Pay attention to the mask.
A carved, African mask pops up throughout Black Girl, Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 debut film. We first see it hanging on the wall of the apartment of a French couple, where Diouana (M’Bissine Thérèse Diop), a young Senegalese woman, has arrived to care for the children. She pauses to look at the mask, and we wonder: is it a sign of respect for her culture? Something more ominous? Flashbacks to Diouana’s life in Senegal fill in the gaps (we learn of the mask’s origin), yet it remains a slippery, powerful artifact. The same could be said of Sembene’s film, which manages to register both as a personal tale of immigration and cultural isolation for Diouana and as a symbolic representation of African nations struggling, after shaking off their colonial chains, to forge an identity under the shadow of European paternalism.
In its very format, Black Girl continuously reminds us of these two worlds. The nonlinear structure jerks us back and forth between them, while the shifts in music—from the lightly bouncing beach ditty in France to the gentle humming we hear in Senegal—also serve as signifiers. The performances—by Diop, as well as by Anne-Marie Jelinek and Robert Fontaine as her increasingly cruel employers—are purposefully detached, capturing the numbness that must come with being effectively imprisoned in a country you don’t know, hearing a language you can’t fully understand.
And yet, despite that sense of detachment, Black Girl gathers a forceful and lasting emotional power. This comes somewhat from a shocking turn of events at the climax, but mostly from a denouement that involves that mask. Without spoiling the details, I’ll only say that a sense of magical realism seeps into Sembene’s film during its final moments, elevating it beyond the realm of social commentary into a work of spiritual conviction, as well.
(8/11/2023)
