Film Notes #2

Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966)

I think it's easy to watch baldly political films and focus on a presumed moral ("colonialism is bad", et. al). When experiencing a film through that vector, the life-spirit of the film is reduced to a signifying object, a metonym for a codified position, or to borrow the language of computer science, idempotent, i.e. given the same parameters, the result of a function (in this case the interpretive faculty) will be the same. Thus given a normalized set of inputs (subject = African girl, villains = white (post) colonizers) the result should necessarily be "political fable." Criticism should open us up to possibilities, not close them off.

A filmmaker puts on the screen what they want audiences to see. In "Black Girl" we see a beautiful African girl disembarking a ship into a crowd of people that do not look like her. A cool-looking man picks her up and drives her through lush coastline cities until they arrive at a tastefully-decorated flat. Waiting at the flat is a white French woman that greets her and puts the African girl to work. For a little more than an hour we witness the African girl, named Diouana (and the only named character in the film) participate in many rituals. She cleans a tub (in a bit of foreshadowing), she gives gifts to her employers (a mask) then takes it back, she cooks African meals for French guests of her employers ("so spicy" they say). Through these  rituals, filmed so clearly, with Diouana very often the primary subject of the frame, Diouana escapes a fate of symbolism that might lead the viewer to receive the film as an allegory.

Diouana is not perfect and I think that's ok. Despite the sympathy we feel for her throughout her time in France, it's tough to say she is not in some respects naive in her expectations. I'd love to read her choice of clothes as willful exuberance, but I suspect it has more to do with her preconceptions of what life in France will be like (recall that sunny car ride from the ship to her new home, which at one point during the film's production was intended to be shown in color). Also consider how she fingers the issue of Marie Claire, and the way she literally dances on a monument to French-African relations. We smile with her at the seriousness of her friend's response, we want to tell him "relax!" but also know she is kidding him in the wrong direction -- he should relax because the monument is an empty symbol, but it seems she wants to say "relax, perhaps we are beyond the formalities of these relations."

I don't think she gets on that boat if she understands how much differently she will be treated when she arrives. Her knowledge is burgeoning but incomplete. Instead she is brought (or dragged, I should say) to radical action by being bludgeoned with the fact of her difference. This is not to say she is culpable for her treatment. Her naivety is a necessary component of this particular narrative, but it is a more devastating account for it not being a full naivety -- Diouana is intelligent and complex and still is driven mad. The constant refrains of "where are the children?" remind us how she was misled, and that abuse of power does not require willful abuse, only persistent negligence.

Other scattered thoughts:

- The movie that "Black Girl" reminded me of the most formally is Michael Haneke's "Amour",  which uses the same conceit of a tragedy told in reverse. Apparently the short story version of "Black Girl" starts with the crime scene post-suicide then cuts back, which is very similar to how "Amour" opens. In any case thematically they also both explore the limited ability of a clipping to adequately summarize the fullness of a situation. In "Amour" the clipping is "Old woman found dead in apartment." Come to think of it, there are also similarities to Haneke's "White Ribbon", which focuses on the failure of a community to adequately morally prepare its young for the future and the persistent abuses that led to that situation. "Black Girl"'s ending is more optimistic. There is a fantastical chord that is struck at the end with the young boy channeling a (Diouana's?) spirit that posits strength, power, and change whereas Haneke's work is more fatalistic and concerned with unadorned fact.

- It occurred to me throughout the film that "Black Girl" would probably work as well if it had been a silent picture. I really thought the visuals were strong enough to carry the picture. Then again, it becomes much more with the narration -- hearing Diouana's voice in the way her employers cannot becomes a privileged, almost sacred experience.

Film Notes #1

Diabolique (Henri-George Clouzot, 1955)

I heard of Diabolique from reading Hitchcock/Truffaut. I became enamored of Vertigo and learned that there's a rumor Hitchcock wanted the rights to the source novel for Diabolique but Clouzot beat him to the punch.

There's a lot I could say about Diabolique but I want to focus on the use of the boarding school and its inhabitants to reveal character traits.

One of the more thrilling aspects of Diabolique is the use of the school children to create multiple moods. In the background of the early going on young boys play games with each other, get up to mischief, and in general careen around like so many pinballs. This creates a sense of constant movement and life in the picture, which is contradicted to good effect in several early scenes, most notably when the headmaster brings them to silence during supper to humiliate his wife. The constant play-making of the children also sets up a wry juxtaposition to the far more grim game the adults are playing.

Oftentimes creating too busy a milieu can unnecessarily complicate or obfuscate a text. Detail can be added for the sake of itself instead of to enrich the properties of the narrative, character, or theme. Note I don't consider this bad or wrong, this is just to point out the ways aesthetic superfluousness can affect a text. This  complication can be done in a couple ways.  The first I call the Mad Men effect. After Mad Men, many inferior programs and movies emphasized aesthetic attributes over (useful thematic) content and form. Additional material was included for pure aesthetic purposes -- particularly costuming and set-dressing (the problem extends further back than Mad Men, but it is a strong recent example of this phenomenon). The other way is in the formal realist manner, a la Flaubert (there's a Shklovsky reference I can't find that says this better than I can) where the sole purpose of environmental detail is to create verisimilitude. It is a welcome abundance in the service of milieu.

Diabolique is a good example of judicious mise-en-scene in this regard. The background activities of the children and staff of the boarding school are not mere window dressing--they are an essential part of the psychical space of the film. The children are a liability, they are a point of contrast, they are objects of scorn and guilt, barometers of character. We can see immediately the contrast of Christina and her husband by looking at how they each treat the children. Christina sympathizes--her husband scolds and punishes, sees them as a means to financial gain. Christina and Nicole rely upon them to uncover the crime they have committed and so they take on the dual significance of both a liability for the criminals, i.e. an object of loathing because they contain the power to expose, but also this exposure is necessary for their plot to come to fruition. This sends Christina into paroxysms of fear, an ultimate expression of repulsion.

There is also the sense in which Christina is regularly treated like a child. Her husband explicitly calls her a child on a number of occasions. He forces her to chew and swallow her dinner the way you would a toddler. And ironically, as it turns out, her grim game is no more real than the children's. How much of what transpires against Christina is a result of her inability to perform adulthood as well as her husband and Nicole? To play a game completely to the end? To not fight the enactment of her own plot or express her will completely? She is neither as diabolical as her husband and Nicole nor as clever and insightful as the private detective. She remains to her last moments a naif. The point at which she sheds her naivety is also, not unexpectedly, the point of her death.