What would Antonio Negri do?

I’ve crossed over into total film dweeb sta­tus. Not a film geek, mind you; I haven’t paid close atten­tion to what’s new and note­wor­thy since I left the video store, and even less since I left TLA alto­geth­er [it’s been almost a year already: wow] so when I read Ous­mane Sem­bene’s obit­u­ary a week and a half ago, I could­n’t believe I’d nev­er seen any­thing by him, hav­ing hunt­ed and pecked at films and film­mak­ers occu­py­ing more or less the same polit­i­cal and aes­thet­ic orbit he did. Pon­tecor­vo and Cos­ta-Gavras, but not Sem­bene? Now it seems absurd.

So what did I do? Like any obit­u­ary vul­ture, I swooped into my Net­flix queue and jumped his land­mark film Black Girl to the top. Sem­bene tells the sto­ry of a Sene­galese girl turned au pair who trav­els with her employ­ers back to France to care for the chil­dren. Sem­bene uses neo­re­al­ist and New Wave tech­niques to illus­trate the divide between the new­ly inde­pen­dent Sene­galese and expa­tri­ate French who lived and worked there. Dioun­na’s jour­ney “back” to her inher­it­ed Father­land comes at the price of her iden­ti­ty and her dig­ni­ty, nei­ther of which she can live with­out. It’s a crush­ing indict­ment of what is owed by inter­na­tion­al pow­ers to the coun­tries they exploit once they’ve “grant­ed” independence.

Read more at Sens­es of Cin­e­ma.