Timing, Dóra Maurer + La noire de…, Ousmane Sembène

“For honest work

You proffer me poor pay,

For honest dreams

You spit in my face,

And so my fist is clenched

Today —

To strike your face.”

Langhston Hughes, “Militant”.

La Panthère et le fouet. Paris: Ypsilon Éditeur, 2021, p. 74.

In “Orphée Noir”, Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, published by Léopold Sédar-Senghor in 1948, the French philosopher wrote: “The white man has, for three thousand years, enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen.” [1] La noire de…, the feature-length masterpiece by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, is one of the first films — alongside Afrique sur Seine (Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Mamadou Sarr and Jacques Melo Kane, 1955) and Soleil Ô (Med Hondo, 1970), among others — to demolish the total and non-reciprocal visual logic that, being one of the mechanisms of domination used by the colonial system, structured its knowledge-power relationships, especially in the fields of ethnography and cinema. An adaptation of the short story of the same name that Sembène published in the anthology Voltaïque in 1962, itself inspired by a fait divers that took place in Antibes, Cote d’Azur, four years earlier, La noire de… employs a rotating gaze, powered by the modes of production. The character of Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a young Senegalese maid, is a device for seeing the coloniser and the old metropole.

The making of this French-Senegalese co-production, six years after Senegal’s independence, is inscribed in the historical-political context of African decolonisation. This process was, at that time, being amply interrogated across cultural and representative forms, including cinema, as well as in academic circles.

In 1965, in a famous debate organised by Albert Cervoni, Sembène accused Jean Rouch of looking at Africans as if they were “insects” [2]. The Senegalese director’s cinematic work aims to overcome the limitations and foundations of ethnography. Sembène wishes to forge a non-hegemonic aesthetic, albeit influenced by the socio-realist canon he had come into contact with during his studies at Studio Gorky, in Moscow, in the same group as the French-Guadalupean director Sarah Maldoror. In parallel, he tries to displace the hierarchical, vertical relationship between subject and object that structures the epistemological and visual system of dominant western modernity.

In a film that has an important auto-biographical dimension, given that Sembène was a dockworker in the Port of Marseille, La noire de… problematises the relationship between the previously colonised and the ex-coloniser, discarding all dualist conceptions and pointing to the transposition of colonial structures of class, race and gender into the metropolitan domain. In the opening sequence, when Diouana arrives in France, the Côte d’Azur is depicted like a postcard. This inversion of powers, in which the French land is represented according to a Senegalese perspective, is itself affirmed strikingly in the ostensible modes of the film, which are built, contrary to what happens in the original short story, according to Diouana’s point of view. Not only is the voice-off narrative delivered in the first person (take note of the tension between image and sound), but the young Senegalese woman also becomes an observer and disillusioned critic of the natural and urban landscape and of her French patrons, anonymously denoted as Madame and Monsieur. This ostensible displacement, which Jean Jonaissant has defined as a “counter-ethnographic” practice [3], establishes a powerful observational position of a Black woman over patriarchal European “civilisation”, and opens a path towards an interconnected narrative structure between two spaces and multiple temporalities. It is the perspective of Madame over Diouana, however, that triggers her “oppositional gaze” [4]. According to Jonaissant, the final gesture of the young woman, confined to the domestic space of the small apartment, conjoins with collective historical resistance to slavery and forms of colonial domination [5]. Moving from a model of representation to a system of self-representation, La noire de… provides a counter-perspective in opposition to the dominant perceptive and cognitive perspective.

The short film Timing, by the Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer, also questions the relation between subject and object and attempts the shift to a self-representational system. Having started her career in the field of graphical art, Maurer first experimented with the field of photography and cinema towards the end of the 1960s. Beginning as a performance of “expanded cinema” [6] and exemplifying the centrality of perceptive processes in Maurer’s work, Timing results from the application of a technique in which the camera is covered and different portions of film are alternately exposed. The artist herself, dressed in black, folds a sheet in front of the camera. The film follows a non-naturalist principle of divisibility and fragmentation of action and its representation, producing a composite depiction of the performance. If the principle of repetition is inherent to the device of cinematic projection, Timing homes in on and exposes the material conditions and “meta-psychologies” [7] of cinema. Its material, self-reflective dimension is indissociable from the opportunity of bridging the gap between observer and observed, one of the separations that has historically sustained the modern episteme and systems of domination. The principles of repetition and difference become an example of profaning the domestic gesture of folding the sheet, in line with Diouana’s refusal to follow Madame’s orders, activating, in parallel, the stated position of Maurer and the viewer’s position of observation. Just like La noire de…, Timing is inscribed in a self-representational system that questions epistemic and representative binaries.

Intended to be projected on a sheet — a surface that, by materially duplicating the object being represented, helps to denaturalise the representation — Timing contradicts the museological device of the White Cube, that device which, since the beginning of the 20th century and in step with the growing abstraction of modern art and the presuppositions of modernism, has sought to neutralise and decontextualise the exhibitory space.

In La noire de…, the ghostly African mask is the only contrasting element on the chromatically uniform walls of the apartment, placing the interior scenes in a political and cultural context — the relations of class, race and gender in their (post-)colonial setting. The inverted White Cube of Timing also places this apparently formalist work in the political debates around representation of its time, raising, in particular, the problematics introduced by feminist studies of the 1970s.

[1] Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Orphée Noir”. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française / ed. by Léopold Sédar-Senghor. Paris: PUF, 2015 (1948), p. IX, author’s own translation.

[2] “Tu nous regardes comme des insectes. Confrontation entre Sembène Ousmane et Jean Rouch”, 1965. Dérives. URL: http://derives.tv/tu-nous-regardes-comme-des/ [22 de Novembro de 2019], author’s own translation.

[3] Jonassaint, Jean, “Le cinéma de Sembène Ousmane, une (double) contre-ethnographie (Notes pour une recherche)”, Ethnologies, vol. 31, n.º 2, 2010, pp. 241–286, author’s own translation.

[4] Hooks, Bell, “The Oppositional Gaze. Black Female Spectators”. Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race

and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992, pp. 115–131, author’s own translation.

[5] Jonassaint, Jean, “Le cinéma de Sembène Ousmane, une (double) contre-ethnographie (Notes pour une recherche)”, op. cit..

[6] Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970, author’s own translation.

[7] Bellour, Raymond, Ciné-répétitions, 2015. Jeu de Paume, Le Magazine. URL: https://archivemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2015/12/cine-repetitions-par-raymond-bellour-fren/index.html [2 May 2022], author’s own translation.