Battle of Algiers is brilliant. If you want to feel like you’re part of the revolution against colonialism, this is the closest you can get. Shot on location in Algiers and using non-actors, it’s one of the first and best examples of cinéma vérité – a film that feels like a real documentary. So dive in and experience both sides of this war – the French colonizers and the Algerian freedom fighters. You’ll come out a more enlightened revolutionary.
Wow. Possibly the best film I have seen this year so far, Embrace of the Serpent is many things at once. It is a beautifully shot film set deep in the Amazon jungle that delves into many themes, including Life and Death, Culture, Civilization, Religion, and Exploration. This is a must see.
Do you want to see one of Africa’s best films from the 20th Century? Set aside 55 minutes to watch Black Girl below (please comment if the video is not working). Don’t let film scholars be the only ones to have seen this incredible film as this should be seen by everyone.
Why Watch Black Girl?
It’s short: it will only take 55 minutes of your time!
It features a strong female character
The best pieces of art are completed quickly. Black Girl was made in 20 days
Examine the legacy of colonialism
The Breakdown
Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl starts with a big passenger ship arriving at a port in France. A finely dressed black woman, Diouana, leaves the boat wondering if anyone will be there to pick her up. Sure enough a white man greets her, takes her bags, and drives her off. After a few jump cuts in the car ride (a style made famous in Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard) she arrives at a house on the French Riviera.
The opening suggests Diouana is here to meet her friends. Because of her nice dress and the white driver meeting her, it initially appears that she shares equal status with the white French people. However, as soon as she enters the apartment, it becomes clear that she does not share the same freedoms as her employers. She is kept in the apartment all day, every day to clean and cook and never ventures out because she never gets paid and is never introduced to anyone (which is always helpful when you don’t speak the language). As a result, she is almost a slave.
What’s the significance of the African mask?
To get to know the film a little better, look out for the African mask. It first appears in the film when Diouana buys it from a small boy from her neighbourhood in Senegal. She then gifts it to her employer who first question it’s authenticity (‘it looks like the real thing’) and then hang it on one of their blank white walls in their apartment in France.
Firstly, the mask initially signifies equality between Diouana and her employer. The act of gifting implies that you share an equal standing with the person you give to. Initially, because of the gifting, Diouana is equal to her employer. However, when her employers dismiss the mask as a fake, they imply that Diouana cannot afford a real mask and therefore she is not on the same level as them.
Secondly, the mask is a metaphor for Diouana’s isolation in France. Like the mask hanging in the middle of a blank wall, she is alone and out of place in French society.
Lastly, the mask is a symbol of the misappropriation of African culture. In Africa the mask is alive as the young boy is shot playing with it and wearing it. However, in France, the mask is dead. In France, the mask has been reduced to an ‘exotic’ artifact which sits on a wall as a trophy of Diouana’s employer’s exoticism. It allows her employers to temporarily ‘play’ their ‘connection’ to African ‘exoticism’ without experiencing any of the discrimination they perpetrate. Just like a fancy dress that they can take off whenever they want.
Narration as a symbol of post-colonialism
When watching Black Girl you’ll notice that whilst Diouana doesn’t speak French, all her thoughts are narrated in French. Her consciousness has been taken over by a language that isn’t her own. She can’t physically speak French and therefore become equal to the French speakers in France, but she can think in French. In fact, French is the only language she actually thinks in via the narration.
This is symbolic of the legacy of French colonialism in Africa (in this case, Senegal). Although Senegal achieved it’s independence from France a few years before this film was made, by restricting Diouana’s consciousness to French Sembene emphasises the parasitic legacy of colonialism. The colonisers colonised Senegal and replaced it’s native culture with it’s own and disrupted Senegalese consciousness in the process.
Conclusion
There’s so much more to say! Simply put, Sembene’s Black Girl packs a lot into just under an hour. If it’s not being studied at schools across the world, it should be. Everyone needs to watch this film!
If you haven’t seen it, you’re in luck. Watch it here on YouTube!
Angelika Levi’s Absent Present is one well made documentary. If you’ve ever listened to an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s equally well constructed Revisionist History you’ll find similarities with Angelika Levi’s documentary method. Like Revisionist History, Levi starts with an event – in this case the disappearance of her friend Benji – and unravels the threads linked to it to uncover a whole chain of associations from colonialism to migration. Having explored more of the threads linked to Benji’s life, we see his disappearance in a new light.
Uncovering the Mystery by Looking at the Big Picture
Benji’s disappearance is a mystery that Levi tries to unravel by following his path. Born in Namibia, he was one of many young Namibian children that were brought to the GDR (German Democratic Republic otherwise known as East Germany) having survived the Cassinga Massacre (a South African bombing raid on Namibian independence fighters). He spent 11 years in East Germany from ages 3-14 at an orphanage and German school, and became a naturalized East German citizen. However, in 1989 the GDR collapsed, East and West Germany reunified, and Namibia gained its independence. As a result, Benji was sent back to Namibia despite having grown up in Germany. Back in his birth country, Benji was kidnapped by Angolan soldiers and forced to join their liberation struggle. He managed to escape and returned to Europe disguised as a tourist. He eventually made it back to Germany, but disappeared a few years later. Levi travels from Germany to Namibia and back to Germany in Benji’s footsteps to try and investigate his disappearance. But ultimately, as she retraces his steps she finds the foot prints of more African refugees in Senegal and Spain and starts to uncover the hypocrisy of anti-immigration policies. By following the footsteps of migrants like Benji, Levi gives us a look at the big picture, which gives us a context to help explain Benji’s disappearance.
The Hypocrisy of Anti-Immigration Policy
Levi starts her broader investigation with the Columbus monument in Barcelona, a grand 19th century column that celebrates the discovery of the New World. At the top, Columbus points towards his ‘discovery’, a world where Columbus received gifts of welcome and from which Spain gained incredible wealth and prosperity. The hypocrisy of the monument is that it celebrates a migrant that crossed oceans in search of wealth, whilst today the same country that benefited from the wealth of other continents turns away migrants with similar intentions.
Levi also highlights the underlying racism behind Spain’s treatment of African migrants in the Canary Islands, juxtaposing images of white tourists relaxing on beaches and running through woods with images of Africans detained in camps just meters from tourist hot spots. The fact that these camps, that almost specifically hold African migrants, are built on the foundations of former slave camps makes it all the worse. Seen in this context, it’s not surprising that Benji tries to return to Europe disguised as a tourist with bleached hair. For Benji, and the African migrants that are detained in Spain, Europe is the only option left in their attempt to survive. It’s “Barcelona or Barsaak” (the Wolof for land of the dead). Viewed in its historical context, the anti-immigration policies of Europe look like an evolution of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. The Africans were forcibly brought to Europe and the Americas as slaves, forcibly exploited in colonialism, and now they are forcibly shut out of the riches their work and land created, detained as migrants.
Whilst the big picture Levi uncovers in Absent Present doesn’t answer why Benji disappeared, it does connect Benji’s forcible removal from his home country, and forcible repatriation to a brutal history of exploitation. It uncovers a hypocritical and racist history that takes African bodies when they’re needed and discards them when they’re not. Seen in this context Benji’s disappearance is not a mystery, but a symptom of the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and illegal immigration.
What to Watch Next
If you’re looking for another documentary that attempts to find a missing person, check out Luis Ospina’s A Paper Tiger. It tries to track down a Colombian artist named Manrique Figueroa by interviewing all the friends he left behind.
Or if you’re looking for more films in which migration and colonialism are a major topic I’d recommend exploring the following:
Atlantics – a feature film from Senegal that conveys the impact of a lost generation venturing north on their friends and family back at home.
Tenere – a documentary that tracks migrants crossing the Sahara desert on the back of Mad Max style converted trucks in Niger in quests to reach Europe.
A Storm Was Coming – a documentary that artistically represents how the Spanish Empire erased the indigenous cultures of Equatorial Guinea.
Or if you’re just looking for more documentaries narrated in English by great German film makers, check out Werner Herzog. His film, Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a great place to start. It’s a film about the life of a German war survivor that becomes a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
In Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyenas, a former outcast returns to her African village a rich woman after being kicked out three decades earlier for getting pregnant out of wedlock. The town fawns over her wealth and rolls out the complete ceremony to welcome her home. However, she has other plans. She promises infinite wealth to the impoverished town and it’s residents in exchange for the execution of Dramaan, a local shopkeeper and the man who fathered her child without owning up. Will the community betray their beloved shopkeeper for wealth?
For more analysis check out Layla Gaye’s review of the film and it’s satirical criticism of neocolonialism and the corrupting power of wealth on a society’s morality.
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