Time-Image, Realism, and Social Class in Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl
Overview
This essay analyzes Ousmane Sembène's film Black Girl through the theoretical frameworks of Deleuze's time-image concept and cinema realism. The paper examines how the film uses time-image to present truth indirectly and explores themes of realism and social class inequality as they relate to the exploitation of a Senegalese maid working for a French couple.
What this essay covers
- Introduction establishing Black Girl's narrative and the film's connection to Deleuze's time-image theory via Rodowick and Andrew
- Realism Theme section discussing how realism in cinema reflects everyday life without dramatic embellishment and affects social perception
- Social Classes Theme analyzing class inequality and the relationship dynamics between characters from different social strata
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Black Girl and Cinema
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Black Girl and Cinema
Introduction
Black Girl is a movie about a Senegalese girl who worked as a maid for a French couple who treat her as a slave. During the 20th century, black people experienced the urgency and need to be attached to a cultural matrix. Even though the movie was made after the first congress of the African Cultural Society, slavery was still practiced. I believe the film's aim and the texts by Rodowick, Andrew, and Ousmane were to display how people were being treated. Edited and published by Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine is widely ignored because commentators approached cinema books with insufficient knowledge about Deleuze's concepts or have inadequate information about film theory. Rodowick explored the film's dormant themes, thus naming the process as transitioning from movement-image to time-image (Rodowick, 1997). Rodowick and Andrew acknowledge that time-image is when a cinema breaks down due to motion centered on the film's objects. Therefore the presentation of time-image was allowed into films.
Time-image is the central theme common across the film and the text since it places thoughts in a truth identification crisis. The Black Girl represents a time-image that includes indirect fashion compared to Plato's approach to finding the truth (Sembène et al., 1966). In other words, Plato stated about getting the truth directly, yet he believed it was unattainable. The financial problems that any family is facing are the same problems that are in real life.