Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966) (Patreon)

It seems that Black Girl, Ousmane Sembène's debut featurette, is destined to be his consensus masterpiece. While the cynical streak in me wonders whether Black Girl's brevity plays a role in it being the director's most widely seen film, I think there's much more to it. I finally caught up with Black Girl, a good twenty years since first discovering Sembène's films through pirated VHS copies of Xala and Emitai -- both now officially released, of course. And although it's been awhile since I've seen the rest of Sembène's earlier films, and I could definitely stand to revisit them, I think I see just what it is about Black Girl that makes it connect more directly with audiences than most of his other work (his late career triumph Moolaadé being a notable exception).

Sembène first studied filmmaking in the Soviet Union from 1962 to 1963, but he had been a leading figure in Francophone Senegalese literature since 1956. And although several of his films were adaptations of his own novels, Black Girl is the film that feels most "literary." With its focus on the interior monologue of the tragic Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), the film's dominant mode of address is one of observable reality failing to match up with the young woman's dreams and expectations. In addition, Diouana's anger serves as the voice of Sembène's post-colonial critique. The French couple who bring Diouana to France -- known only as Madame (Anne-Marie Jelinek) and Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) -- quite literally exist in a separate reality, seeing Diouana's oppressive situation as not only natural but fortuitous, something for which she should be grovelling in gratitude.

Diouana's dissatisfaction, however, grows beyond her actual circumstances. At first, she is legitimately mad that Madame deceived her, hiring her to be a nanny but then expecting her to cook and clean, the couple's children nowhere in sight. She also thought she would get to see Nice, Cannes, high-end stores, and the like, and while it's true that Madame keeps Diouana cooped up and overworked, Sembène suggests that Diouana herself was taken in by the French colonial promise, that by coming to France she would become "French," and that this would represent a gain in status. When Diouama receives a pleading letter from her mother, Madame and Monsieur are shocked at their maid's callousness toward her own family. But as Black Girl shows, this situation is complex. Yes, Diouana maybe desires to shed her Senegalese past, more than she even knows. But, since she cannot read or write, communicating with her mother would require the assistance, and inevitable judgment, of her employers.

Sembène's direction and visual storytelling is remarkably clean and spare in Black Girl. We don't yet see the mordant humor of Xala or the declamatory style of narration and character development we see in Camp de Thiaroye and Moolaadé, in which Sembène applies Brechtian ideas to very specific aspects of Wolof culture that outsiders often cannot recognize. At moments, Black Girl feels like a French New Wave film, or some of the early experiments of Jean Rouch. Everything is articulated with precision, perhaps nothing more so than the use of Diouana's 50-franc African mask. It is a fetish object for Madame and Monsieur ("it looks genuine"), an attempted gift in Diouana's part, and eventually a physical symbol of the hazards of colonialism, the assumption that you can move people around like commodities and expect them to capitulate to the exchange. When Monsieur returns to Senegal, not to console Diouana's family but to settle his accounts, the young kid (Ibrahima Boy) dons the mask and essentially chases him back to France, a metaphor suggesting that the end of French colonial rule was the beginning of the battle, not the end.