Black Girl (1965)

What's interesting about Ousmane Sembene is that Black Girl is a film he made at the beginning of his career but it is also his most structured and dense film. Black Girl is a product of its time and was made during the French New Wave. Sembene was able to bring these characteristics to African Cinema because he was a student of World Cinema before returning to his native Senegal. Black Girl is about a young woman who is able to go France to become a maid for a rich couple. At first her excitement is great but the new jobs turns into misery as she becomes a work order slave instead of an employee. Sembene keeps most of the the story regulated to the apartment of the couple. He bases the camera framing on specific designs and angles to show the isolation the girl feels. Sembene also utilizes the language barrier in the story to make the film even more visualized in its dramatics. I was reminded of Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and its use of visual barriers to show isolation and distance. Sembene has an easier time reaching this theme because his story is set mainly in an apartment and claustophobia and isolation is easy to acquire. Black Girl uses time structure to break up the action, but Sembene's best achievement is that he doesn't limit the purpose of the story to the girl's death. The final point of the film is the distance between Africans and Europeans. Walkabout was also a story about Europeans invading an acient land of different rules and regulations. Black Girl isn't the achievement that Walkabout is because it's accomplishment of filming an apartment to excude its main themes isn't as great as filming a vast desert, but Black Girl shares the best similarities with Walkabout.