Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts - Enacting Pos…e Sembène’s La Noire De… - Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée 20/3/24, 15:16

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Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual
Contexts | Judith Misrahi-Barak, Srilata Ravi

Enacting
Postcolonial
Translation: Voice,
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Color and Free

Indirect Discourse
in the Restored
Version of
Ousmane
Sembène’s La
Noire De…
Tobias Warner
p. 113-126

Résumé
Ousmane Sembène encountered a host of financial, logistical, and
bureaucratic problems during the production of La Noire de... (1966).
This essay studies how those difficulties forced Sembène to make
changes to the voices of characters and to the color of the film stock.
Due to funding difficulties, the main character Diouana is played on-
screen by the Senegalese actress Thérèse M’Bissine Diop but in the
soundtrack the performance is that of the Haitian actress and singer
Toto Bissainthe. Sembène also had to cut a short sequence in color
because he lacked the proper accreditation to direct a feature film. I
compare the widely available print of the film with a version recently
restored by the Archives françaises du film. My argument is that La
Noire de... foregrounds its own constraints to transform them into
meditations on translatability, postcolonial subjectivity and the limits of
authorial expressivity in film. I analyze Sembène’s use of voice and
color as examples of free indirect discourse. Established understandings

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of free indirect discourse in cinema by Gilles Deleuze and Pier Paolo

Pasolini frame the mode as transcending the distinction between
character and camera. But La Noire de... uses free indirect discourse in
a different way, to make the viewer feel the challenges of producing the
film. Drawing on this expanded notion of free indirect discourse, I show
how Sembène deploys both voice and color to thematize a further
limitation he faced—the fact that he was not (yet) able to make a film in
an African language.

Texte intégral
I started to make [La Noire de...] without the authorization
of the National Center of the French Cinema. However, as it
was a coproduction between Domirev (Dakar) and Les
Actualités Françaises, it needed one. Due to a vicious circle
I could not obtain authorization because I did not have the
professional card since to obtain one it is necessary to have
already made a film or to have been assistant (which I did
not want to be). Finally we realized that by presenting La
Noire de... as a short film (less than one hour) it would be
easier to regularize the situation with the CNC. [...] So I cut
all the color scenes....
Sembène, 1969 Interview with Guy Hennebelle (Busch and
Annas 2008: 9)

1 Ousmane Sembène encountered a host of financial,

logistical, and bureaucratic problems as he tried to shoot,
edit and distribute La Noire de...1 Although the film would
go on to widespread acclaim upon its release, Sembène’s
struggles to produce La Noire de... capture the many
challenges that francophone African filmmakers faced in
the early independence era, a period in which a variety of
neocolonial institutions restricted access to capital,
regulated the ability to work, and determined which bodies
and performances could play a role on screen.2
2 Sembène’s troubles began with the script for the film. La
Noire de... was an adaptation of his own short story of the
same name. Both the text and the film focus on Diouana, a
young Senegalese woman who finds work as a maid with a

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French family in Dakar. But when Diouana moves back to

France with her employers, she finds herself effectively
trapped in their apartment. Subjected to their constant
exploitation, contempt and casual racism, she takes her
own life. Sembène had hoped for support from the French
Ministry of Coopération, which had funded his first film,
Borom Sarret in 1963. The Coopération was the principal
way francophone African film was funded at the time. But
the Coopération rejected the script for La Noire de... on the
basis of its subject matter, meaning that Sembène had to
find a way to produce the film independently. Although he
found a partner in Les Actualités Françaises, the production
itself ran short on cash and staff, leading to compromises in
post-production.3
3 Sembène had also hoped to make La Noire de... as a full-
length feature. But, as he explains in the 1969 interview
quoted above, he lacked the proper accreditation to make a
feature. In what amounted to a bureaucratic paradox,
Sembène would have had to have already made a feature
film in order to be authorized to make a feature film. Since
his cameraman did not have a proper director of
photography card either, the Centre Français de
cinématographie put pressure on Sembène’s French co-
producer to cut the print down to the length of a ‘moyen
métrage’ (Vieyra 1972: 83).4
4 This essay studies how the constraints imposed on the
filmmaking process shaped La Noire de... by forcing
Sembène to make key changes to the voices of characters in
the soundtrack and to the color of the film stock. Due to his
limited budget, Sembène was unable to bring the
Senegalese actress Thérèse M’Bissine Diop, who plays
Diouana in the film, to Paris to record her character’s
dialogue;5 instead, Diouana’s speech and interior
monologues were recorded separately during post-
production, using the voice of the Haitian actress and singer

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Toto Bissainthe. Lacking the proper accreditation to make a

feature also forced Sembène to make other changes: most
notably, he had to cut a short sequence in color near the
beginning of the film. An all-black-and-white print was
distributed instead and this is still the only version of the
film that is widely available today. However, an ‘uncut’
version of the film was recently restored by the Archives
françaises du film, reinstating the missing color sequence.
5 In this essay, I compare the widely available print with the
restored version to analyze how restrictions on voice and
color left traces on the finished film itself. My argument is
that La Noire de... actually foregrounds these chromatic
and sonic constraints, making them into meditations on
translatability, postcolonial subjectivity and the limits of
authorial expressivity in film. Rather than eliding the
headaches he encountered in production, Sembène
transforms the changes he had to make into palpable
aspects of the viewing experience. La Noire de... draws our
attention to its rough edges, to the ways in which Sembène
did not get to make the film he wanted to make. The film
presents itself a site of translation, turning the restrictions
it confronted into an immanent aspect of its aesthetic.
6 To approach the film’s poetic use of its own production
issues, I will analyze these moments as examples of free
indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse in cinema is
typically understood to refer only to sequences in which a
strict separation between a character and the camera
collapses. This mode has been thoughtfully explored by
Gilles Deleuze and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose theorizations
I take up and extend here. Both Deleuze and Pasolini offer
useful insights into cinematic free indirect discourse, but
they also understand the mode as the rupture or
transcendence of a boundary that exists between camera
and character, objective and subjective image. While this
orientation is no doubt useful in many cases, it falters when

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applied to La Noire de...

7 In Sembène’s case, free indirect discourse—typified in the
use of voice and color—involves more than the
consciousness of the camera and the point of view of the
character dissolving into each other. Sembène’s free
indirect discourse also collapses the distinction between the
character and the process of making the film. Rather than
making the boundary between filmmaker and character
porous, La Noire de... stages a breakdown of the barrier
between the subject of representation and the very means
and process of representing the subject.
8 I will begin by analyzing the uncanny qualities of speech in
La Noire de.... All the voices in Sembène’s film are slightly
estranged from the scenes and bodies they accompany. As
Rofheart points out, the film was shot silently, so the speech
of characters was dubbed in post-production by actors
different than the ones we see on screen (28). But the
disconnect this introduces is more noticeable for some
performances than others. For Madame and Monsieur—
Diouana’s employers—there is little to no difference
between what the viewer expects and the voices
encountered in the soundtrack. But with Toto Bissainthe’s
performance of Diouana’s thoughts and speech, something
different occurs. Bissainthe’s sonorous French seems
slightly off as the voice of a character who is not supposed
to be fluent in that language.
9 A voiceover in a film often promises viewers unfettered
access to a character’s thoughts, but Bissainthe’s
performance as the voice of Diouana’s interiority has an
almost extra-diegetic quality to it. The voiceover is keyed to
the ‘sense’ of what is being performed, but Bissainthe’s
accent, intonation and other vocal qualities index the
uneven geographies of production through which this
performance passed. In short, the film plays off (and subtly
critiques) the relative immobility of Diop’s body and the

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mobility of Bissainthe’s voice.

10 This substitution of voices evokes many kinds of
dislocation. On a thematic level, the palimpsestic voice of
‘Diouana’ in La Noire de... is premised on the
interchangeability of the character within the film itself. We
see this memorably in the vagueness of the very title of the
film, as well as in the scene in which Madame searches for a
new maid in Dakar, scanning a group of women behind her
sunglasses. The overlaying of voices also nods to the way in
which Diouana’s voice is often subject to being captured
and ventriloquized. Monsieur has Diouana ‘dictate’ to him a
letter to her family—which will only ever tell them that she
is doing just fine, thank you, since he is the one who is
writing it.
11 On the other hand, though, the superimposition of
Bissainthe’s voice could also be read in a restorative light.
Having the Haitian actress and singer voice the thoughts of
the young Senegalese protagonist makes ‘Diouana’ into a
diasporic performance. The ellipses of Sembène’s title
would then point not only to the character’s anonymity and
disposability but also to the way in which this is a story that
is repeated elsewhere. Read in this way, the deployment of
Bissainthe’s voice invites us to notice the resonance of
Sembène’s critique of French neocolonial racism in a more
transnational frame.
12 There is another fundamental disconnect to the
performance of Diouana’s voice: the character ‘ought’ to
speak and think in a language other than French, but the
film itself was required to use French. As Murphy and
Williams note, the use of Bissainthe’s voice can plausibly be
understood as a way of working around this limitation, and
allowing the audience access to Diouana’s interior life (57).
With La Noire de..., Sembène was not (yet) able to make a
film in an African language (that would have to wait
until 1967, with Mandabi, and even then the process of

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doing so met with as many, if not more, difficulties). This

linguistic limitation is never named as such within the
frame of the film itself. But through the composite
performance of Bissainthe-Diop, Sembène makes the
viewer aware that a substitution has taken place. In an
innovative transposition, he uses one constraint (the
impossibility of having Diop speak her own lines) and
repurposes it to thematize another limitation (the
impossibility for him at this point of making cinema in
African languages). Sembène’s gesture concedes the
impossibility of realizing a monologue in an African
language—yet—but it nonetheless insists on making a
francophone viewer feel that a switch has taken place.
13 But to whom is this gesture addressed? The
superimposition of Bissainthe’s voice and Diop’s body is not
perceptible by just any audience. Sensing Bissainthe’s
contribution depends on a certain competence on the part
of the viewer—namely, an awareness of accent. This
competence is, of course, embodied. A francophone viewer
would need a certain lived familiarity with the discursive
worlds from which these voices arise to have a sense of
what Diouana’s voice might sound like and a corresponding
sense that Bissainthe’s speech does not quite match up. I
say ‘sense’ here because the substitution of voices seems to
be intended for precisely this type of uptake—to be felt,
somatically, without that intuition necessarily becoming
entirely conscious. Rather than being merely a compromise,
a mistake, or a mis-fit, Bissainthe’s accent and intonation—
in a word, her French—is there to be felt by the viewer, to
give them the sense that something is off with the film’s
representation of Diouana, but in a way that is difficult to
pin down.
14 Interestingly, Sembène never clarifies what the language (s)
of Diouana’s private thoughts actually are—the character
has a Manjak surname (Gomis) and is described as being

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originally from plurilingual Casamance (like Sembène); she

has also spent time in Dakar and likely speaks some Wolof
and French as well. But Diouana’s interiority is only
represented in the film through a kind of translation,
without there ever being a clear sense of what her ‘original’
language (s) might be. Whatever lies behind the film’s
enactment of Diouana’s subjectivity-in-translation remains
opaque—perhaps deliberately so. Far from being a mere
imposition, then, Bissainthe’s voiceover appears to have
opened up a polysemous space of aesthetic possibility for
Sembène.
15 If we turn now to the missing color sequence in La Noire
de..., a similar interpretation can be made. The scene in
question occurs near the beginning of the film. After
Diouana first arrives in France to continue her work as a
maid for a French family, she rides in a car with her
employer from Marseilles to the family home in Antibes. As
Monsieur and Diouana begin their car ride, they exchange a
series of curt questions and answers. ‘As-tu fait bon
voyage? Oui, Monsieur. C’est beau la France. Oui,
Monsieur’. As these stiff pleasantries unfold, there are a
series of shots from inside the car of the picturesque
country and seaside. These are from the point of view of the
passenger seat, where Diouana is seated—a significant shift,
since the camera before and after this sequence does not
attach itself to any one character’s vantage point. As the
audience looks out the window with Diouana, a jarring,
almost maniacally cheery piano theme appears.6
16 This sequence of shots represents a liminal period for
Diouana, just after her arrival but before she reaches the
apartment where her illusions about the nature of her
employment in France will be destroyed. This same
sequence exists in both versions of the film. But in the
restored version, however, a series of four shots from inside
the car are in full color, marking a sharp departure from the

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rest of the film with its crisp, high-contrast black and white.
The color sequence is quite short,
approximately 50 seconds in total (from minute 3: 12 to
minute 4: 02). In the unrestored version that has been
widely available, this sequence of shots is in the same black
and white as the rest of the film.
17 The shift to color could be understood as an indication of
Diouana’s idealizations of France upon her arrival.
Sembène himself lent support to this reading when he
described the missing scene:
[A]t the beginning of her stay in Antibes, the girl saw all in
pink. All was perfect: she had so much dreamed to go to
France! Little by little, reality appeared to her, and she sunk
into it. Thus I passed into the black and white. (Busch and
Annas 2008: 10)

18 The color sequence would then represent the ‘rose colored

glasses’ through which Diouana sees France.7 Even in the
version that only uses black and white, the camera still
gazes longingly out the window from her point of view in
the same series of shots. In both versions, these shots will
turn out to be some of Diouana’s last exterior views of
France. As soon as she arrives, the camera begins to be
more limited its movements, taking on the claustrophobia
of her confinement in the family’s apartment.
19 But there is a density of perspectives in this sequence that
goes beyond the interpretation Sembène proposes. The
shots in color are unmistakably an index of Diouana’s
affective disposition (optimistic, romantic) but they are also
a commentary thereon by the filmmaker (such optimism
might be naive, dangerous). And there is a further level: the
dissonance of the colors and the soundtrack during the car
ride relative to the rest of the work marks this sequence out
as kind of a film within the film—Diouana watches herself
ride along in this car (in France! At last!) as if her life were a
technicolor movie.

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20 Sembène employs a similar dynamic in the short story from

which the film is adapted. In the prose version of La Noire
de..., Diouana’s subjectivity is often shown to be mediated
through the vocabulary of film. As she despairs at her life
abroad, she asks herself ‘où était la France? Les belles villes
qu’elle avait vues sur les écrans dans les salles de cinéma
de Dakar’ (177). Later, in a moment of nostalgia, she thinks
back on her memories of her life before as a ‘film du passé’
(181). Evoking cinema allows Sembène to trace the contours
of Diouana’s subjectivity for the reader in a rather complex
way. A cinematic imaginary vividly narrates affective states
—her frustrated desires, nostalgia, and alienation. But this
use of cinema in prose also draws attention to the way in
which Diouana’s subjectivity is being staged or screened for
the reader—and for the character herself. In other words,
in the prose version of the work, Sembène has Diouana
relate to her own lived experience and memories as if she
were watching a film.
21 This, I want to suggest, is also the nature of the short
sequence in the car that originally existed in color: we are
watching Diouana watch herself as if the experience she is
having were in a movie. Rather than just being an example
of ‘rose colored glasses’, this sequence has a far more
recursive structure: the character is viewing her own life
from the position of a spectator in a cinema. But she is
watching a very different film than the audience.
22 Read against each other, then, the film and the short story
suggest a way of understanding this sequence not only as a
representation of Diouana’s interiority but also as a gesture
that reveals a prior mediation. In the wild enthusiasm of
those color shots, Diouana’s vantage is presented as a site of
translation, the medium of which is cinema itself. The effect
of this gesture, in both versions of the film, is therefore not
merely to convey ‘what Diouana is feeling’ but rather to
have the camera stage the space and texture of the

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character’s subjectivity in such a way that the audience

notices the role that film itself is playing in this enactment.
The scene in the car therefore appears as an example of
cinematic free indirect discourse, in which the points of
view of the camera and the character merge and perform a
commentary on each other, without being totally
indistinguishable.
23 Both the shots in color and the voiceover seemed, at first, to
represent Diouana’s interiority. The monologue appeared to
offer direct access to her thoughts. The shots in color
purported to capture her optimism. But both of these
gestures now appear in a different light, as ways in which
the film points to its own inability to represent Diouana’s
subjectivity in an unmediated way. The accent and
intonation of the supposedly interior monologue do not line
up with the character to whom they are supposed to belong.
The shots in color present not the character’s point of view
but a combination of the character and the filmmaker’s
commentary. In both cases, elements of the film’s
production have become part of the aesthetic gesture.
24 While the voiceover and the shots in color both have free
indirect qualities, these two aspects of the film have had
different afterlives. Bissainthe’s voiceover exists in both
versions of La Noire de...—the wide-release and the
restored version. But since the color shots were removed
during post-production, only the restored version now
contains the sequence in its entirety. This raises the
question of how we might read the disappearance of color
from the ‘final’ print of the film.
25 On the one hand, traces of Sembène’s original plan for the
sequence survive in the wide-release version—the
soundtrack and the position of the camera still mark this
sequence off from the rest of the work and bestow on it a
free indirect quality that is markedly different from the rest
of the film. On the other hand, though, the total removal of

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color from the film stock did not leave behind a trace, at
least not one that functions in quite the same way as does
Diouana’s voice. There is no visual equivalent for the
superimposition of Bissainthe’s voice on Diop’s
performance, and no corresponding sense on the part of the
viewer of the wide-release version that full color shots are
missing. The free indirect qualities of color in La Noire de...
are legible to us today only in a comparative perspective, in
which we refrain from privileging either version as the
original and instead work differentially between them. In
this perspective, the garish color of the restored version and
the crisp black and white palette of the wide-release version
may be read together, as two facets of an aesthetic gesture
that aims to comment on the filmmaking process but which
was itself made subject to the compromises of that very
process.
26 But if we are to argue that Sembène’s use of voice and color
are examples of cinematic free indirect discourse, then we
must be clear that in doing so we are departing from the
usual sense of that term in film studies. Free indirect
discourse in cinema typically refers to shots in which it is
difficult or impossible to entirely disentangle the points of
view of the character and the camera. Gilles Deleuze and
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the primary theorists of this mode, both
understand free indirect discourse as transcending or
dissolving the character/camera or subjective/objective
opposition in cinema. Deleuze understands the mode
through the figure of the assemblage, while for Pasolini it is
the concept of the ‘doubled’ film that is crucial. And yet
both of their approaches have the paradoxical effect of
restricting our understanding of free indirect discourse in
cinema precisely by limiting the mode to the overcoming of
a character/camera polarity. Deleuze and Pasolini’s
theorizations will need to be revised to account for the ways
in which Sembène’s use of free indirect discourse actually

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incorporates constraints on the filmmaking process.

27 Deleuze refers to free indirect discourse in cinema as the
‘semi-subjective’ image. His focus is on the way in which
the mode makes possible an ‘assemblage of enunciation’
that is split between the consciousness of the character and
that of the camera (73). As he puts it,
a character acts on the screen, and is assumed to see the
world in a certain way. But simultaneously the camera sees
him, and sees his world, from another point of view which
thinks, reflects and transforms the viewpoint of the
character. (74)

28 This assemblage of camera and character can never be

broken down absolutely into its component parts, nor can it
be thought of as simply a mixture or average of two
subjects. With Deleuze’s semi-subjective, we are ‘caught in
a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-
consciousness which transforms it’ (74). The mode is about
‘going beyond the subjective and the objective towards a
pure Form’ (74). With the semi-subjective image, Deleuze
says, it is no longer about knowing whether an image is
objective or subjective. It no longer matters. The mode is no
longer ‘an oscillation between two poles’ but rather an
‘immobilization according to a higher aesthetic form’ (76).
29 In Sembène, though, the correlation is not between a
camera-consciousness and a perception-image. Deleuze’s
schema is missing a third term—the means available to
represent both the character and camera’s consciousness in
the first place. While Deleuze’s approach to cinematic free
indirect discourse as the semi-subjective assemblage
transcends the poles of subjective and objective, it remains
correlated with these two elements even as it leaves them
behind in a flight towards pure form. By contrast, in the
instances of the free indirect in La Noire de... we not only
see Diouana seeing the world and the camera seeing her,
but we also feel the limits of cinematic representation itself.

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In Sembène’s poetic use of vocal and chromatic constraints,

we encounter a mode of free indirect discourse that
highlights how it was possible for the filmmaker to make a
world in this way. Recast in Deleuze’s terms, we feel the
assembly of the assemblage.
30 Pasolini’s approach to cinematic free indirect discourse is
less formalist and more technical than Deleuze’s, but it
shares some of the same limitations.8 Pasolini defines free
indirect discourse (in prose) as a moment when ‘the author
penetrates entirely into the spirit of his character, of whom
he thus adopts not only the psychology but also the
language’ (5). For Pasolini, direct discourse in prose finds
its analog in the cinema in the subjective shot, which would
be from the point of view of a particular character (usually
the protagonist). Free indirect discourse in the cinema, by
contrast, makes use of a character’s viewpoint, which
Pasolini calls a character’s language, but it does so ‘without
quotation marks’—i. e., without the filmmaker clearly
signaling that a transition between the ‘language’ of the
character and that of the camera is taking place (6).
31 What Pasolini finds compelling about free indirect
discourse is that it pulls against the tendency of a
character’s social condition to determine her cinematic
‘language’. In Pasolini’s example, the class background of a
character inclines her to see the world in certain ways, so a
filmmaker who captures the point of view of such a
character in a subjective shot would need to use those
languages. But free indirect discourse allows a filmmaker to
sidestep the social determinism of cinematic language by
rupturing the barrier between the filmmaker and the
character. In cinematic free indirect discourse, we see the
world the way a character sees it, but we also see the
filmmaker’s point of view on that way of seeing (6–7).
32 Pasolini’s two technical examples of free indirect discourse
in film are, first, ‘a close follow-up of two viewpoints,

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scarcely different from each other, upon the same object’;

and, second, a ‘succession of two shots which frame the
same portion of reality first from close in, then from a little
farther away; or else first-head-on, then a little obliquely; or
else, finally, quite simply, on the same alignment but with
two different lenses’ (7). The last example comes closest to
describing the status of color in La Noire de..., where the
color of the film stock shifts as the camera merges with
Diouana’s consciousness. Interestingly, neither Deleuze nor
Pasolini looks beyond the visual channel to consider how
sound might also have free indirect qualities in film, as it
clearly seems to do in Diouana’s dislocated monologue.
33 Pasolini’s most useful claim for the present discussion of
Sembène is his observation that the use of the free indirect
in cinema tends to produce films ‘of a double nature’ (9).
These two natures include ‘the dominant state of mind in
the film’ behind which ‘unwinds the other film [...] the film
the author would have made even without the pretext of the
visual mimesis with the protagonist’ (9). Pasolini finds that
the framings and montages of cinematic free indirect
discourse point ‘to the existence of this underlying,
unrealized film’ which would be ‘totally and freely
expressive, even expressionist’ (9). Reading Pasolini’s
insight back through Sembène, though, we would need a
different take on this ‘underlying, unrealized’ film. In
Sembène’s case, the film is unrealized not because of the
limits of the form, but because of the limits of film
production that were imposed on the filmmaker. If for
Pasolini the free indirect gesture is a way of ‘making the
camera felt’ (10) in Sembène this is replaced with ‘making
the filmmaking process be felt’. Instead of a ‘freely
expressive, even expressionist’ film, we get an
expressionism of aesthetic constraint.
34 In his reading of Pasolini, Peter Verstraten remarks that
‘free indirect discourse makes us wonder to whom an image

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is to be attributed’ (125). But in La Noire de..., one wonders

not to whom but to what certain visual and sonic elements
can be attributed. Neither the voiceover nor the scenes in
color sit comfortably within Deleuze or Pasolini’s
understandings of cinematic free indirect discourse. For
Sembène, the constrained production process shares the
position of the camera or filmmaker in the usual
understandings of free indirect discourse. With his use of
both voice and color, Sembène makes the apparatus of
filmmaking palpable, by pointing obliquely toward the ways
in which the aesthetic decisions available to him are
enmeshed in the structures of power that are beyond his
sole control.
35 With its intense, close tracking of Diouana’s emotional
isolation and detachment during her time in France, La
Noire de... may at first seem to be committed to conveying
its protagonist’s lived experience in an unmediated way, as
a testament to and witnessing of her alienation. This is
definitely its aim on one level. But if we privilege this
interpretation too quickly or completely, we risk missing a
more subtle and significant feature: La Noire de... often
refers to its own inability to depict Diouana’s subjectivity
and story in ways that could be understood as ‘authentic’ or
‘unmediated’.
36 Sembène uses the twin constraints of voice and color to
speak to each other, but also to another, equally
fundamental one: the impossibility of making La Noire de...
in any other language besides French. Since Sembène
cannot (yet) make a film in which a character speaks in an
African language, he makes the viewer who accesses
Diouana’s subjectivity notice the fact that a translation has
taken place. The texture of subjectivity in La Noire de...—
conveyed through voiceover and color—is presented to the
viewer as a site of translation, the original of which is left
opaque.

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37 This dynamic carries over into later Sembène films as well,

albeit in quite different ways and to different ends.
Throughout the 1960s-70s, from Borom Sarret to Mandabi
to Ceddo, Sembène regularly does not get to make the films
he wants to make, or at least not entirely in the way he
wants to make them. As I will show in a forthcoming study,
the evidence of these constraints is all over the films
themselves. Indeed, these two decades of Sembène’s career
are the period in which he develops a distinct aesthetic
strategy that is far subtler and less heavy-handed than the
political allegories for which he is rather too well known.
Put simply, not all of the aesthetic gestures in these early
films are of the filmmaker’s own making or choosing.
Sembène finds ways to make use of the constraints he faces
in creative ways. The authorial position in early Sembène is
revealed in one way or another to be the product of
constraints on the filmmaking process. But this very fact
becomes the grounds for an aesthetic strategy of a different
order, which draws these constraints into the work itself.
38 In this essay I have argued for approaching this tendency in
La Noire de... through the optic of cinematic free indirect
discourse. Along the way, I have shown how this requires
modifying the approaches of Deleuze and Pasolini. My hope
is that I have reconciled two possible orientations toward
the use of voice and color in La Noire de... On the one hand,
a formalist approach might identify the change in the color
of the film stock and the use of a voiceover and analyze
what these make possible as cinematic techniques. On the
other hand, a historicist reading might argue that these
same formal features are really just the traces of historical
contingencies that took the forms of funding issues, lack of
proper permits, etc. My aim has been to overturn neither
method, nor to synthesize the two dialectically. I have
sought instead a point of view that would see each approach
through the other, illuminating the ways in which the

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formal features of a work can be historical accidents, while

historical accidents can rise to the level of form in their own
right.

Bibliographie
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Works Cited
BUSCH, Annett, and Max ANNAS. Ousmane Sembène:
Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 2008.

DELEUZE, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.

University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

DIAWARA, Manthia. African Cinema: Politics and Culture.

Indiana University Press, 1992.

Format
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MLA

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Chicago
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institutions qui ont souscrit à un des programmes
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services, écrivez à : [email protected]

MURPHY, David, and Patrick WILLIAMS. Postcolonial African

Cinema: Ten Directors. Manchester University Press, 2007.
DOI : 10.7765/9781526141736

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. ‘The Cinema of Poetry’. Movies and

Methods 1 (1976): 542–58.

ROFHEART, Mahriana. Shifting Perceptions of Migration in

Senegalese Literature, Film, and Social Media. Lexington
Books, 2013.

SEMBÈNE, Ousmane. Voltaique. Présence Africaine, 1998.

SEMBÈNE, Ousmane. La Noire de.... DVD, La Médiathèque

des Trois Mondes, 2008.

SEMBÈNE, Ousmane. La Noire de.... Film 35 mm, Les

Archives françaises du film, Centre national du cinéma,
Bois d’Arcy.

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Chicago
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services, écrivez à : [email protected]

UKADIKE, Nwachukwu Frank. Black African Cinema.

University of California Press, 1994.
DOI : 10.1525/9780520912366

VERSTRATEN, Peter. ‘A Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose: On

Antonioni and Malick’. Image & Narrative 13.2 (2012):
117–132.

VIEYRA, P. S. ‘Sembene Ousmane: Cinéaste’. Présence

Africaine, Paris (1972): n. pag.

Notes
1. I am very grateful to Laurent Bismuth of the Archives françaises du
film for helping me locate a restored copy of La Noire de... Daniel
Brémaud and the rest of the staff at the AFF/CNC provided valuable
assistance in viewing the film at Bois d’Arcy. For an account of the
production of La Noire de..., see Vieyra 78.
2. For an excellent overview of the challenges faced by francophone
African filmmakers in this period, see Diawara 21–35.
3. See Diawara 26 and Vieyra 82. As Diawara also notes, the
Coopération nonetheless acquired the rights to distribute La Noire de...
after Sembène managed to produce it independently. Ukadike suggests
that this may have been an attempt by the Coopération to control the
impact of the film, since it could theoretically limit its distribution in
Africa only to French Cultural Centers and obstruct a wide release
(Ukadike 322).
4. There are somewhat conflicting accounts of this aspect of the story.
See Sembène’s version in Busch and Annas, 9. Vieyra suggests,
however, that the ill-fated decision to try to make La Noire de... at
feature-length was made after shooting. Vieyra indicates that Sembène
tried for a longer format only after he discovered the film’s ‘importance’
as it was being edited (79, 82).
5. See ‘Un entretien avec T. M’Bissine Diop’ in the DVD extras on the
Médiathèque des Trois Mondes edition of La Noire de...
6. This same piece of music returns near the end, after a shocking jump
cut from Diouana’s lifeless body in a bathtub (witnessed by her mask) to

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sunbathing white bodies on a Côte d’Azur beach.

7. Vieyra shares this interpretation: ‘Elle découvre la France qu’elle
trouve belle. La couleur veut donner cette sensation de magnificence’
(82).
8. Pasolini’s 1965 analysis is nearly contemporaneous with
Sembène’s 1966 film, and many of the films he analyzes are from
roughly the same period. (Red Desert, 1964, and Before the Revolution,
1964). It is tempting to speculate how Pasolini’s understanding of free
indirect discourse in film might have been different had he been writing
just a bit later and looked beyond Antonioni, Godard, and Bertolucci.

Auteur

Tobias Warner

University of California, Davis

Is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of French and Italian
at the University of California,
Davis. He is currently completing
a manuscript on the politics of
language in Senegalese literature
and film, from the colonial period
to the neoliberal era. Drawing on
archival research as well as an
analysis of works in Wolof and
French, the book shows how a
debate about language produced
the terms of a modern literary
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tradition. Since receiving his PhD

in Comparative Literature from
UC Berkeley in 2012, Warner’s
research has been supported by
the University of California
Humanities Research Institute,
the Mellon Foundation, the Davis
Humanities Institute, and the
Hellman Family Fund. His work
has appeared in both PMLA and
Research in African Literatures.
Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés)
sont sous Licence OpenEdition Books, sauf mention contraire.

Référence électronique du chapitre

WARNER, Tobias. Enacting Postcolonial Translation: Voice, Color
and Free Indirect Discourse in the Restored Version of Ousmane
Sembène’s La Noire De… In : Translating the Postcolonial in
Multilingual Contexts [en ligne]. Montpellier : Presses universitaires de
la Méditerranée, 2017 (généré le 20 mars 2024). Disponible sur
Internet : <http://books.openedition.org/pulm/12510>. ISBN : 978-2-
36781-400-1. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.12510.

Référence électronique du livre

MISRAHI-BARAK, Judith (dir.) ; RAVI, Srilata (dir.). Translating the
Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts. Nouvelle édition [en ligne].
Montpellier : Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017 (généré le
20 mars 2024). Disponible sur Internet :
<http://books.openedition.org/pulm/12375>. ISBN : 978-2-36781-
400-1. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.12375.

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Compatible avec Zotero

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