Black Girl
If you trace African film back to its first fiction feature, it is only 30 years old. Yet far from being underdeveloped, it begins on a more sophisticated level than any other cinema in the world. By some accounts Ousmane Sembene’s hour-long Black Girl was made in 1965, by others 1966, a characteristic ambiguity when it comes to African movies. Do you date them according to when they were made or when they were first shown? And given the scant and largely unreliable print sources that we have to check, how can we be sure about either date?
One major reason for the sophistication of Black Girl is that by the time Sembene made it he was already in his early 40s and had published four novels and a collection of stories (including the story Black Girl is based on), studied filmmaking with Mark Donskoi at the Gorki studio in Moscow, and made three short films back in Africa (L’empire Sonhrai, Borom Sarret, and Niaye, all from the early 60s). By his own account, his main reason for becoming a filmmaker was that his stories could reach more Africans, especially those unable to read. (Illiteracy plays a key role in the plot of Black Girl.)
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To make his first feature Sembene ultimately had to turn to Andre Zwobada–an old friend and colleague of Jean Renoir’s who, back in the 30s, helped write Renoir’s communist documentary La vie est a nous and was assistant director on The Rules of the Game. In the 60s Zwobada was the main editor for the French government’s newsreel service Actualites Francaises; sharing Sembene’s contempt for the paternalism of the Film Bureau, he wound up producing Black Girl and arranging for its postproduction to be done at the Actualites Francaises facilities in France. (Thanks to this arrangement, many of the film’s actors–all of them wonderfully precise and believable nonprofessionals–are dubbed by others; Sembene himself appears briefly in a couple of scenes as a schoolteacher, smoking his pipe.)
I’m an amateur when it comes to African aesthetics–in large part because I have the disadvantage of knowing them mainly secondhand through such outsiders as Jean Rouch and John Coltrane. Yet it seems to me that they may have something to do with a certain freedom from conceptual rigidity. It is this that allows Sembene to shift in “The Promised Land” between the viewpoints of mistress and servant and between the forms of prose and poetry and in Black Girl to get us to share the consciousness of a single alienated character and then to create his most awesome emotional impact and summary statement after her death, when that consciousness is no longer present. He achieves this through one of the most basic artifacts and symbols in African aesthetics, a mask–a key object, I should add, that plays no part at all in “The Promised Land.”
