paraphrasing for professor2013

La Noir de or Black girl is a Franco Senegalese film that was released in 1966. It was one of the first films from Sub-Saharan Africa to receive international acclaim, and attention. The director was a pioneer in the Senegalese film industry Ousmane Sembene. He was one of the first directors from the country to receive international recognition for his films. The film also stars Mbissine Therese Diop, Anne Marie Jelinek and Robert Fontaine. The movie is not very long running at a little over an hour. But it is a film that goes through a lot of interesting themes and social issues. It may be shot but it does a good job of keeping the viewer interested and getting to the point.

          The film begins in the city of Antibes which is in the French Riviera, Diouna who is the main character in the story, is a woman from Dakar Senegal that was hired by a French family to be a nanny. She was hired by the family while they were staying in Dakar and chooses to go with them back to France after working for them for some time. She likes working with them and she seems pretty excited to go there. She had high hopes to go to France and live a good life with the earnings that she has. She wishes to see the country and its beauty and enjoy a better life than she could have enjoyed in Dakar. But after a short amount of time she gets a harsh does of the reality. She realizes that she was brought in to do housework and not the nanny work that she was originally told she would be doing. The children that she was supposed to be watching are off at school and she finds herself being delegated to menial housework. Early in her time with the French family Diouna dresses nicely wearing nice clothes and high heels but after sometime her mistress gets annoyed by this, and makes her wear a maids uniform. This sent a message to Diouna not to get any sort of ideas or impressions. Diouna starts to think to herself that she is basically in a position of paid slavery. In the beginning of the movie Diouna always tells herself that her housework is only temporary and that once the children come back from school she will stop having to do this work. This seems to keep her occupied for some time but when the children come back she sees that her situation will not change at all. She has seceral flashbacks of her life back in Dakar and the happier she is in Dakar the more dismayed she becomes with life in France. It seems that many immigrants find themselves in that situation. They want to continue to stay in the country they came to for work but they miss their homes and families. But many of them do not go back out of necessity. With respect to their economic situation. The final straw for Diouna seemed to be the letter that her mother sent her, she committed suicide soon after. Her boss went back to Dakar and tried to give her family Diouna’s pay, they refused it.

          This film was rich with symbolism, there were many references in the film to colonialism and the injustice that it caused. The way that Diouna was treated by her mistress and the family she was working for are an example of that. They treated her not as a human being but like someone treats livestock basically they viewed her as something that they rented out. They had no respect for her own needs and so on. An example of that is the dinner party that the family hosted, they paraded her around like some sort of an exotic animal. One of their friends kissed her because in his words he never “kissed a black woman before”. They also spoke ill of her in front of their guests because they knew that she would not understand them very well or did not care at all. The racist mentality of the French towards their African colonists and people from their colonists was displayed and very evident in this film.

          Overall I really liked this film a lot it was interesting, although it was kind of slow. I do not usually watch movies that are that old. I don’t usually watch films that are not in color, but this movie was interesting. I am kind of glad that we had to watch this for class or else I would not have watched it at all! The message of the film was good and it showed something that many people tend to forget. That the way you treat people does have an effect on them. Sticks and stones do break your bones and words definitely do hurt.