A LONG WAY FROM HOME African History, Politics and Identity in Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl
A founding work of African cinema that depicts a young Senegalese woman’s unhappy life as a maid in France, Black Girl is an angry denunciation of colonial exploitation and appropriation. As CRISTINA ÁLVAREZ LÓPEZ argues, it is also a moving and poetic film in its own right – one that, half a century on, is only now starting to receive the appreciation it deserves.
Considering both its artistic achievement and its crucial role in the history of African cinema, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966) is still an undervalued film. The obvious reason for this is that, until quite recently, it has not been readily available internationally. But there is a more general factor: the difficulty that Third World cinema faces in competing with films from culturally privileged countries. In more recent times, however, Black Girl has been receiving renewed, respectful attention. It has certainly not always been this way.
Black Girl follows Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a Senegalese woman who finds a job taking care of the children of a French couple, known only as Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) and Madame (Anne-Marie Jelinek), living in Dakar. When the couple go back to France during the summer holidays, they offer Diouana a continuation of her job, and she accepts. However, things do not turn out as she expected.
Black Girl premiered in the International Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966. It is illuminating to trace the thread of discussion that followed in the pages of the celebrated French magazine Cahiers du cinéma, where the film was drawn into the debates of the mid 1960s concerning the progressive ‘New Cinema’ movements around the world.
In a collective report on ‘the situation of the New Cinema’, Michel Delahaye began by describing as ‘simplistic’, while praising what he saw as the ‘larger reality’ raised by the film: servitude, in all its forms, as a global phenomenon. In the Cannes Film Festival review of the following month, Jacques Bontemps took a much tougher stance, judging that the
