Critics reviews

Not only is La Noire de… one of the films that changed the history of (African) cinema itself, it also influenced the life of many people and changed their perception of their place in the world and in their own history.

It is a razor-sharp dissection of colonialist condescension and dehumanization through its story of a Senegalese woman who moves to France to work as a nanny. Mambéty’s work emerged in the shadow of Sembene.

Black Girl closes with a brilliant reverse movement: an African mask, gifted by Diouana to her employer, returns along with her possessions to her mother’s home in Dakar. In Sembène’s hands, this poetically charged object carries the full spiritual weight of Africa.

Sembene, the auteur, is faithful to Diouana's demise, his creative genius comes into play as he applies meaning and context to her travail. With not much to work with, Sembene tracks what may have been her passage to such a tragic end. The cruelty she encountered makes her path to suicide so terrifyingly logical.

That Black Girl, still timely after five decades, inspires anything but fury and despondency owes to the elegance of even the saddest images...Admittedly less subtle than later Sembène works, Black Girl could hardly be bolder, more moving, or more historically important.

It's especially sharp on the corrupted social contracts of postcolonial life, and Sembène roots these observations most effectively in the relationship between Diouana and Jelinek's Madame. In a manner oddly reminiscent of the manipulations of Scottie (James Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Madame seems hell-bent on controlling Diouana in order to bolster her own flagging sense of superiority.

Sembène visualizes Diouana's displacement with shots that alternate between angular, off-center compositions and ones in which the woman is filmed alone in the center of the frame. Both setups are alienating and alienated, ensuring that Diouana never exists on the same level with her bosses, who are only referred to as Monsieur and Madame so as to emphasis the power imbalance between them and Diouana.

More than a work that helped usher in a revolutionary wave of filmmaking, more than a stunning cinematic introduction of talent (not exactly a debut, as Sembène's lesser-seen short, Borom sarret, was released in 1963), in just under an hour's time, Black Girl is remarkable for its compact and concise establishment of so much that would define Sembène's cinema.

Diop's dignity and growing despair in Black Girl is painful to watch. You can see the abjection in her face, and you wish she would rage and storm out to freedom... I won't give away the ending, but Sembène is unapologetic in driving home the psychological cost of all these pressures on black identity. Diouana's story, brought to life by the natural talent Diop, is powerful stuff.

Though the husband tries desperately to make amends in the film's coda, Sembène, through an excoriating final image of a masked boy, refuses to let them, or anyone, off the hook. As a political and humanist statement, Black Girl still packs a flaming wallop, 50 years on.

Formally spartan, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (1966) is dense with cool fury... Sembène's heroine stages a few insurrectionary acts before deciding on her ultimate escape — a scene that throws the film's monochrome palette into starkest, bleakest relief and that lands with the clean impact of a fist to the face.

This absorbing 64-minute drama, shot in stark monochromatic tones, resonates equally as a vivid character study and an incisive commentary on the pernicious inequalities of postcolonial power relations between cultures.