Sembene Ousmane Film at Film-K-lib
11.05.2023
Last Film Club screened and discussed the 1966 feature film directed by the Senegalese novelist and film maker, Sembene Ousmane, called “La Noire de ...” During debate, we realized just how phenomenal the film is.
The film, made over 50 years ago, has stood the test of time for its content in a truly amazing way, and its style has clearly been an influence on the West, as Martin Scorsese pointed out, when he said, “An astonishing movie—so ferocious, so haunting, and so unlike anything we’d ever seen” at the time. (I mention Scorsese as a tribute because it was his foundation that contributed to the restoration of this film, thus allowing us to screen it and discuss it in our film club, called Fim K-lib, with the hyphen in the Kreol word, forming a pun on the word freedom.)
The film is beautifully shot. It starts in Senegal, with a young woman looking for a job. She gets a job as a domestic worker with a French family still working there. When the family return to France, they offer to take her with them to do the same kind of work in France. She is keen to travel and visit places, so accepts.
The film, to prove the point about standing the test of time, has an image from the beginning and then throughout the film of a mask, a haunting piece of art, that is symbolically appropriated by the former colonizer (a mixture between theft and a gift) and then re-appropriated. The same day that we screened the film in 2023, on the world news on the BBC and other TV channels, there was talk of the restoration of the Cullinan diamond that is in Prince Charles’ crown, and that was appropriated, or expropriated, from the Transvaal in South Africa in 1905 and which is now being claimed back. In the same way, Belgium and France are returning looted art from former colonies right now, while India claims the Kohinoor diamond. So, the Ousmane film, with its light symbolic touch, is “daktyalite” until today.
Secondly, the film has a long scene actually shot with the heroine skipping along on top of a huge national monument and being called out playfully by her boyfriend for this. The monument (in Dakar, we guess) is inscribed as being to the memory of the Senegalese soldiers who fought and died in the Second World War. This theme, referred to symbolically with a light touch, is also, right now, being addressed in countries as different as India and Kenya. And, in South Africa, a massive multi-media art production called “The Head and the Load” has been produced right now this year by William Kentridge , who is one of the greatest artists of South Africa. (Incidentally, and showing links in our past histories, William Kentridge is the son of the man we know in Mauritius as the British QC, who was barrister for Olivier Bancoult and the Chagossians’ cases in London against the UK Government, Sydney Kentridge, who turned 100 last year). The recent art-work we are referring to by William Kentridge is an opera and dance about the soldiers from South Africa, who participated in the First World War, and who have so often been “forgotten” in memorial ceremonies. Yet, over 50 years ago, Ousmane was clairvoyant enough to know that this kind of memory will be elusive and so he included the image over a long shot in the film of the war memorial. (Incidentally, Sydney Kentridge was my senior lawyer in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the late 1960’s following my arrest with 20 other students, who had been distributing leaflets at the Johannesburg Main Railway Station against apartheid in education. Again showing links in our common histories.)
Thirdly, the Ousmane film has a clear visual reference to the assassinated African leader, Patrice Lumumba, who was killed with CIA help in 1961. The USA and the Belgian State’s now known role in this assassination is still in the news today. Everyone knew at the time that the USA and Belgium were guilty, but they denied it until recently. But these assassinations of former colonies’ best leaders cannot be forgotten. In fact, the remains of Patrice Lumumba were only recently returned to the Congo and buried there. It was in June last year, 61 years after his assassination. This visual reminder after Independence of the continued neo-colonization is both “there” frontally, and also subtle.
Fourthly, on a more cultural than political note, the film has constant references to peoples’ self-organization, as in a scene of a “peoples’ school” with hand-written sign, or children playing with hand-made toys, or simply the myriad of lively inter-relationships in the African world that the heroine leaves behind her to become a domestic worker, not unlike a slave, in France.
Like all good art, it does not paint the world in camps of good and evil, but it does expose the systemic lines of domination, as they are perpetuated in history.
Of course, the heroine of the film “La Noire de ...” (clearly representing, by means of the “...” in the title, anyone and everyone from unknown former colony) has a fate that makes the film a sharp, cautionary tale: do not submit to new forms of slavery. In it, there is no future.
Lindsey Collen
