La Noire De: An Understanding of the Film "Black Girl"

La Noire is an adaptation of one of Sembene’s earliest written works. Black Girl is an exploration of a Senegalese woman who is transplanted to France to work as a maid for a French family. In the film, Diouna cannot accurately express herself in French, instead her thoughts are presented to the viewer through non-diegetic voiceovers. It is not expected that she would naturally think in a foreign language however, Sembene made such a cinematic choice to please his sponsors. She is stripped of her cultural identity and dissolved into a person of a lesser class whose sole function is to clean up after the household. Her disenchantment with her position leads to hopelessness. Diouana decides to take matters into her own hands and ends her life so she can emancipate herself from the environment of slave-like captivity.

When Diouana arrives in France she is dressed in high heels, a polka-dot dress and a necklace resembling pearls. Her natural hair is bundled underneath a conservative  European wig.  Diouana’s disillusionment is established in a later flashback sequence in the film when she is with her boyfriend in Dakar. In the original story, Sembene expresses Diouana’s illusions in a passage:

Already, without having left Africa, she could see herself on the quay, returning from France, a millionaire, with clothes for everyone. She dreamed of being free to go wherever she wanted without having to work like an animal. If Madame refused her, she would be sick. 

Cinematically, her feelings are translated through blissful excitement as she sings a childish song, “I am going to France”, and dances on the steps of a monument. Her boyfriend scolds her for having no regard for the dead but innocence and mistaken identification with the monument is perhaps a representation of her misguided and disillusioned encounter with death. Upon hearing about the job, Diouana runs through her village shouting, “I’ve got a job with white folks!”