Black Girl

BLACK GIRL   ****

Ousmane Sembène

1966

IDEA:  A Senegalese woman emigrates to France thinking she will continue her role as caretaker for her employers' children, but when she gets there she is increasingly stripped of her freedom as their indentured domestic servant.

BLURB:  Black Girl starkly registers the abuses of European colonialism through the eyes of a Senegalese woman trapped in its systems of racial, sexual, and economic oppression. Conceptually, this narrowed focus on the experiences of a colonial subject is itself a radical and revolutionary act, a centering of African identity and personhood that affords privileged status to the colonized at the necessary diminution of the colonizers. By allowing Diouana’s thoughts and actions to narrate the film, Sembène foregrounds the voice and presence of a woman who is expected to be submissive and unseen, providing a harrowingly internal and profoundly empathetic account of her exploited humanity. He and the magnificent Mbissine Thérèse Diop communicate with blunt eloquence so much of this person beyond the indignities inflicted upon her, making her plight all the more unbearable. They attune us to her heritage, her dreams, her tenacity; to her ordinary decency; to her feelings of cultural dislocation and loss of self-possession in a literal domestic prison. Black Girl is a staggeringly tragic film in its depiction of an individual destroyed by a seemingly incurable colonial mentality, but it is the opposite of a resigned one. Sembène’s angry first-person portrait opens up, in the end, into a collective announcement of national resistance and reclamation, in which a personification of Africa literally expunging one of the film’s white aggressors howls with an implacable defiance. A lacerating indictment of the post-colonial myth, Black Girl endures as one of the cinema’s most forthright and emotionally naked works of political modernism.