In Black Girl, his 1966 cinematic debut, writer-director Ousmane Sembène casts himself as a local Senegalese schoolmaster, a figure who shares and spreads knowledge but, crucially, does not limit or control it. In his silent, accommodating, generous spirit, as a man who seems to see and explore more than know and dominate, he embodies the non-dogmatic mode of storytelling practiced by the film itself. In contrast to the typical characterization of the Hollywood director as a master-storyteller and moral jurist underlining every gesture, Sembène’s film is a cinema of non-tendentiousness, an act of poetic witness. It embodies the spirit of post-colonial “Third Cinema,” a cinema of righteous indignation that achieves moral clarity through paradoxical diffuseness, that wanders perambulates with its meaning rather than arbitrating it. Black Girl is an elliptical, exploratory text, one that slowly accumulates a deep and abiding frustration with the ghostly after-image of European colonialism but asks us to actively probe its recesses and shift with its resonances rather than passively accept a meaning that has been handed down and foreclosed for us.

When his protagonist Gomis Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) accepts employment as a childcare specialist for a white family in Senegal, eventually moving with them to France, she gives them a mask from her community as an act of compassion for the employment. Intended as a gift, a continuation of an active tradition of mutual generosity and togetherness, it has to survive becoming a mere totem. To her employer Madame (Anne-Marie Jelienk), it’s a predetermined object to fasten to her wall, an “authentic” marker of a stable and unmoving African culture. It is Madame who embodies the characteristic administrative authority of the dominating director, turning life into a symbolic abstraction, displacing the contingencies of an experientially abundant existence by congealing them into markers of assumed and unquestioned meanings. A mask that signifies so much, that refuses to be prematurely settled, for Diouana and her community becomes, for Madame, an essentialized indicator of an “authenticity” which can decorate without complicating her apartment and anoint without troubling her soul with indicators of her liberality and cultural awareness. Her desire to adorn it on her wall emblematizes her desire to pin its meaning down, to turn it from a living cultural object into an anthropological artifact.

However, the mask, which is so fecund and meaningful in Sembène’s film, always remains deliriously, deviously polysemic. It moves through the film, but it is not, and cannot be, ever summative of it or of any single meaning in particular. In one beautiful shot, Diouana stares at the mask on the wall, only to turn the top half of her body around to look at us. She becomes both the mask’s mirror, a repetition of its objectified silence, and its conduit, quietly implicating us in our own acceptance of inequality as it radiates a kind of resonant stillness. In moving her body toward it but turning back to us, she becomes its conversational partner in an intimate encounter teeming with unresolved suggestion. As a figuration of passage, the mask is a reflection of both oppression and resistance, a mute witness to violence that is also a beckoning social critic.

The mask’s constitutive ambiguity trembles throughout the entire film, especially in Christian Lacoste’s lustrous cinematography, which figures whiteness itself as a kind of luminescent longing that inspires and entraps Diouana, who early on speaks of France as an object of desire, and as the blinding, abyssal emptiness it eventually becomes to her. When she first enters the apartment in France, the shot figures Diouana’s face and the mask as two lonesome black dots on a forbidding white plane. The colonial buildings in Senegal too are viciously white slabs pricked by what we initially think of as black voids, towering edifices of colonial austerity and monolithic banality that trap the dark windows, manifold through they may be. But color remains cinematically multivalent and ambiguous throughout the film, a restless evocation of the fluctuations of identity and home. In Paris, a trapped Diouana looks outside her window and sees a pitch-black apparent nothingness pock-marked by white lights. While it emblematizes her loneliness, the reversal of color also prophecizes a potential refuge in the very darkness, the legion manifestations of a complex blackness, that she sees maneuvering throughout the world, even though whiteness seems to be in control. Like the mask, the darkness itself comes to signify not acquiescence or emptiness but the proliferating possibility of an object that remains impenetrable to the knowing or controlling eye.

Fittingly then, while Diouana is obviously oppressed, it is Madame who seems the most unsettled in the film. Sembène suggests that her oppressive orientation is entangled with her own frustrated desire for domination and the allure of colonial power being contested in this newly independent country. We sense that she returns to France because she is no longer sure of her worth in a now free Senegal, and that she brings both Diouana and the mask with her as exalted memories of a time when she believed in a more uncomplicated supremacy. She seems more at home in Senegal, where she can exert a kind of omnipotence that she wishes to carry back with her in the form of Diouana, an object commodified as a piece of luggage, a human proxy, like the mask, to be anointed on her wall. And in France, her craving for authority becomes a tenuous foundation of her personal solidity, something that the increasingly uncooperative Diouana troubles. As the film progresses, her quietude progressively indicates not the subservience of a willing object but, like the mask itself, the interloping critique of a silent commentator on the actions, one whose resistance is measured in miniscule refusals. Even her final, tragic act suggests not a soul-chilling surrender to the impossibility of her conditions but a release from bondage, a poetic passage home.

In the film’s finale, it is the mask’s return to Senegal that becomes a displaced embodiment of Diouana’s own life, a mark of continuance and a mimetic for an entire mode of existing and engaging with the world in excess of European categories. When Madame’s husband Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) returns to Africa to settle the family’s relationship with Diouana, Sembène himself returns as the schoolteacher, a ferryman to the complexities of African community as well as a chronicler of how little of these relations have actually been transferred to him. When he offers money to Diouana’s mother, she resists his palliative gesture with a deflationary rather than conciliatory rebuke, one that compromises his façade of reciprocity.

As Monsieur walks away, a child haunts him by dawning the mask, now returned home to Africa, and following him, a walking reminder of the history of Diouana’s life that remains unclaimed by Monsieur, a residuum that also indicates another conception of life, a penumbra of her unconstrained existence beyond her corporeal form. Life, the film implies, is a many-sided relation, and death is not a closure but an otherworldly transfiguration that haunts the living. She, the film reminds, remains unassimilated to whatever narratives that would project themselves onto her, retaining an ineffable actuality that Sembène’s wandering camera exposes with observational acumen.

Perhaps, then, the most telling shot of the film is an entirely unassuming one. Heading down the French apartment building in an elevator, Diouana is viewed through the window, between the lines of an architecture that constrains her but to which she becomes a fleeting, excessive apparition. Charles Burnett’s 1977 masterpiece Killer of Sheep is more famous for honoring Black Girl’s mask when a mute child wears a dog face as an act of quiet resistance, but Burnett also echoes Sembène’s sensibility when the African American children of Watts, Los Angeles gleefully jump between multiple buildings, captured by Burnett from below. In this moment, he is looking up at a human reverberation of Sembène’s governing ethos, an appreciation for people who nurture a relationship to space that is, however besieged by external forces, not limited by them. Diouana does something similar in this film in her refusal to treat a monument to World War II as an arbiter of her past. Walking blissfully, fugitively on top of it, much to the disgrace of even a would-be lover, she is commanded by no national aspiration nor any primordial past. She is, like Sembène’s beguiling and provoking ghost of a film, like the mask that works within and beyond any meaning or person it touches and temporarily attaches to, an apparition that refuses to congeal before our eyes, a historical reckoning in the form of an evanescent transience, not a bright rupture but a slow fade to black.

Score: 10/10