The black one from Dakar
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The black one from Dakar |
| Original title | La Noire de ... |
| Country of production |
Senegal France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1966 |
| length | 65 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Ousmane Sembène |
| script | Ousmane Sembène |
| production | André Zwoboda |
| camera | Christian Lacoste |
| cut | André Gaudier |
| occupation | |
| |
The black from Dakar (original title: La Noire de ... , dt. "The black from ...") is a Senegalese - French film from 1966. The film was the first feature film by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène and is therefore also the first well-known feature film by a black director from sub-Saharan Africa . This makes the film one of the forerunners of African cinema .
action
The young Sengalesin Diouana works in Dakar as a nanny for a white French family. She comes from a poor background in a village near the city and was chosen by the white woman from a group of unemployed girls on the street because, unlike the others, she did not ask too intrusively for a job. At the start of work, Diouana brings a wooden mask from her village as a present for her new employer, which she bought from a boy for little money. The family hangs the mask on the wall as a decoration. In return, the white employer gives her a fashionable, European dress.
The family moves to France on the Côte d'Azur and soon brings the girl to join them . Diouana is excited and looking forward to the opportunity the move offers her. However, her friend warns her of the dangers that could lurk in France due to the political situation. In France, the girl is overwhelmed by her tasks. Instead of taking care of the family's children, as in Senegal, they also have to run the household, clean and cook while the employers do nothing. At the same time, Diouana has no connection with society. She doesn't have the time to get to know France the way she'd hoped. Diouana feels increasingly humiliated. Her employer harshly orders her not to wear her fashionable dress while she is working, and a friend of her employers kisses her against her will because he has never kissed a black girl. Diouana's mother writes her a letter and asks for money; Diouana herself cannot read and therefore has to ask her employer to read the letter to her. Her employer is increasingly demanding of her to work more and not sleep.
Diouana decides to resist. She tries to take the mask back from her employers and refuses to work.
Finally, Diouana commits suicide by cutting her wrists in the bathtub. Employers find her body and her death is mentioned in a small column in a local French newspaper. The employer goes to Dakar, wants to return Diouana's suitcase and mask and offer Diouana's mother money. The mother indignantly refuses the offer, while the boy who owned the mask takes it back. The boy runs after the employer with the mask in front of his face and stares at him as he leaves the country. When he drove away, the boy takes off his mask and runs away.
Emergence
The film is based on a story also called La Noire de… in Sembène's collection of short stories The Voltaer ( Le Voltaïque ), which appeared in 1962. Sembène was inspired to plot by a short report about the suicide of a black girl in the French newspaper Nice-Matin .
Sembène applied for money for the film at the Bureau du Cinéma of the French Ministry of Cooperation, which was set up in 1963 to provide technical and financial assistance for films in Francophone Africa. However, the Bureau du Cinéma refused to produce the film, possibly because of Sembène's critical stance on paternalism in development aid , which could also be transferred to the Bureau du Cinéma. Instead, Sembène found a producer in André Zwoboda , who was also critical of the Bureau du Cinéma because of its paternalistic attitude. The post-production of the film took place on the premises of the French newsreel Les Actualités françaises , for which Zwoboda worked as an editor.
All of the actors in the film were laypeople and their voices were dubbed in post-production. Sembène himself makes a brief cameo as a teacher.
Staging
The film alternates several times between the current story in which the protagonist works in France and flashbacks to her life in Senegal.
During the film, Diouana's voice critically comments on her role as the housemaid of her white employers in the voiceover and asks complex questions on topics such as racism and the oppression of workers. In the film itself, however, the girl only speaks in a few places where she answers questions or orders from her employers in the affirmative or negative. The French cultural scientist Daryl Lee analyzes that this stylistic device relates directly to the withdrawal of the voice through structural discrimination : “We don't hear her speak, but we hear her voice all the time. What does it mean to be alienated from one's voice? What does it mean not to have access to it? "
The film was shot in the Nouvelle Vague style with natural light and a handheld camera .
The musical and visual design suggests a strong contrast, like the contrast between colonized and colonialists in colonialism or the relationships between whites and blacks in racism . The film is a black and white film. The choice of color for the film is deliberately tailored to a strong contrast between black and white. Diouana's dress is white with black dots, her employer's apartment is in the two colors; also the food that appears in the film (e.g. coffee, rice, milk) is either black or white; the employer drinks a whiskey that says “black and white”. Lieve Spass notes: "The contrast becomes most dramatic when the camera focuses on Diouna's lifeless black body in the white bathtub." The music also reinforces this stylistic device by alternating between French piano music and African music.
Themes and motifs
The black woman from Dakar deals with the difficulties Senegal had to contend with after its independence from France and is therefore seen as part of the postcolonialism trend ( Postcolonial Cinema ). As a starved anti-colonialist, Sembène strongly criticizes the mechanisms of exploitation that persisted even after independence. Jonathan Rosenbaum interprets the scene in which the white employer chooses Diouana from a group of black girls as an allusion to a slave market as part of the Atlantic slave trade .
The already described contrasts between the oppressor and the oppressed run along the binary hierarchy of colonialism between black and white. Lieve Spass emphasizes that these play a major role in the film, but not the opposites between men and women. Diouana is humiliated mainly by her white employer and less by her husband.
The mask, an important element of African art , forms a motif in the film. It stands both for the cultural appropriation of African art by Europeans and symbolically for the legacy of colonialism. Based on the ending, when the boy follows the French employer and finally takes off the mask when he is gone, Rosenbaum writes: “There are few endings in film history that are as powerful and rich as this one - trembling with tragic wisdom and subliminal Weight of meaning, with finality and promise, with humor and pain. Diouana and Africa and the mask and the boy have finally become one, an indissoluble and unbearable human fact that looks all of us in the face. ” Because the mask belongs to the boy again and is not a decoration in a French household or museum, it symbolizes the freedom of France and the boy himself the future of viewers, says Anthony Reed.
Reed interprets the final scene as a reversal of the classic objectification in colonialism: through the boy's gaze, the white employer becomes the object and the boy or the African becomes the subject.
reception
The film attracted quite a bit of attention at the time of its release. In 1966 he received the main prize of the Carthage Film Festival and the French Jean Vigo Prize . Daryl Lee particularly emphasizes the award the film received at the Festival mondial des arts nègres . Important black writers, musicians and civil rights activists such as Duke Ellington , Nelson Mandela and representatives of the French Négritude were present at the festival. The festival should bring Africa together as a unit.
The lexicon of international films describes the film as "a straightforward and, despite all noticeable commitment, coolly designed accusation against racism" .
Web links
- The blacks from Dakar in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Anthony Reed: La Noire de ... / Black Girl (1966) . In: Sabine Haenni, Sarah Barrow, John White (Eds.): The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films . Routledge, 2014, pp. 376-379 .
- ↑ Sarah Jiliani: In praise of Mbissine Thérèse Diop Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl. In: British Film Institute. December 15, 2016, accessed April 13, 2017 .
- ↑ Beti Ellerson: Thérèse Mbissine Diop. In: Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. 2000, accessed April 13, 2017 .
- ↑ a b c d Sylvia Cutler: La Noire de…: Sembène's Black Girl and Postcolonial Senegal. In: Brigham Young University. Humanities. February 3, 2015, accessed April 12, 2017 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Jonathan Rosenbaum: Black-And-White World (Black Girl). (No longer available online.) In: Chicago Reader . April 21, 1995, archived from the original on April 13, 2017 ; Retrieved April 12, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b c d Lieve Spass: Female domestic labor and Third World politics in La Noire De… In: Jump Cut. July 27, 1982. Retrieved April 12, 2017 .
- ↑ The black woman from Dakar. In: Zweiausendeins.de. Retrieved April 12, 2017 .
