The panelists engaged in conversation

As part of Columbia Maison Française’s Blackness in French and Francophone Film series, a mid-20th-century classic, Black Girl (La Noir de…) was screened last night. Staff writer Ezra Lerner attended. Editor’s note: this article includes mentions of suicide and sexual harassment.

As the film comes to life, the speaker whirrs like a soft projector. Beautiful, colorless images of France appear on the screen. (Granted we are watching a 4K restoration of the original movie). A dark-skinned black woman, Diouana, enters France in the 1960’s. Demanding the same space as her white counterparts, her shoes clack firmly on the ground as she meets her new employer.

She speaks with the same vigor, closes the car door with the same force, and exudes the same confidence as the person across from her. As Diouana’s hand rests on the roof panel, she awaits her new house, imagining the beautiful life of a French au pair. In reality, she would become a prisoner, trapped in her boss’s home until the day she takes her own life. Such is the world of Black Girl (La Noir de…), the 1966 film by Senegalese director Ousmane Sembéne.

Shot on location in Dakar, and screened at Cannes, the film received critical acclaim upon release. Decades after Sembéne became a famous novelist, and just over a decade after he died, this film still stands out for the revolutionary statements it makes about Blackness. “Cinema,” Sembéne contended, “is a means of political action.” He was not convinced, however, that one film could change a flawed political system. Rather, he thought it could inform people, chipping away at the problem. “A film is a debate,” he explains.

With that in mind, the panel came on stage after the final credits. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the chair of Columbia’s French and Romance Philology department on the right, Mamadou Diof, the head of Columbia’s Institute for African Studies on the left, and Maboula Soumahoro, the moderator, an English professor at Université François-Rabelais and Columbia visiting scholar, in the middle. Both panelists began by speaking about the moving nature of the film, even upon a repeat viewing. Diof was gripped by the main task of the film: “how do you build something?” How do you build a “Pan-African environment?”

This certainly was not easy at the time. Between 1950 and 1955, Sembéne came up with the first generation of African filmmakers being educated in France. Their main goal was to “film Africa,” Diof explained. But for the longest time, “they were denied that.”

But when the film was finally made, Sembéne had the slimmest of budgets. A challenge at the time, Diagne explains that Sembéne’s financial limitations defined the film’s style. The movie was initially shot silently, for example, with audible words added in post-production. Unable to bring the initial actors to Paris, however, the dialogue was dubbed in with different performers. Diagne marveled how that off-kilter aspect of the film has become one of its famous traits.

Despair must also be listed as one of Black Girl’s defining characteristics. Our main character’s employer is verbally abusive. An unwanted house guest forcibly kisses her. And no matter how many times she dreams of seeing the French sights, it is only taking the children for a walk that affords her the opportunity to leave the premises. So when Diouana passes on, it is because she realizes that she has become a slave. Abuse—being treated as property—affects anyone and everyone: even a strong woman who knows what she wants. 52 years later, that message remains relevant.

Photo via Ezra Lerner