Black Girl and Borom Sarret, the two films by Ousmane Sembène included on this new BFI release, are historic films. That’s not a value judgement, that’s a statement of fact. A documentary-style account of a day in the life of a troubled wagon driver, Borom Sarret was the first short film made by a black African film-maker. Three years later, Black Girl became the first feature. But groundbreaking films are not necessarily great ones; for every A Bout de Souffle, there is a The Jazz Singer. You should know Black Girl because of its place in film history; you should watch it because, happily, it still stands up today.
The story of Diouana, a young woman from Sembène’s native Senegal falling to pieces as she works for a patronising French family, Black Girl is a psychological tragedy that is played with a counterintuitively relaxed, breezy pace and tone. In a delightfully high-spirited interview in the extras, the star M’bissine Thérèse Diop confirms that she thinks back to the production with nothing but joy. It’s easy to see that joy early on, as Diouana runs to tell her mother that she’s got a job with white people, the race who her fashion magazines have taught her to associate with glamour and luxury.
Sembène was a great believer in the power of cinema as a communication tool, a way of talking to Africans about African politics that hadn’t existed before.
BLACK GIRL/BOROM SARRET
It will be interesting to see how the reissue of Black Girl feeds into modern debates about race and cultural appropriation. Christian Lacoste’s monochrome cinematography does an impressive job of capturing Diop’s beauty, but Diouana cannot see herself as beautiful or worthwhile. She lives with people whose love of African food and decor never matures into a respect for African nations or people, and who find a different racist stereotype in every aspect of her behaviour. Eventually, the film becomes a chillingly convincing depiction of chronic, imprisoning depression.
But Sembène’s film is not simply a downer. It is a rich visual pleasure, particularly in an alternative cut where Sembène shows Diouana’s arrival in France by briefly lapsing into glowing, Raoul Coutard-style colour. And the fact that it exists is a heartening act of defiance. Sembène was a great believer in the power of cinema as a communication tool, a way of talking to Africans about African politics that hadn’t existed before.
This didn’t always come off – as the informative notes by Samba Gadjigo recount, some of his films were banned in Senegal. But he never gave up, even when he wanted to. The short video essay Sembène: A Portrait, included in the extras, ends with him saying he’d like to retire and hand things over to the younger generation of African directors, but he still had work to do. Specifically, he wanted to make a film about the nineteenth-century Guinean anti-colonial resistance fighter Samori Ture, on a much larger scale than any of his previous work.
Samory, as the project was called, was never made. But watching the most substantial extra, an hour-long documentary by Manthia Diawara and Thiong’o Ngugi-wa entitled Sembène: The Making of African Cinema, you see that it wasn’t due to any lack of passion on his part. Attending a pan-African film festival in Burkina Faso, the director proves a thoughtful, confrontational and riveting conversationalist. The film also doubles as a handy Sembène filmography, as well as a yardstick to measure the BFI’s new transfer: the smudgy, shadowy clips from Borom Sarret and Black Girl in Diawara and Ngugi-wa’s documentary are no match for the lush, pin-sharp visuals in the disc’s main features.
Black Girl/Borom Sarret is out now on BFI Blu-Ray
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