Week #3—Films from Continental Africa

Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates is a dynamic film to begin our semester because it immediately brings to mind four topics. First, Micheaux tackles the subject of lynching with tremendous urgency, given that he released the film months after the Red Summer of 1919, in which there were a string of lynching that took place in more than twenty cities. Secondly, Micheaux was one of few, if any, directors who examined interracial romantic unions in the 20th century. The scene in which we learn that Sylvia Landry’s assailant is her biological father addresses disputes the myths of biracial women as sexually assertive and manipulative, and the justification that lynching was used to protect innocent White women from sexually uncontrollable Black men. Formally, Micheaux achieves this through the use of crosscutting, as shown when he cuts between Sylvia trying to aggressively escape Armand Gridlestone and the burning of the Landry family after they are lynched. The series of events takes place during a flashback that does not appear until the film’s third act. Although his central character is a woman, Micheaux also provides a cinematic image of the “Race Man,” a Black man who reflects model social and cultural values that reflect upward class mobility and the desire to establish a Black middle-class that disrupts the caricatures circulated of African Americans as inherently incompetent and willfully compliant to their suppression, or eternal victims of exploitative labor practices (i.e. sharecropping/tenant farming). Micheaux himself presents two characters, Eph and Old Ned, who would most likely be identified as caricatures, yet they are used to reveal the consequences of racial betrayal, physically and internally.

One of the most striking observations in Gates is the transfer between spaces, identified as North (urban) and South (rural). The correspondence between these locations point to two major moments in the early 20th century for African Americans: the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. As early as 1915, African Americans migrated from the South to escape both racial terror and labor exploitation in search of new economic and social opportunities in Northeastern and Midwestern Cities. One specific location, Harlem (a section of Manhattan in New York City), would embody a variety of new arrivals of African descent within and outside the United States. Whether through artistic expression or economic autonomy, African Americans sought to project a set of values and demeanor that directly contradicted the image circulated after slavery through song, stage, film, and even consumer items.

Critics and scholars attribute Within Our Gates to be an example of a film created during the first decade of filmmaking activity amongst African Americans (1910-1919). In continental Africa, African filmmakers did not emerge until the 1960s, as the countries from which they hailed were gaining independence from European colonial rule. One of the most profound filmmakers to emerge would be Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, a novelist who used his film training from Russia to adapt his books into films. Sembene is more so credited for transferring the storytelling traditions of the griot to cinema, both in the structure of the narrative and its outcome. In Black Girl (La Noire de…), Sembene uses the conventions of the griot to examine the placement of a Senegalese domestic in the home of a French family. He reveals that the ideas that his central character, Diouana, had about working as an au pair in France, are quickly shattered. It is important to examine how her situation is a commentary on the colonial relationship between Senegal and France, and what the promises this relationship has to offer reveals about its realities.

Black Girl (La Noire de…) (1966)
Dir. Ousmane Sembene

Questions to consider while watching Black Girl:
1. What role does the mask play in the film? How is it reflective of the relationship between Diouana and the family that has hired her?

2. How are flashbacks used by Sembene throughout the film? What correspondence do they have with Diouana’s internal dialogue?

3. Sembene includes scenes in the film between Diouana and her boyfriend in Senegal. What kind of Senegalese citizen does he represent, and what are some contrasts between him and Diouana?

4. What are some examples of silent resistance that Diouana practices while working as a domestic?