With his debut feature, Senegalese author and activist Ousmane Sembène fleshes out a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy about a young woman from Dakar whose job in France isn't what she imagines.
I’m glad the Sight and Sound poll (and this feature) gave me the push to finally sit down and watch this stunning film. I, too, remember Ebert’s championing of Moolaadé when it came out and will likewise be seeing it and Sembène’s other films.
As for this one, one part that struck me was when the wife browbeats her husband about his drinking and he skulks off to the bedroom to rifle through his porn. Clearly, nothing he does satisfies her, either.
Such a great movie. Can’t pretend I’m an expert on Senegalese film but man that country seems to have such a rich output. Also love how every film partially set in Dakar has such an interesting relationship (plot-wise and visual-wise) to the sea. I’m thinking of course about Black Girl, Touki Bouki, and the recent Atlantics.
Black Girl is a pretty raw film, very much a debut feature in feel. It has some good stuff but it would be my poster child for movies that show up on lists like this simply to fulfill geographic distribution desires. If you actually think Black Girl is better than all but 94 movies ever made, right on good for you, but I think it's much more a solid three star films elevated by WHO made it rather than WHAT it accomplishes as a film. Which seems to be more and more the desire of list-makers and cinephiles, but it bothers me. Do you actually think Black Girl is better than every movie Steven Spielberg ever made?
Boo. More polished doesn’t always mean greater! Part of what makes a lot of indie movies great is their rough-around-the-edges, more exploratory direction. Bottle Rocket is still one of Wes’s best for instance.
Anyway why is it always movies made by black people that are always the ones where people are suddenly like “is this REALLY better than (other movie)”? I saw a lot of this when there was discussion around The Woman King getting 0 Oscar nods - suddenly the Oscars became a meritocracy and The Woman King just wasn’t good enough to get a nomination.
The whole Sight and Sound list is full of insane choices anyway so Black Girl at 95 isn’t even close to where I’d begin complaining.
I respect your point about rawness - my brother and I have endless (friendly) debates over Terminator 1 vs. T2. Is the raw, neo-noir (tech noir!) horror of the original better than the more polished sequel? Similarly, he also likes the original Mad Max more than I do.
As for the race thing, I think that one side has a tendency to elevate movies made by black filmmakers, which causes a reaction. Or maybe it's a circle. But once you have people out there saying that movie X deserves more praise because it was made by a black filmmaker, you will of course have others saying that movie X isn't actually great just because it was made by a minority. Makes sense to me.
But leave race out of it. If Mad Max (1979) was #95 on the list, wouldn't that seem pretty weird too? A raw movie with some great scenes but not exactly a masterpiece.
I think you’re looking at the film with too little historical context. Black Girl is an influential film that utilizes aspects of the French New Wave style to tell a political story that criticizes French culture and colonization (Senegal literally gained independence from France less than ten years before this film came out!) and is considered one of the early great films in Senegal’s history. These are all things that should be factored in when you are weighing films against each other imo.
But to your other point, honestly I would love if Mad Max was on a list like this because it’d be so insane lol. The problem with that comparison is that Mad Max is sort of just a nice and trashy genre film. Still influential in its own way of course but it doesn’t have the same heft to its historical context as Black Girl does.
Well now we have to get into an argument about whether historical importance figures into the BEST conversation. And I don't think that's at all why Black Girl shows up here. And to prove it I shall give you a title: The Jazz Singer.
The Jazz Singer is an immensely important film historically but it is not a great one. Honestly, it's not even a good one. And so -- correctly in my opinion -- it never shows up in these lists. No matter how important you think Black Girl is (and I think you're overrating it but that's not worth arguing about it) there is no question it was less influential than The Jazz Singer. Or Gone with the Wind. Or The Robe. But none show up here. So why does Black Girl? Because it appeals to a desire for geographic diversity, or racial diversity, or anti-colonial themes, or whatever else is more important to the voters than the film itself.
And yeah I'd love Mad Max on the list because it would be so anti-SaS, but I'd put The Road Warrior or Fury Road on first
I think there's a great deal of historical importance to BLACK GIRL, given how it's largely considered the first film from the entire *continent* to get international attention. It's "rawness" can be forgiven a bit when you consider that Sembène is creating a cinema scene that did not previously exist.
Keith and I make the argument for this film as well as we can in the piece, but I think there's a great deal of sophistication and political purpose at work here. Just the act of looking at a headline about a Senegalese woman committing suicide and imagining that story being told from *her* perspective is entirely unique, given that the world had never had access to an African point-of-view. But for all the film's bluntness, there are subtleties at work here, too-- in the character's motives, in the way she dresses and wears her hair, in the way the white Europeans talk to each other about her and about Africa, and in the specific way she chooses to end her life. I think it's a rich text.
Well your first line kinda supports my point - Black Girl is here to fulfill geographic diversity desires rather than to reward greatness unto itself.
And to the rest of your point, I hear what you're saying, I absolutely do, but I just don't that unique perspectives = greatness. Andy Warhol's movies offered a unique perspective but is BLOW JOB one of the best films of all time?
And for the record, I'd give Black Girl a thumbs up. I think it's a solid film and has some good points among the rawness. Again, the Mad Max parallel works well. But I care about WHAT not WHO. Are you doing a history of film class? Absolutely include this one for its importance as an African film made by an African. But on a best list? Come now - do you actually think it's better than every film made by the Coens, Malle, Spielberg, Peckinpah, Malick, Herzog, and Hawks?
I'm intrigued by the idea that "greatness" is some kind of quality that exists outside of any context — that somehow it doesn't matter *at all* who made a work, or when, or why.
Sight & Sound is not the only greatest films list out there. Black Girl is not on the Letterboxd list, or the IMDB's, or on most individual ballots in that poll. The sad and inescapable truth of any top 100 movies list is that more than 100 movies "deserve" to be on that list, and there's no objective correct answer. Factoring in context is not incorrect.
There are plenty of things I disagree with, personally, about the S&S greatest movies list — including how great Black Girl is. But I'm grateful to be nudged towards watching it, and love exploring why other people do believe it belongs on the list.
There needs to be an option for ultra-like or mega-like on these comments, but what you're saying here is dead on. If you go back to that link for the S&S poll from 2012, which lists the Top 1000, you will see mostly exceptional films. I think I said it before in the piece I wrote about the 2022 list, but putting together my own Top 10 for consideration was an absurd project and I think I could have come up with radically different lists on different days. Because when you're talking about the greatest films of all time over a period of over a century, *and* you're taking into consideration their historical import and their meaning to you personally, it just becomes an impossible undertaking.
And so, ultimately and most productively, we can talk about and appreciate what's there. Even if you wouldn't include a film like this on your own Top 100, as you say, the whole purpose of the list (and hopefully this conversation series) is to consider why it's there and dig Into its merits (or lack thereof, I guess, if you're not into it). The argument James is making about Mad Max makes me think that context is important there, too, b/c George Miller was operating in a tradition of Aussie exploitation films and doing exceptional things without a resources he would get later in a slicker work like Fury Road. And if we want to stick to films from countries with developing cinema scenes, you could certainly say that Kiarostami's Certified Copy is a more sophisticated film all around than, say, Where Is The Friend's House?, but is it better? I'm not so sure.
I respect your argument. Obviously greatness is inherently subjective. But to put your point to the test: is the Jazz Singer a great film? I made this argument elsewhere in this thread; virtually everyone is in agreement that The Jazz Singer is historically important, but not great. Ditto The Robe, which was discussed on this site recently.
So it's clearly not just historical importance that puts Black Girl on here: it is the focus that cineastes (and left-of-center spaces in general) place on WHO makes the art being more important than WHAT the art is. And that WHO should involve a country, gender, race that is considered marginalized. No one cares about Finnish cinema, but African cinema is Important.
And maybe they're right! Maybe the primary way we should evaluate art is by strongly considering the race, gender, and nationality of the artist. But I do not agree, and so I shall continue to argue.
It's not that I think all but 94 films are better, but rather x number of critics out of a pool y-size, thought it was amongst the *10* greatest films of all time, where x was not an insignificant number (arguably an even stronger claim. From another light, a much less bold claim). I know how the outcomes of these lists get billed, but it's probably best to keep in mind what the numbers are actually saying.
And to answer the question, The Terminator is a much better film than T2. There is no debate in my mind about this, and there's no point in anyone trying to change my mind about it.
I love both Terminators, which is probably why I switched to Mad Max because it’s a better analogue. The original has great scenes but pretty much everything it does well is done as well or better in #2
And yeah the idea that people think it’s one of the TEN best films of all time is even weirder
The other thing is that I’m not planning to express any “this deserves to be here” or “this doesn’t” opinions unless I hit something that sparks a true WTF reaction. The idea is to approach each film and talk about our trackings to it. It’s an interesting list. No list is going to be everyone’s (anyone’s?) idea of perfection.
T2 is a model-perfect Hollywood blockbuster. I love it. The first one is my favorite, though. It’s filled with compelling ideas and I admire its pitilessness and neon-tinted nightmarish tone.
Yeah there was a Run the Series feature on Terminator at the AVC (after your time I think) which argued the original Terminator is a horror film - set mainly at night, with merciless killer tracking innocent young woman - and it caused me to look at the film in a new light because I had never thought of that. Definitely a pitiless film and a good one.
Agree that no list is going to be anyone's idea of perfection. But that doesn't mean I cannot quibble here and there about some inclusivity inclusions, if you will
I watched this recently because of the Sight & Sound poll, knowing nothing about it, so Diouana dying by suicide was shocking, though not really surprising. It's not a horror film by any conventional definition of the term, but it's certainly horrifying, and the banality of that horror makes it all the worse. Some of the film's greatness comes because Monsieur and Madame don't have any sense of how terrible they are.
In the beginning I thought I was getting something like Cléo from 5 to 7, and it turned out more like Rosemary's Baby.
It's rare that I feel this way, but I wish I'd known going in the origins of this story. I didn't know the end was coming, and it felt didactic and of a piece with Madame's flattened meanness (and also terrible acting, imo). I think I'd have been much more sympathetic to the film if I'd known its real-life origin.
I'm also wondering how I would have responded if I had known the real life inspiration behind the movie. However, I found myself thinking everyone felt a little flat and perfunctory when the voice-over was happening (the strength of those scenes felt like it was the content and observations of the voice-over), and couldn't help but notice things were more dynamic and cinematic when there wasn't voice-over. But there was always voice-over in France, I think, and I believe all the non-voice-over scenes happened in Senegal, but now can't recall if all of Senegal was without voice-over.
I seem to recall, from my only one viewing, trying to observe if this seemed to be an intended effect of the idea of her becoming stuck in a type of mental prison while in France, but there was something, though I can no longer recall what, made me feel it was not all fully intended or executed in a way to the film's detriment. But that was only one viewing and I'm just a random person on the internet, so take that with a grain of salt.
If people like the exploited migrant worker story genre, I will say there was a movie I was shown in high school decades ago, El Norte, that recently got a criterion release. Have I gone back and rewatched it? No, but Black Girl really did make me think of it, and it getting a criterion release makes me think it's probably of good quality (I don't trust my high school memory of it).
The skewering of the "enlightened" French upper class in this and the talk of the mask is making me think of the black face scene in Antonioni's L'Eclisse. A scene that, partly because I never research things, can never decide if Antonioni is also skewering the hypocrisy of the upper class or unintentionally depicting it by displaying his own.
I guess even if it's the latter, it can be read as unintentionally being the former for my enjoyment of the film.
I just watched this yesterday, thanks to its appearance here, as well as in Filmspotting's recent African Cinema marathon. What a direct, devastating movie.
There's one element I'd like to dive a little further into, since the scene confused me a little. When Monsieur reads the letter from her mother, Diouana rejects it, ripping it up and saying her mother didn't write it. And I can see her having that reaction: the letter is difficult to hear, the lack of privacy she has is terrible, and Monsieur's starting to write back without so much as asking her robs her of her autonomy. And when we see Diouana's mother at the end, she doesn't seem ill. And yet what would Monsieur and Madame have to gain by faking this letter? Was it indeed faked by them? There's a man we see early on, who seems to be the neighborhood's professional letter writer -- could he have faked it, or could someone else have faked it through him?
I get the emotions of the scene, and it's harsh, blunt tone. But I'm unclear about the origins of the letter itself. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
I’m glad the Sight and Sound poll (and this feature) gave me the push to finally sit down and watch this stunning film. I, too, remember Ebert’s championing of Moolaadé when it came out and will likewise be seeing it and Sembène’s other films.
As for this one, one part that struck me was when the wife browbeats her husband about his drinking and he skulks off to the bedroom to rifle through his porn. Clearly, nothing he does satisfies her, either.
Such a great movie. Can’t pretend I’m an expert on Senegalese film but man that country seems to have such a rich output. Also love how every film partially set in Dakar has such an interesting relationship (plot-wise and visual-wise) to the sea. I’m thinking of course about Black Girl, Touki Bouki, and the recent Atlantics.
Black Girl is a pretty raw film, very much a debut feature in feel. It has some good stuff but it would be my poster child for movies that show up on lists like this simply to fulfill geographic distribution desires. If you actually think Black Girl is better than all but 94 movies ever made, right on good for you, but I think it's much more a solid three star films elevated by WHO made it rather than WHAT it accomplishes as a film. Which seems to be more and more the desire of list-makers and cinephiles, but it bothers me. Do you actually think Black Girl is better than every movie Steven Spielberg ever made?
Boo. More polished doesn’t always mean greater! Part of what makes a lot of indie movies great is their rough-around-the-edges, more exploratory direction. Bottle Rocket is still one of Wes’s best for instance.
Anyway why is it always movies made by black people that are always the ones where people are suddenly like “is this REALLY better than (other movie)”? I saw a lot of this when there was discussion around The Woman King getting 0 Oscar nods - suddenly the Oscars became a meritocracy and The Woman King just wasn’t good enough to get a nomination.
The whole Sight and Sound list is full of insane choices anyway so Black Girl at 95 isn’t even close to where I’d begin complaining.
I respect your point about rawness - my brother and I have endless (friendly) debates over Terminator 1 vs. T2. Is the raw, neo-noir (tech noir!) horror of the original better than the more polished sequel? Similarly, he also likes the original Mad Max more than I do.
As for the race thing, I think that one side has a tendency to elevate movies made by black filmmakers, which causes a reaction. Or maybe it's a circle. But once you have people out there saying that movie X deserves more praise because it was made by a black filmmaker, you will of course have others saying that movie X isn't actually great just because it was made by a minority. Makes sense to me.
But leave race out of it. If Mad Max (1979) was #95 on the list, wouldn't that seem pretty weird too? A raw movie with some great scenes but not exactly a masterpiece.
I think you’re looking at the film with too little historical context. Black Girl is an influential film that utilizes aspects of the French New Wave style to tell a political story that criticizes French culture and colonization (Senegal literally gained independence from France less than ten years before this film came out!) and is considered one of the early great films in Senegal’s history. These are all things that should be factored in when you are weighing films against each other imo.
But to your other point, honestly I would love if Mad Max was on a list like this because it’d be so insane lol. The problem with that comparison is that Mad Max is sort of just a nice and trashy genre film. Still influential in its own way of course but it doesn’t have the same heft to its historical context as Black Girl does.
Well now we have to get into an argument about whether historical importance figures into the BEST conversation. And I don't think that's at all why Black Girl shows up here. And to prove it I shall give you a title: The Jazz Singer.
The Jazz Singer is an immensely important film historically but it is not a great one. Honestly, it's not even a good one. And so -- correctly in my opinion -- it never shows up in these lists. No matter how important you think Black Girl is (and I think you're overrating it but that's not worth arguing about it) there is no question it was less influential than The Jazz Singer. Or Gone with the Wind. Or The Robe. But none show up here. So why does Black Girl? Because it appeals to a desire for geographic diversity, or racial diversity, or anti-colonial themes, or whatever else is more important to the voters than the film itself.
And yeah I'd love Mad Max on the list because it would be so anti-SaS, but I'd put The Road Warrior or Fury Road on first
I think there's a great deal of historical importance to BLACK GIRL, given how it's largely considered the first film from the entire *continent* to get international attention. It's "rawness" can be forgiven a bit when you consider that Sembène is creating a cinema scene that did not previously exist.
Keith and I make the argument for this film as well as we can in the piece, but I think there's a great deal of sophistication and political purpose at work here. Just the act of looking at a headline about a Senegalese woman committing suicide and imagining that story being told from *her* perspective is entirely unique, given that the world had never had access to an African point-of-view. But for all the film's bluntness, there are subtleties at work here, too-- in the character's motives, in the way she dresses and wears her hair, in the way the white Europeans talk to each other about her and about Africa, and in the specific way she chooses to end her life. I think it's a rich text.
Well your first line kinda supports my point - Black Girl is here to fulfill geographic diversity desires rather than to reward greatness unto itself.
And to the rest of your point, I hear what you're saying, I absolutely do, but I just don't that unique perspectives = greatness. Andy Warhol's movies offered a unique perspective but is BLOW JOB one of the best films of all time?
And for the record, I'd give Black Girl a thumbs up. I think it's a solid film and has some good points among the rawness. Again, the Mad Max parallel works well. But I care about WHAT not WHO. Are you doing a history of film class? Absolutely include this one for its importance as an African film made by an African. But on a best list? Come now - do you actually think it's better than every film made by the Coens, Malle, Spielberg, Peckinpah, Malick, Herzog, and Hawks?
I'm intrigued by the idea that "greatness" is some kind of quality that exists outside of any context — that somehow it doesn't matter *at all* who made a work, or when, or why.
Sight & Sound is not the only greatest films list out there. Black Girl is not on the Letterboxd list, or the IMDB's, or on most individual ballots in that poll. The sad and inescapable truth of any top 100 movies list is that more than 100 movies "deserve" to be on that list, and there's no objective correct answer. Factoring in context is not incorrect.
There are plenty of things I disagree with, personally, about the S&S greatest movies list — including how great Black Girl is. But I'm grateful to be nudged towards watching it, and love exploring why other people do believe it belongs on the list.
There needs to be an option for ultra-like or mega-like on these comments, but what you're saying here is dead on. If you go back to that link for the S&S poll from 2012, which lists the Top 1000, you will see mostly exceptional films. I think I said it before in the piece I wrote about the 2022 list, but putting together my own Top 10 for consideration was an absurd project and I think I could have come up with radically different lists on different days. Because when you're talking about the greatest films of all time over a period of over a century, *and* you're taking into consideration their historical import and their meaning to you personally, it just becomes an impossible undertaking.
And so, ultimately and most productively, we can talk about and appreciate what's there. Even if you wouldn't include a film like this on your own Top 100, as you say, the whole purpose of the list (and hopefully this conversation series) is to consider why it's there and dig Into its merits (or lack thereof, I guess, if you're not into it). The argument James is making about Mad Max makes me think that context is important there, too, b/c George Miller was operating in a tradition of Aussie exploitation films and doing exceptional things without a resources he would get later in a slicker work like Fury Road. And if we want to stick to films from countries with developing cinema scenes, you could certainly say that Kiarostami's Certified Copy is a more sophisticated film all around than, say, Where Is The Friend's House?, but is it better? I'm not so sure.
I respect your argument. Obviously greatness is inherently subjective. But to put your point to the test: is the Jazz Singer a great film? I made this argument elsewhere in this thread; virtually everyone is in agreement that The Jazz Singer is historically important, but not great. Ditto The Robe, which was discussed on this site recently.
So it's clearly not just historical importance that puts Black Girl on here: it is the focus that cineastes (and left-of-center spaces in general) place on WHO makes the art being more important than WHAT the art is. And that WHO should involve a country, gender, race that is considered marginalized. No one cares about Finnish cinema, but African cinema is Important.
And maybe they're right! Maybe the primary way we should evaluate art is by strongly considering the race, gender, and nationality of the artist. But I do not agree, and so I shall continue to argue.
It's not that I think all but 94 films are better, but rather x number of critics out of a pool y-size, thought it was amongst the *10* greatest films of all time, where x was not an insignificant number (arguably an even stronger claim. From another light, a much less bold claim). I know how the outcomes of these lists get billed, but it's probably best to keep in mind what the numbers are actually saying.
And to answer the question, The Terminator is a much better film than T2. There is no debate in my mind about this, and there's no point in anyone trying to change my mind about it.
I love both Terminators, which is probably why I switched to Mad Max because it’s a better analogue. The original has great scenes but pretty much everything it does well is done as well or better in #2
And yeah the idea that people think it’s one of the TEN best films of all time is even weirder
The other thing is that I’m not planning to express any “this deserves to be here” or “this doesn’t” opinions unless I hit something that sparks a true WTF reaction. The idea is to approach each film and talk about our trackings to it. It’s an interesting list. No list is going to be everyone’s (anyone’s?) idea of perfection.
T2 is a model-perfect Hollywood blockbuster. I love it. The first one is my favorite, though. It’s filled with compelling ideas and I admire its pitilessness and neon-tinted nightmarish tone.
Yeah there was a Run the Series feature on Terminator at the AVC (after your time I think) which argued the original Terminator is a horror film - set mainly at night, with merciless killer tracking innocent young woman - and it caused me to look at the film in a new light because I had never thought of that. Definitely a pitiless film and a good one.
Agree that no list is going to be anyone's idea of perfection. But that doesn't mean I cannot quibble here and there about some inclusivity inclusions, if you will
I watched this recently because of the Sight & Sound poll, knowing nothing about it, so Diouana dying by suicide was shocking, though not really surprising. It's not a horror film by any conventional definition of the term, but it's certainly horrifying, and the banality of that horror makes it all the worse. Some of the film's greatness comes because Monsieur and Madame don't have any sense of how terrible they are.
In the beginning I thought I was getting something like Cléo from 5 to 7, and it turned out more like Rosemary's Baby.
It's rare that I feel this way, but I wish I'd known going in the origins of this story. I didn't know the end was coming, and it felt didactic and of a piece with Madame's flattened meanness (and also terrible acting, imo). I think I'd have been much more sympathetic to the film if I'd known its real-life origin.
I'm also wondering how I would have responded if I had known the real life inspiration behind the movie. However, I found myself thinking everyone felt a little flat and perfunctory when the voice-over was happening (the strength of those scenes felt like it was the content and observations of the voice-over), and couldn't help but notice things were more dynamic and cinematic when there wasn't voice-over. But there was always voice-over in France, I think, and I believe all the non-voice-over scenes happened in Senegal, but now can't recall if all of Senegal was without voice-over.
I seem to recall, from my only one viewing, trying to observe if this seemed to be an intended effect of the idea of her becoming stuck in a type of mental prison while in France, but there was something, though I can no longer recall what, made me feel it was not all fully intended or executed in a way to the film's detriment. But that was only one viewing and I'm just a random person on the internet, so take that with a grain of salt.
If people like the exploited migrant worker story genre, I will say there was a movie I was shown in high school decades ago, El Norte, that recently got a criterion release. Have I gone back and rewatched it? No, but Black Girl really did make me think of it, and it getting a criterion release makes me think it's probably of good quality (I don't trust my high school memory of it).
The skewering of the "enlightened" French upper class in this and the talk of the mask is making me think of the black face scene in Antonioni's L'Eclisse. A scene that, partly because I never research things, can never decide if Antonioni is also skewering the hypocrisy of the upper class or unintentionally depicting it by displaying his own.
I guess even if it's the latter, it can be read as unintentionally being the former for my enjoyment of the film.
I just watched this yesterday, thanks to its appearance here, as well as in Filmspotting's recent African Cinema marathon. What a direct, devastating movie.
There's one element I'd like to dive a little further into, since the scene confused me a little. When Monsieur reads the letter from her mother, Diouana rejects it, ripping it up and saying her mother didn't write it. And I can see her having that reaction: the letter is difficult to hear, the lack of privacy she has is terrible, and Monsieur's starting to write back without so much as asking her robs her of her autonomy. And when we see Diouana's mother at the end, she doesn't seem ill. And yet what would Monsieur and Madame have to gain by faking this letter? Was it indeed faked by them? There's a man we see early on, who seems to be the neighborhood's professional letter writer -- could he have faked it, or could someone else have faked it through him?
I get the emotions of the scene, and it's harsh, blunt tone. But I'm unclear about the origins of the letter itself. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?