01 Mar The Final Sequence of “Black Girl” and Glauber Rocha’s Notion of Violence
In his revolutionary 1965 manifesto ‘The Aesthetics of Hunger’, landmark filmmaker and film theorist Glauber Rocha wrote “The moment of violence is the moment when the colonizer becomes aware of the existence of the colonized. Only when he is confronted with violence can the colonizer understand, through horror, the strength of the culture he exploits. As long as he does not take up arms, the colonized man remains a slave.”
When Rocha says violence he doesn’t mean bloody revolution but instead is defining violence as when abuse towards the oppressed is forced into the view of the oppressors. And this abuse can’t solely be forced into the sights of the oppressors, it must be portrayed in an unabashedly polemic manner, to the point where there is no doubt that what is being viewed is inhumanity. Rocha promoted this portrayal of “violence” as one of the purposes of the Cinema Novo movement, a Brazilian movement led by Rocha and filmmakers such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade that dedicated itself to promoting social equality through the depiction of underdeveloped and impoverished regions of Brazil.
And while Cinema Novo’s relationship with the Third Cinema movement is much-discussed (one camp seems to be those who believe that Cinema Novo is an early subcategory of Third Cinema and the other sees the movement’s influence from the Italian Neorealist auteurs as evidence that the movements should be put into two different categories), there are undeniable parallels between the two. One being the common focus on the idea of a camera as a weapon capable of an artistic assault on oppression. Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 masterpiece “Black Girl” epitomizes this. The film is an explicit and unambiguous condemnation of the European neocolonialism that perpetuates the profound racism, classism, and general inhumanity inherent in colonial systems.
And while the entire film is centered around this, the last sequence in particular is one of the best cinematic articulations of Rocha’s goals among Third Cinema and Third Cinema-adjacent films. The sequence almost functions as an epilogue. By this point, the film has already hit its climactic moment, with Diouana committing suicide in a bathtub Marat-style, choosing death as the only way to seize her agency from who have essentially enslaved her. After Diouana’s death, one of her former employers travels to Diouana’s home in Dakar to deliver Diouana’s items, including the mask she gifted them and a sum of money, to her mother who refuses. While it’s never explained why she refuses, one likely possibility is that she is fully aware of the way Europeans treat Africans and knows that the man offering her money likely had a part to play in the death of her daughter. Once rejected, the man begins to leave and a young boy (who may or not be Diouana’s younger brother) picks up the mask to wear it and begins to follow the man. Sembene’s camera cuts between the steadily advancing child, face fully concealed, and the increasingly uncomfortable European, the cuts growing more frantic as the sequence continues. Once the European reaches the bridge, he escapes to his car and drives off, the audience seeing the vehicle swiftly escape through the eyes of the child. Sembene cuts to the boy in the mask, his visage facing the camera for the first time in the sequence. He takes the mask off slowly, revealing his face looking at the car in the distance as the credits start to play.
‘Black Girl’ (Janus)
Masks depersonalize individuals who cease to be such while hidden behind them. While wearing the mask, the boy becomes a symbol of something larger, the Senegalese people, African victims of colonial oppression, the youth growing up in a newly-independent Africa. And as the boy follows the European, never letting him leave his sight, Sembene illustrates his purpose. He wants to instill fear in the minds of his neocolonial oppressors. The fear that Africa will not sit idly by as oppression occurs. The fear that their neocolonial oppression will be put under a microscope and that vitriolic art condemning it will be released to the masses. There is nothing more powerful than knowledge and with this film, Sembene displays not only his acute awareness of the circumstances his people are being subjected to but also a vow to spread that knowledge to his fellow Africans. This is deeply angry, political filmmaking and with the last sequence, Sembene gives the many European members of his audience a warning: Your sins will remain hidden no longer.
Ousmane Sembène once said that “Cinema is like an ongoing political rally with the audience”. The Senegalese auteur was previously a prominent figure in African literature yet switched to filmmaking as he believed it to be “a more effective tool for [his] activism”. Cinema is the most accessible of art forms and therefore in Sembene’s view the method through which to most effectively educate the masses. While lauded by European audiences throughout his career, Sembène made his art for the purpose of illustrating the preoccupations of his fellow Africans. Like Rocha, Sembene realized the importance of making neocolonial oppression impossible for the oppressors to ignore. So while he was mainly interested in making films for African audiences, Sembene wanted his work to shock European audiences, eliciting in them the fear that the people they are oppressing are conscious of the indignity of their circumstances.