Film review

La noire de …

Ousmane Sembène (1966)

Ousmane Sembène is a well-known name and the label ‘father of African cinema’ is usually attached to it but his work has been a closed book to me until now.  This month’s BFI retrospective, marking the centenary of Sembène’s birth, includes, as a double bill, his short film Niaye (1964) and Black Girl, his first and most celebrated feature – which is also widely regarded as the first feature film made by any Black African.  Born in the Casamance region of Senegal, Sembène moved as a teenager to Dakar, where he did manual labouring jobs.  He served in the French Liberation Army during World War II and had further blue-collar work in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  He taught himself to read and write in French (his mother tongue was Wolof) and published his first novel in 1956.  Two more novels and a collection of short stories had followed by the time his first short film appeared in 1963.  Both Niaye and Black Girl derive from Sembène short stories.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi ­… and it takes a while to adjust to the unusual form of Niaye, a fabular drama of hypocrisy in a Muslim village in Senegal, where a girl has been impregnated by her father, the village chief.  Drama is certainly the word in terms of how much incident is packed into the film’s thirty minutes.  The pregnant girl goes into hiding.  Her brother, Tanor, has returned from military service in Indochina out of his mind.  Their mother, Ngoné War Thiandum, overwhelmed by the accretion of dishonour in the family, commits suicide.  Acting on the instructions of his uncle, Tanor kills his father.  The uncle’s men kill the patricide and the usurper becomes village chief.  A key figure in the narrative is the griot.  A dictionary definition of the word is ‘member of a class of travelling poets, musicians and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa’ but it seems the griot also functions as the conscience of a community.  Sembène’s griot, appalled by what he has witnessed, decides to abandon the village and seek a home where ‘truth does not only belong to the nobles’.  Shortly after departing, he thinks again and returns.  The daughter and her newborn baby are ejected from the village.

Drama isn’t quite the word, though, to describe Niaye‘s narrative style and the disjunction between figures on the screen and voices on the soundtrack.  Sembène’s cast mostly comprises real members of a village community and the acting is basic albeit there are arresting camera subjects, especially Mame Dia as Ngoné.  The other credited performers are Modou Sène as Tanor and Serigne Sow as the griot.  Voiceover comes not only from the latter but also from a female counterpart, a griote (Astou N’Diaye) who gives voice to Ngoné’s thoughts.  (Interesting that more than four decades later, according to IMDb, Astou N’Diaye played the mother of one of the major characters in Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019).)

Immediately before his murder, Tanor sees in his mind’s eye the warfare he has recently been part of, a vision that includes aircraft and a flock of descending parachutes.  Near the end of the film, the banished teenage mother, just outside the village, puts her baby down beside a tree, preparing to abandon the child.  There are birds (vultures?) overhead; their noise is accompanied by the baby’s crying.  The mother picks up the baby and walks on with it.  This visual echo is one of several striking images, which also include the dark umbrella that the usurper chief always carries in the hot sun.  The deranged Tanor, still wearing his army fatigues, cuts a bizarre figure as he marches or dances round the village, brandishing a French tricolour and leading local children in a chorus of  ‘Auprès de ma blonde‘.  The persistent chanting and instrumentals from Fatou Casset (a real-life griote) and Kèba Faye will mean something to audience members with knowledge of or feeling for West African folk music.  For me (without either), the emphatic, often angry voiceovers – spoken in French – made for more powerful listening.

Photographed, like Niaye, in black and white, Sembène’s first feature (though it’s barely an hour long) is a more familiar narrative.  Black Girl moves back and forth between present and past.  The present describes the increasing hopelessness of Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a young Senegalese newly arrived in France to work for a white family.  The past comprises extended flashbacks to her life in Dakar and the events that brought her to Europe.  Niaye supplies a bridge to several important aspects of Black Girl, including the pernicious effects of colonialism and the implicitly related corruption of indigenous African culture.  As before, a voiceover conveys what the film’s images often conceal and, in keeping with its anti-colonialism, speaks French as if resenting the language.

The flashbacks explain that Diouana hails from a poor village outside Dakar, where she tries to find work.  Women in her position regularly gather in the city square, which prospective employers regularly visit.  Diouana is untypical in that she doesn’t vociferously demand to be chosen for employment.  She thereby attracts the attention of a French woman (Anne-Marie Jelinek), known simply as ‘Madame’, who hires Diouana as nanny to her and her husband’s children.  Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) is a civil servant currently working in Dakar.  When his posting there ends and the family returns home to the south of France, Diouana is thrilled to be asked to continue working for them there.  She has no regrets about leaving Senegal or parting from her clean-cut boyfriend (Momar Nar Sene).  In Antibes, Diouana is dismayed that her household duties are entirely menial, mostly cooking and cleaning; it’s a while before any of the children she thought she’d be caring for even returns to the family home (I missed the reason why).  In Dakar, Diouana falls in love with France on the strength of magazine pictures; eager to explore her new country, she finds herself a virtually housebound skivvy.  She still dresses up to do her work, though, at least until Madame sharply reminds her she’s only a maid.  A letter arrives from her mother, lamenting that Diouana hasn’t been in touch and asking for money.  Monsieur reads the letter to Diouana, who later tears it up.

The film’s French name is richer than the English one.  The ‘de’ could introduce either the title character’s place of origin or, in its possessive sense, her owner’s identity; thanks to the ellipsis that’s also a full stop, it introduces neither.  Those three dots render the heroine’s identity uncertain, even mysterious (as in Max Ophüls’ Madame de … (1953)).  They also hint at Diouana’s uprootedness.  Like Diaye, Black Girl features some primitive acting though it’s of a somewhat different kind here (the dubbed voices probably don’t help).  Anne-Marie Jelinek’s one-note portrait of unkind Madame is uncomfortably crude but Sembène’s central themes wouldn’t emerge so strongly if Jelinek were more nuanced:  it’s essential that the viewer sees Madame (and the rather more ambiguous Monsieur) from Diouana’s point of view.  The protagonist is not only reticent; tall, lissom Mbissine Thérèse Diop is mostly limited in what she expresses in her face and movement.  But this is surely Sembène’s intention too.  Diouana is in no position to speak her mind or show her feelings.

According to Wikipedia, ‘Critics in the US and Europe did not initially recognize Black Girl‘s lasting power’.  In 2022, the film appeared in the top 100 in Sight & Sound’s decennial poll (placing joint ninety-fifth).  The difference between its initial reception and canonical status today isn’t, however, quite as stark as that implies.  Sembène received the 1966 Jean Vigo Prize for Black Girl.  (The Vigo, awarded annually by a jury since 1951, is usually given to a young or new film-maker:  the latest recipient is Alice Diop for Saint Omer (2022).)   The film was first shown in the USA in 1969 and Manny Farber placed it first in his top ten films of that year, commending it as ‘unlike anything else in the film library:  translucent and no tricks, amazingly pure, but spiritualized by a black man’s grimness in which there is not an ounce of grudge or finger-pointing’.  In his collected reviews published a couple of years later, Farber cites Black Girl as a prime recent example of the ‘termite art’ that he defined and admired.  Besides, the picture’s promotion to official classic in 2022 may have less to do with greater appreciation of its artistry than with changes in the political climate of film criticism.  A selection of quotes on the BFI website from those who voted for Black Girl in last year’s S&S poll refers to it as an ‘evisceration of the myth of liberté, égalité, fraternité’ and ‘a searing example of Black feminine refusal’.

Those predictable formulations aren’t wrong, though, and Farber, despite his convincing description of what’s on the screen in Black Girl, takes less account of what’s on the soundtrack.  Diouana’s attitude and behaviour suggest affectlessness but her bitter voiceover tells a different story.  This is so in scenes both with her French employers and with her African boyfriend.  In one of the flashbacks, the boyfriend makes a move to embrace her; Diouana resists his touch but not in a forceful movement.   Yet her voiceover asserts that ‘he was too familiar – I stormed off’.  In Antibes and Dakar alike, Diouana’s most physically extrovert moments tend to be expressions not of misery but of relative exuberance.  Manny Farber singles out as the film’s ‘most charming image’, ‘a very long-legged girl teetering around the kitchen on foot-long high heels and a dust rag in her hands’.  Shortly before she leaves Senegal, Diouana and her boyfriend walk by a monument commemorating the dead of both World Wars.  While the boyfriend briefly imagines veterans placing a wreath at the memorial, Diouana climbs the monument for a jaunty walk that becomes a dance – presumably in celebration of her imminent departure for France.  The boyfriend, shocked and embarrassed by her levity, instructs her to come down immediately.  She complies, seeming to resume her more usual passivity.

Diouna eventually kills herself, slitting her throat as she lies in the bath in the Antibes house.  The suicide has all the more shocking impact because she has been so undemonstrative – has seemed to lack what is now known as agency.  Her death isn’t quite the end of Black Girl.  In the closing stages, another African face, perhaps the film’s most compelling one, comes to the fore.  In Dakar, Diouana, as a gesture of gratitude to her French employers, makes them a gift of a traditional mask which she buys from a boy (Ibrahima Boy) on the street.  In Antibes, it hangs on the wall; a rare physical confrontation between her and Madame sees Diouana try and fail to take the mask back.  After her death, Monsieur flies to Senegal with Diouana’s suitcase and the mask, as well as money which he offers to her mother.  The offer is refused.  As Monsieur leaves the village and returns to the airport, he’s followed all the way by the young boy who sold the mask and who now wears it.  Senegal achieved independence from France in 1960.  For much of Black Girl (as in Niaye), Ousmane Sembène seems to illustrate the futility of nominal independence for a country lacking a flourishing national culture or moral purpose.  As a piece of domestic decoration in a white home in France, the mask is reduced to an exotic souvenir.  Yet this symbol of West African identity never disappears.  And in the conclusion to this remarkable film it is literally on the move.

8 August 2023