Film bridges gaps that emerge when working primarily with theoretical text. Reading helps us develop a shared language, shared frameworks, and analytical clarity. Film brings those ideas closer to actual life.
For some time now in Hartford, we’ve been facilitating reading groups organized around the edited volume, Abolition & Reconstruction: An Emergent Guide for Collective Study (A&R). The book, published by the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, gathers together key socialist texts from multiple left traditions along with discussion questions and facilitation guides, inviting readers to read and discuss the material in community with one another.
To help bring the ideas in the text to life, we chose six films to screen within the reading series. The films in the series offer representations of many of the key ideas introduced in the reading. Just as importantly, they are formally inventive in ways that encourage us to connect with those ideas at an emotional level (details and RSVP link here).
The idea of “sensuous activity” that Marx introduces in the “Theses on Feuerbach” (A&R, p. 18) feels relevant here: our transformative politics aren’t just something we have arrived at through reading groups and thought exercises. They are grounded in our lived experiences, our material conditions, and our embodied lives. Film helps us encounter, in intimate ways, the kinds of realities that theory helps us name and analyze.
Take Sara Gomez’s De Cierta Manera (1974) (screening Thursday, April 4th) . Rather than offering a schematic for how to do revolution or triumphalist celebrations of revolutionary Cuba, Gomez tells a story of messy, contradictory, unfinished work through a messy, contradictory, and unfinished love affair. Just as the larger society is building a new political consciousness, so too are the two protagonists trying to leave their pre-revolutionary selves behind, while not entirely succeeding. David Schickele’s Bushman (1973) (screening Thursday, April 30th) similarly tells the story of immigration through a quiet, sometimes almost listless portrait of an immigrant’s life. Then the ending arrives and reframes everything, pulling the real world into the frame in a way that’s genuinely disorienting. Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains (2009) (screening Thursday, May 28th) uses beautifully staged, sometimes nearly silent, often comedic shots to convey serious meanings about how the long violence of occupation shapes and re-shapes generations of family life.
Each of these films does important political education work by connecting with radical ideas in oblique and intimate ways through unconventional story telling, challenging dominant ways of seeing and making sense of the world. Reading sharpens our understanding; film deepens our connection.
Black Girl and the Master’s House
Where the first film in our series, West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty was grand and theatrical in its reckoning with colonial violence, Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de… (Black Girl, 1966) is quiet and intimate, confining its exploration of world-historic violence to a few characters and their interactions within the close quarters of a French apartment. The film follows Diouana from her home in Senegal to her new life as a domestic laborer in Antibes, France. She crosses the Mediterranean with expectations of leisure and opportunity on the Riviera, only to experience new dimensions of repression when she arrives. Denied any life outside the household, treated as servant and a curiosity, Diouana is slowly undone by the polite violence of the colonial interior.
While the film dramatizes the migration process, it doesn’t focus on the spectacle violence of enforcement regimes. Instead, we see how diffuse infrastructures of coercion push Diouana from one part of the world to another. Likewise, we see how those same coercive forces shape her relationships with the white Europeans she encounters. The film offers in concrete terms a socialist critique of “free” exchange of labor within a globalized economy committed to producing structural poverty, uneven access to the basic necessities, and gendered and raced forms of domination.
Sembene makes this argument with his spare, intense visual language. The sight of Diouana crossing the sea aboard a big white ship gestures to other forced crossings from Africa. Likewise, Dakar’s “maid market,” where women are offered up to potential employers, arranged for white inspection, is unmistakable in its evocation of similar historical markets and transactions. Then there’s the tribal mask, purchased as a curiosity by the white couple in Senegal, and hanging on the wall of their Antibes apartment. A piece of Africa now belonging to acquisitive Europeans.
Practically every image the film conjures connects Diouana’s situation to centuries of extraction. That is because, for Sembene, this extraction persists. Like the mask, Diouana is an object of curiosity. Her cooking is treated by guests as exotic and primitive (and too spicy!). She is simultaneously sexualized and racially denigrated. Her mistress accuses her of lying “like the indigenes.” Her wages are withheld. In spite of emancipation and her nation’s independence, Diouana is, for all intents and purposes, an unfree laborer in the service of the French.
Film as Counterhegemony
Every social class produces its own thinkers. Before becoming a “father of African Cinema,” Sembene was a dock worker, a union organizer, and a novelist. Before that, he was forced into military service by the French, driving trucks for the French Army in Italy during WWII. Like the battlefield and the Marseille docks, Sembene understood culture as a terrain of struggle. If cinema can be mobilized to produce ruling-class “common sense,” rendering his fellow workers and fellow Black migrants backward and exploitable, it could also be mobilized to tell the stories of working-class Africans and the diaspora. His decision to become a filmmaker was a political act. The written word was limited in its reach. Cinema, however, could speak to the masses, in their own languages.
Sembene was an “organic intellectual” in the most direct sense of that term. He understood his art as emerging from his class interests, and that his work as an artist was to articulate those interests back to his fellow workers and to the world. As we have discussed at some length in our most recent Abolition & Reconstruction reading group, the organic intellectual’s thinking and organizing are inseparable. They develop their worldview from within their shared classed experience, rather than from some position of scholarly remove. They understand their contributions to knowledge as bound up with the political project of the group of which they are a part. The value of their intellectual labor, then, is not derived from credential, but from their deep understanding of their class interests and the clarity with which they can translate lived experience into political consciousness. As Sembene put it in a 1973 interview: “I’m not trying to make cinema for my buddies or for a limited circle of specialists. What I’m interested in is exposing problems of the people to which I belong . . . For me, the cinema is a means of political action.” (qtd. in Cineaste, 1973). Black Girl represents that political action. Africa turning a critical lens on Europe. The building of a new common sense.
Black Girl, directed by Ousmane Sembene (1966, Senegal), will be screening at Hartford’s First Presbyterian Church at 6:30 pm on Thursday, March 5th. There will be food and discussion. Part of the Abolition & Reconstruction Film and Reading Series. Come join us!
