Alex Deliso -- Annotated Bib no.5

Black Girl Movie Inference

The themes and parallels to slavery are very, very overt. Diouana’s situation is essentially indentured servitude, but the insinuations from both Diouana and her mistress’ family make it clear that a modern version of slavery is what Ousmane Sembene intended to convey to his audiences.

The cinematic choices were subtle, simple, and very effective. For the most part, the white characters wore black clothes and the black characters wore white clothes. The scenery was also predominantly pale, although there were a few instances where the colors overlapped, such as the black-and-white stripped pattern over the dining room floor. Such patterns were reminiscent of Keita’s work and provided a contrast so that the eye had something to follow. None of the patterns were overwhelming but they gave the scenes an additional layer of depth. The choice of a single object on the white wall—most notably the mask, which (in the context of the film) could represent a silenced will or voice—draws more attention to each individual part of the room.

There was an interesting emphasis on her feet—at one point in the movie, Diouana is forced to take off her heels, told “Don’t forget that you are a maid,” and then the camera is fixated on her feet for a good twenty seconds. A few scenes later, while Diouana is sleeping in her bed the camera begins at her feet—with her shoes on—pans around her body for a little bit, and then ends with her feet bare and the shoes on the floor.  It almost ties into the “animalistic” stereotype that is also played upon during the conversation where the guests ask if Diouana can speak French. The response to that is that she doesn’t speak it, but she “instinctively” understands it, and the guests immediately regard her as primitive because of the supposed language barrier between them. Both of these can be traced back to the stereotypes that African culture is uncivilized, and are directly contrasted by one of Diouana’s internal rants where she thinks “[t]hey eat like pigs and jabber away.”

Strangely enough, the predominant opposing forces in the film were two women of differing races. Most of the men in the film were regarded neutrally or had innocuous intentions, such as when the mistress’ husband started writing a letter for Diouana because she couldn’t write herself. It may be partially because of the time frame when the movie was filmed, and also partially because Sembene is a man himself—the woman are treated as the sources of conflict, while the men are treated in a lighter regard, as if their decisions and actions can’t cause nearly as much harm.