Country: Senegal
Director: Ousmane Sembène
Time: 55 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription) and Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
Illustrious Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s debut film, Black Girl, tells the story of Diouana, a young Senegalese woman from Dakar who moves to Antibes to work for a well-to-do French couple as their maid. The relationship quickly deteriorates amidst their countervailing expectations and the patronizing behavior of Diouana’s nameless employers. Tense and claustrophobic, the couple’s apartment (which functions as the film’s central location and metaphor) constricts continually, a space of toil without privacy or reprieve. Throughout, the film offers a crisp and pointed analysis of relationships across postcolonial lines. In addition, it features one of the most enigmatic and compelling closing scenes in cinema.
Released six years after Senegal’s independence, the story allegorizes the colonial relations between the characters’ respective countries or, perhaps, underscores continuities in a postcolonial world where state-based independence has been achieved but economic and social equality remains elusive. Antipathy develops within these confines, violence and rage lurking behind the demure and placid surface. Diouana’s job as a cleaner functions, similarly, as metaphor, perhaps evoking the French desire to erase prior history, to cleanse the present of the past. A writer and director, Sembène, who participated in union politics in France and worked in a car factory in Paris and on Marseille’s docks prior to returning to Senegal, based the film of his own short story and thus it also offers an interesting way to think through the advantages and disadvantages of film (as opposed to literature) as medium for social and political critique.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Ousmane Sembène — Xala (1976)
Djibril Diop Mambéty — Le Franc (1994)