrific explorations of the intersections of narrative traditions. And they are winning, engrossing intersections of comedy, melodrama, and political intrigue.

Look at those films - the shocking, elegant use of non-diegetic sound and the oppositions of African and western visual traditions in Camp de Thiaroye (the great unheralded masterpiece of the 1980s), the playful visual patterns and match cuts in Moolaade, the daringly limited purview and authorial rigor of Black Girl, and the gorgeous patterning of light and color in Guelwaar. Sembene was an African, a political thinker and compassionate debater, but he was also a phenomenal, indispensible filmmaker, one who could mix modes of address (watch how quickly any of his films veer from comedy to tragedy and then back again) and find within these intangible grey areas the soul of a continent in transition.

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