A negra de...

Black Girl (1966)

*** (out of 4)

Impessive feature from Ousmane Sembene about a black woman (Mbissine Therese Diop) from Senegal who goes to live in France as a servant but soon begins to feel the abuse of her "owner." Some people have called BLACK GIRL one of the greatest films ever made but I'm going to fall well short of that type of praise. With that said, there's no question that the film has a pretty strong message and gets its across without having to preach or wag fingers in the viewers face. Some people have complained about the look and style of the picture but I personally thought this was one of the highlights. I really liked how the thing almost came across as a documentary as we often just see the woman as she is working or being abused and then we hear her narration afterwards. I also liked how the flashbacks were used to give us more information about the woman and of course this leads us to the ending, which I'm not going to spoil for those who haven't seen the film. It's certainly a very effective one that will lead people to have their own views on what it actually means. I liked how the film isn't just about a black and white issues but there's also the issues of differences between people of different countries as well as a issue of money. Director Sembene does a very good job at telling the story and doing so in a rather original way. The performance from the lead actress is simply wonderful as is the supporting one from Anne-Marie Jelinek.

Black Girl presents an allegory for European colonialism in Africa through the lens of a Senegalese woman who secures a job in France. Sembene makes careful directorial choices to emphasize the contrasts between Senegal and France and the divide between Diouana's expectations for France and the reality. One of these choices is the use of nonlinear time - the film opens with her arrival in France and shows her interactions with Madame, then goes back in time to when she secured the job in Senegal. The striking difference between these two times is Diouana's attitude. In Senegal, when she is offered the job she is overjoyed at the opportunity, especially since it involves taking care of kids. However, when she gets there, she doesn't see the kids, is told to do all the work around the house, and is berated by Madame for being lazy. Seeing Diouana's frustrating situation is more resonant in only realizing afterwards how excited she was for the job going in. Her body language is a world apart, as in France she never smiles and has no energy but in Senegal was beaming when she got the job, and was so excited to see what France was like. I also like Sembene's choice to have her inner monologue as narration, as that further serves to put the audience inside Diouana's head. Her perspective is essential to understanding the way she is completely devastated by her experience, and from the first scenes of the film we are put in her point of view as we look out the window onto France through her eyes. Madame presented it as a great opportunity for her to make money and do what she enjoys - be with children - but then doesn't give her what she promised and by the time she does, her condescension and demands have sucked all the life from Diouana. You can interpret the symbolism of the film in many ways, and mine may change, but my impression now is that the film symbolizes the way Europe seemed to offer to help African countries but really just exploited them for all their resources, denied them the opportunity promised to give the next generation a better life, and then saw it as a surprising, random, unfortunate event when the countries are even worse off. The exploitation element is made explicit by Diouana's narration at the end, where she talks about being done being a slave. The mask is another interesting symbol in the film, one of African culture. We see how Diouana shares it with the family initially but they then appropriate it and treat it as their own, and at the end of the film Monsieur is haunted by it as the legacy of his sins. Really smart and well layered, and with a poignant ending, Black Girl is an excellent allegory.

Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembene's feature debut, engraved in the film history as the first Sub-Saharan African feature film made by an African filmmaker. But the "very first"tag doesn't necessarily guarantee a masterpiece for its own sake, BLACK GIRL, recently restored to its original transfer with vintage graininess and monochrome sheen, running approximately 60 minutes, has been rammed down audience's throat more like an ardent manifesto than an artistic adventure.

Diouana (Diop) is a young Senegalese girl, has been working for a French couple as their child- minder in Dakar, when the couple is transferred to Antibes, they intend to continue hiring her, offers her a one-way ticket to Antibes living with them. Thrilled by the opportunity to come to France, Diouana arrives with high hopes, like any girl in her age, pining for a new life in a developed country, breathing the fresh air of the Western civilization and seeing a world beyond her imagination, only all turns out to be a dashed dream.

Upon arrival, Diouana surprisingly finds out that the couple's kids are not there, instead, she is requested to work as a maid, cooking, cleaning and all other trappings. As days go by, we are guided by Diouana's inner voice, she becomes increasingly disillusioned with misgivings, questions and reminiscences of her life in Dakar, eventually she realizes that she has been cheated and exploited, living like a prisoner in the apartment, France to her merely means her tiny bedroom and the kitchen, what is worse that she is illiterate, therefore she cannot even express her true feelings in letters to her mother in Dakar. What can she do enmeshed in such dire circumstances? Diouana plumps for the most radical way to lay bare her protest, ire and accusation against the stuck-up madame (Jelinek, a force of unapologetic monstrosity) and the aloof monsieur (a grotesquely- looking Fontaine), it is as searing as startling, she has other alternatives, but in Sembene's ideology, perhaps, this is the best tack to provoke a rude awakening.

Ultimately the film serves as Sembene's fervent anti-colonialism diatribe, a symbolic indigenous wooden mask relentlessly haunts the guilty party, where the poverty-stricken country holds its dignity in a defiant way, BLACK GIRL, also benefits from its unruffled frame compositions, marks the dawn of African cinema which finally finds its voice to speak volumes about the cinema- eschewing continent's own story, history and ethos, for that particular reason, Sembene's debut can promisingly function as a stepping stone and find its niche in a hallowed recess.

In Senegal, you've been waiting for a chance, to find a job that will improve your circumstance, then you find one you enjoy, look after a girl, and two boys, for a family who originate from France. When the people then move back, to their homeland, you're summoned to join them, and lend a hand, now you're cook, cleaner and servant, a skivvy slave, toiling emigrant, no illusion of the one who's in command. You endure abuse, and the constant criticism, but your boss is so devoid of altruism, there's no escape, there's no away out, inside you scream and shriek and shout, the only option that remains, involves incision.

"La Noire de..."--better translated as "The Black Girl/Woman de...," retaining the French preposition with its ambiguous connotations, either meaning "of" or "from" or "belonging to"--is credited as the first sub-Saharan African feature film to receive international acclaim. Its author, Sembène Ousmane is likewise considered the "father of African cinema." Indeed, Senegal had only recently declared independence from French colonial rule in 1960, and, reportedly, before that Africans in French colonies were prohibited from making their own movies. One assumes this ban existed because the authorities feared such a thoroughly anti-colonialist picture being presented as in "Black Girl" and even more so that it be artfully composed. For, despite clocking in at under an hour (although originally a bit longer), Ousmane's film tenders a taut thesis, subtly adorned in art and while still managing a shamefully shocking end and strikingly symbolic epilogue.

If this were simply postcolonial social commentary, as admirable as that message may be, it would be easy to write off "Black Girl," which is what the French Film Bureau did in rejecting to produce it (although, they later purchased the rights to (or not to) distribute it). It's the crafting of the message that makes this a great film, though. I especially love the use of the mask here--a piece of African art much like the film itself that serves as a source of contention for its control, within and without the film. At first, while in Dakar, Diouana, the protagonist, offers the mask as a gift to her employers, for which they place it beside other pieces of African art decorating their villa. Back in their high-rise apartment in France, however, the mask hangs alone on the white family's wall, with the only apparent other they take back with them from Senegal to France being Diouana. When the boy who originally possessed the mask regains it, he shadows one of Diouana's employers, the man, as if haunting him with the history of colonialism while simultaneously deporting him from a newly free nation.

The precision of the black-and-white cinematography is worth remarking upon here, too. With a minimalist aesthetic reflecting its low budget and the influence of the French New Wave, it may be easy to miss how well the photography reinforces the social commentary. Jonathan Rosenbaum (see his book, "Movies as Politics"), for one, reiterates what another film critic, Lieve Spass, says regarding the black-and-white dichotomy of the picture in everything from the dots on Diouana's dress, the food they consume (white rice and milk, black coffee and "Black and White" whisky), to, most dramatically, Diouana in the white bathtub. There's also the dark mask on the apartment's white wall, the black void Diouana stares out at from that apartment, in addition to the obvious pigmentation. When the white French woman looks over a crowd of black women waiting for work as maids, the visual connotation to a slave market isn't lost. Nor is it when Diouana is mistreated by those she serves in France: the shrewish madame treating her as inferior, the mostly indifferent monsieur, kissed by a stranger who doesn't bother with a request or introduction after remarking that he's never kissed a black woman before, overhearing another guest suppose that Diouana instinctually, "like an animal," understands commands in the French language (one may be forgiven for thinking it was the two centuries of French colonial rule that explains the people of Senegal knowing French--heck, the Normans only controlled England for half a century a millennium ago, and there remain thousands of French cognates in the English language to this day, but I digress).

It rather goes without saying that this is an economical picture, although, again reportedly, originally the film included a color sequence. In addition to the photography, however, there's the sparsity of story and dialogue, which I admire, notwithstanding that some Westerners seem to be put off by it. Regardless, relying on Diouana's internal narration is effective in focusing the narrative and getting the point across--that the dream and promises that led her to France becomes alienated from her confined reality, which she compares to being treated like a prisoner and slave, as others cast her as a racial, supposedly inferior "other." Her illiteracy along with her general muteness compounds her alienation, as wrenchingly detailed in the scene involving a letter supposedly from her mother. The general English translation of the title is rather suiting in this regard, to simply label her and the film as the "Black Girl," to not even question from whence she belongs--her identity simply stated and assumed, as her employers and the colonizers would have it. The film returns her voice, if only for the spectator, and likewise the identity of postcolonial Africa.