Black Girl

The archive holds fourteen films. Japan, the United States, Italy, Sweden, Hong Kong, China, France, South Korea, Iran, Germany, the Soviet Union, India and Brazil are all represented — and sub-Saharan Africa is not represented at all.

Today fills that gap with the least arguable choice available. In 1966 the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène made La noire de…, sixty-five minutes long, in black and white. It is generally regarded as the first feature film by a director from sub-Saharan Africa, it won the Prix Jean Vigo that year, and it brought African cinema into international view for the first time.

It interlocks closely with today's first film. In Spirited Away, Yubaba files a child's name away in a contract and leaves her one character of it. Here, Diouana is called "the maid"; she cannot read or write, her mother's letters have to be read aloud to her by the man of the house, and the replies are written for her by the couple. One film turns "your name and your voice are taken from you" into a fairy tale; the other films it in the real world.

In time the two are thirty-five years apart — 2001 and 1966; one is 124 minutes in colour, the other 65 minutes in black and white; one is a child of postwar Japanese affluence, the other of a Senegal six years independent.

One thing should be stated plainly rather than glossed over: this is not an 8-out-of-10 film on IMDb. Its standing rests on two other things — that it is the starting point of a whole cinema, and that the 2016 restoration allowed critics to read it accurately again.

达喀尔，一栋公寓楼外的空地上，一群女人在等活干。她们大多是文盲，靠替人带孩子、洗衣服换一点钱。

一个法国女人走过来。别的女人都往前挤，只有一个年轻女子站着没动——于是她被选中了。她叫 Diouana。

她先在这家人家里带孩子。她把从一个小男孩手里花五十几内亚买来的一个非洲面具送给了女主人，他们把它摆在家里。

后来这对夫妇要回法国，问她愿不愿意跟他们走，去那边继续做事。Diouana 非常高兴。她告诉男朋友，她要去法国了。

到了法国之后，事情变成另一种样子。她被困在公寓里，只做饭、打扫，不被允许出门。女主人对她刻薄。她开始不太说话。

影片在法国的现在和达喀尔的过去之间来回切。

（这里不再往下说。如果你打算看，请先读下面「观看前应该知道什么」里的强度提示。）

A man who did not start making films until he was forty

Ousmane Sembène was born in 1923 in Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, into a fishing family. His first language was Wolof; he taught himself to read and write French. During the Second World War, from 1944 to 1946, he was conscripted into the Senegalese Tirailleurs and served with the Free French Forces.

In 1947 he stowed away to France. He worked first at the Citroën factory in Paris, then moved south to Marseille to work the docks, where he joined the CGT trade union and took part in strikes aimed at stopping the shipment of arms to the colonial war in Indochina. In 1956 he published his first novel, Le Docker noir (Black Docker), drawn from what he had seen on the Marseille waterfront.

Why he put down the pen and picked up a camera

His reason was stated plainly: his written work could reach only the cultural elite, whereas film was "the people's night school" and could reach a far wider African audience.

In 1962–63 he studied filmmaking for a year at the Gorky Film Studio in Moscow under the Soviet director Mark Donskoy. In 1963 he made the short Borom Sarret, about a poor cart driver in Dakar — generally regarded as the first film made by a black African. Three years later came Black Girl, his first feature.

He went on to make films for four decades, from Mandabi (1968, the first feature shot in Wolof) to Moolaadé (2004). He died in Dakar on 9 June 2007, aged 84.

A real event, and the part the newspaper left out

The film adapts his own short story "La Noire de…", collected in Voltaïque (1962), and that story was triggered by a real news report: a Senegalese maid who killed herself in France.

What Sembène does is supply everything the report did not give her — how she was chosen, what she saw, what she thought. In the newspaper she is an outcome; in the film she is a process.

Sixty-five minutes, a tiny budget, and a word he invented

Sembène cut the running time to roughly an hour to satisfy the Centre national du cinéma. The money came from the French Ministry of Cooperation's Cinema Bureau, whose head had rejected the script — most likely because of its subject. The film was completed on a very low budget.

For this he coined a term: mégotage, literally "cigarette-butt cinema" — picking up what others have thrown away and using it anyway. It was not self-deprecation; it was his formal account of how to make films with almost no resources.

The mask: from a row of masks to a bare white wall

The central object of the film is the African mask Diouana buys in Dakar from a small boy for fifty-odd Guinean francs and gives to her employer.

In Dakar it hangs among other masks, with her inside a familiar place and familiar people. In France it is mounted alone on a bare white wall — which is exactly Diouana's position: one person, and a white wall. In the second half of the film she fights with Madame to get it back. The ownership of a gift is the politics of the entire film.

In the final scene Monsieur travels to Senegal to return her suitcase, the mask and her money; her mother refuses the money. As he leaves the village, a boy wearing that mask runs after him. Some critics read it as this: Africa's past will keep following its colonisers, and the future is watching them.

The letters: her life is written by someone else

Diouana cannot read. When her mother writes, Monsieur reads the letter aloud to her — it asks why she has not been in touch, and asks for money. The couple then write the reply, telling her mother that she is happy and well in France. Diouana tears the letter up, but she does not correct them.

The critic Rachel Langford points to what matters in that scene: her life is not authored by her; it is authored for her by the coloniser. Across the whole film, the only expressions she can call her own are silence and stillness.

Her voice, technically, is borrowed too

One production detail lands precisely on the theme: in the finished film Diouana's lines are dubbed into French by a different person. M'Bissine Thérèse Diop's performance lives in her body and her face, but the voice is not hers. A film about a woman deprived of a voice has a protagonist whose voice literally belongs to someone else.

(A note on Diop herself, from her 2016 interview: apart from one polka-dot dress, every costume she wears in the film was her own, because she worked as a seamstress; and her family were strongly opposed to her appearing in a film, to the point that her neighbours mocked her for it.)

Coldly received, then reassessed

Western critics were lukewarm at the time. In 1969 the New York Times found it unevenly weighted; that same year Roger Ebert called it "slow and mediocre"; in 1973 the Village Voice thought it too didactic and melodramatic.

But one early reader got it right. In 1981, writing about domestic workers in Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis observed that "their tragic situation is brilliantly captured in Ousmane Sembène's film La Noire de…".

After the fiftieth-anniversary restoration in 2016 the assessment settled. A. O. Scott, in the New York Times, wrote that the film is "both fiercely of its moment and permanently contemporary", and that the power of Sembène's art — the striking purity of his early work — lies in its humanism. Ashley Clark, writing for the Criterion Collection, called it "an elegant, coolly enraged dramatization of postcolonial pain", noting that in a Eurocentric version of this story Madame would be the protagonist, whereas here the focus shifts entirely onto Diouana.

Where it sits

In Movies as Politics (1997) Jonathan Rosenbaum called it the symbolic beginning of filmmaking in sub-Saharan Africa — at least insofar as its author was himself African. It is also a rare record of the colonised point of view: Senegal had been independent since 1960, but the colonial relationship did not end with the flag.