WORLD CINEMA, BEGINNINGS TO PRESENT-ENG 171

Use of Cinematography and Mise-en-scène In Black Girl to Show the Dehumanizing Effects of Colonialism

Ousmane Sembene’s debut film, Black Girl (1966), examines the nature and consequences of cultural dominance in a self-aware manner. The film is a bold narrative about a young Senegalese girl confronting race, class, and identity issues and being forced to learn how to make her own decisions in the colonial setting. Shot soon after Senegal’s six-year independence following the French colonial rule, the film raises in rage the banner of the renewed anti-colonial movement of pan-Africanism. The film also exemplifies how the medium of film can be fashioned to serve as a weapon in the fight for political and cultural freedom, exemplifying a highly bitter critique of the colonial power structure. The director uses symbolic and avant-garde cinematic and mise-en-scène techniques to show the psychological traumas resulting from colonial oppression of the oppressed. This film effectively uses cinematography and mise-en-scène to critique the dehumanizing effects of colonialism as it highlights the struggle for decolonization through the narrative of the back girl.

Sembene’s cinematographic choices play a crucial role in exposing the objectification of Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop) by the colonizers. The camera shots for the first scenes open with Diouana full of enthusiasm and excitement at starting a new life in Antibes. She is brought into a close-up with her, anticipating that someone will be waiting for her. However, as soon as she understands that she must live a life of servitude, this vibrant world of optimism abruptly fades to black and white. Instead of the colorful life expected, she is confined to a life of housework, cooking, and cleaning that undermines her daily identity. The camera scenes constantly jump between Diouana’s flashbacks of her former life in Senegal and her current life as a domestic worker in France. These flashbacks emphasize her objectification and alienation compared to her current situation. These cinematographic scenes occasionally are symbolic of how colonialism denies the oppressed and, in this case, Diouana, the experience of the life one would anticipate to their full humanity.

Sembene’s precise cinematography also illustrates the manipulation of power and freedom, showing how colonial forces deprived people of their physical freedom. Long static shots of Diouana, cut close in the small spaces, and the camera, which tracks her moving in the employer’s apartment, create an atmosphere of restraint as she does her daily routine tasks. Throughout his life, Sembene has utilized his intelligence and filmmaking abilities to reveal the ways in which the African bourgeoisie and its white counterparts mistreat the African labor force (Landy 2). With the help of his courageous ventures in visual techniques, Sembene magnifies Diouana’s current state, which is that of a subjugated woman. The camerawork makes the viewer an accomplice of her enslavement while emphatically reinforcing her status as a person—an effective defiance of the colonial ideology of African backwardness.

While Sembene’s cinematography highlights Diouana’s oppression, his deliberate mise-en-scène choices seamlessly intertwine to evoke the decolonization experience in a subtle yet profound manner. Mise-en-scène is a term used to describe all the elements of theater and film combined to create a scene, including acting, lighting, costumes, sets, props, and body movement (Tweedie 51). These elements work together to create how people interact with filmed items. Through the film’s Mise-en-scène, there is a constant allusion to colonialism, which is reinforced by the frequent use of harsh black-and-white contrasts in the décor in images of Diouana’s Antibes apartment, which she ultimately grows to see as her prison. The dining room and living room floors, which Diouana only visits for cleaning or serving, are covered in thick black and white bars; the front door of the apartment is white with a single dark band running across it; and the bathroom, to which she has minimal access, is entirely white. Most of Diouana’s time is spent in the kitchen, which features a sizable expanse of tiny white tiles sporadically decorated with dark tiles. These decorations depict an aspect of colonialism, with the places she has limited aspects being completely white.

In the film, Ousmane Sembene moreover employs mise-en-scene to show how colonialism causes the deprivation of dignity of a black person. Through the film scenes, props, and costumes, the director leads us to identify with the protagonist’s attitude of disillusionment and loneliness. The African mask Diouana gives to her bosses is a symbol of the commercialization of African culture. Her distinctive Western dress upon her arrival in France indicates her desire to blend in, only to be excluded as she gets forced into domestic service. The film’s stark black-and-white cinematography clearly distinguishes her life in Senegal from her current one and shows the absence of her identity. Furthermore, in the ending where Diouana commits suicide in the bathtub allows us to see the whole thing as a spectacle of colonial luxury that grows on the back of exploitation the more we see the superficial and obscene nature of it when comparing it to her tragic death. Sembene smartly uses mise-en-scène techniques to remind the viewer about the rotten core of the colonial powers. Hence, mise-en-scène serves as a powerful metaphor for the impersonal nature of colonial powers.

Cinematography and mise-en-scène in Black Girl are effectively combined to bring the psychological impact and dehumanizing ramifications of colonial rule to the fore. Sembene uses sparing visual elements and highly symbolic images which become the central focus of Diouana’s inner world and push forward her perspective as a woman in the colonized territory. This interplay is already evident from the first scene since a critical close-up of Diouana’s character’s face contrasts with the huge dark room that the surroundings form. The direct focus on the main character’s constriction within the boundaries of her individuality and the overwhelming darkness reflects the ex-centric’s fight to remain themselves in the face of colonial suppression.

As the movie unfolds, Sembene’s frozen camerawork and somber editing pace coincide with the experience of confinement that Diouana feels in the apartment of her French bosses and the imprisonment she endures in the service. Using long takes, as she did her domestic chores, the camera reveals tiny Diouana, surrounded by such a luxurious house, and thus a tiny woman deprived of self-governance. When Diouana finally commits suicide, this terrible close-up of her face is contrasted with the glittering decorations and equipment that represent the exploitation of the colonized. Her personal distress is deeply intertwined with these hiding symbols that represent colonial vice and greed. Hence, through a seamless fusion of cinematography and mise-en-scène, Sembene achieves an emotionally competent and formally experimental approach to the psychological blight of colonization. The camera’s proximity helps bring out Diouana’s inner world even when her spatial and social confinement becomes more apparent.

Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl represents a cinematic milestone by virtue of its audacity and insightful depiction of the colonial condition. Through his careful and well-symbolic cinematography and mise-en-scène, Sembene involves the viewer in seeing the strong psychological effect of colonial subjugation. The constant camera focus on Diouana and the prop and the lighting setup of her surroundings make us understand her condition and how she was dehumanized. The tragic end as Diouana takes her own life in a bathtub amidst the very symbols of colonial extravagance provided the stark culmination of Sembene’s searing criticism: the colonized subject is lost in the void, deprived of identity, freedom, and basic humanity. An articulate and modern denunciation of European racial arrogance, Black Girl features visually charged scenes that assert the urgency of decolonization and the priority of reasserting African sovereignty and identity in the postcolonial period. Sembene’s searing imagery is etched into our memory!

Works Cited

Landy, Marsha. “‘Black Girl’ by Marsha Landy.” Ejumpcut.org, 2019, www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC27folder/BlackGirlLandy.html.

Ousmane Sembene. “La Noire De…” IMDb, 5 Apr. 1967, www.imdb.com/title/tt0060758/.

Tweedie, James. The age of new waves: Art cinema and the staging of globalization. Oxford University Press, 2013.