Upon its release, Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1974) was acclaimed for its scorching critique of contemporary postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a politically engaged pan-African filmmaker and a wholly new kind of African auteur.
 
James S. Williams study of Xala tackles its conceptual and formal challenges, resisting a reductive analysis of the film as a mere political allegory. Instead, Williams argues that it is not a 'clean' counter-hegemonic film, but rather, it is continually disruptive, combustive and even subversive. He analyses the film's syncretic mix of styles and tonalities, including drama, oral 'trickster' narrative, symbolic tableaux, humour, satire, sociological documentary, social realism, and mysticism. In doing so, he asserts that watching the film is an intentionally alienating experience and Sembene employs denaturalising techniques in order to evade the binaries the film itself brings to the audience's attention. Williams goes on to focus on aspects of Sembene’s filmmaking that have been relatively neglected, such as his constant dispersal of narrative focus and point of view, generic shifts, and the proliferation of characters and sub-plots. Through these devices, Sembene forges a wholly new pan-African aesthetic and cinematic grammar untainted by Western notions of beauty. The result is an extraordinary and restlessly complex film that cannot be reduced simply to a didactic work of political messages.