Hiii, this is an essay I wrote for a Comp Lit seminar. I thought I was done with Derrida, but this was a surprising pleasure. I think I'll have to take up an extended research project on Steyerl and Fisher this summer, but hopefully that project will find me when Godard is a class again. Anyways, thought I'd share.
Early debates in film theory revolved around questioning what cinema is, ontologically, before Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theorists alike, such as Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, and Teresa de Lauretis, began asking what cinema is today or what can it do. Though Third Cinema, a term coined by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their manifesto, is largely interested in how cinema, its production, and its distribution can mobilize neocolonial and Third World nations— cinema as a political weapon—, its assumption that cinema can be a tool, either to cure or poison, unintentionally, calls into question its ontology once again. Experiments in early cinema by the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliés provide proof of its intrinsic realism or fantasy, respectively, though André Bazin describes it as a language in which montage reinforce meanings of one image, as though it were a word, in relation to another, and this linguistic nature is indifferent to directors’ intentions (315). Thus, several questions emerge for Third Cinema: does Third Cinema need deconstructing to fulfill its postcolonial ambitions? Or does its form always doom it to being a sort of poison detracting from the truth of neocolonialism? Consisting of both visual and auditory presence, is deconstruction theory enough to rescue the postcolonial voice from retreating into tautological failure?
This paper will explore these questions through an analysis of Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film, La Noire de…, translated as Black Girl, which is insufficient at best. La noire meant “domestic servant” at the time of French colonialism and Sembène’s de is abandoned in this translation, which overwrites the wandering, unfettered, and ghostly implication of Sembène’s original title along with its narrative. It tells the story of a young girl, Diouana, who moves from Dakar, Senegal to Antibes, France to work as a domestic servant for a French couple, simply Madame and Monsieur. Though she expected an exciting cosmopolitan lifestyle leaving the Medina, a place filled with sand and makeshift houses, schools, and businesses where Dakar’s natives were relocated, she is met with alienation and cruelty. She eventually commits suicide in her place of work and Monsieur returns to Senegal to deliver her belongings, including an African mask, and money to her mother. La Noire de… is only one such example of Third Cinema in which colonialism is explored intimately alongside class relations, but it has also unexpectedly deviated from Solanas and Getino’s initial desires for Third Cinema, making La Noire de… an interesting case study. The film has become a Criterion Collection classic despite Third Cinema’s abhorrence for mainstream film industries, and this paper will treat La Noire de…’s insufficiencies in averting ideological and economic interests of the film industry, as Solanas and Getino describes it, as a potential insufficiency in the prerequisite formal thought process— i.e., the lack of attention to film’s ontology as a visual and auditory language— deconstruction— as a result of and, even, in Third Cinema’s desire for militant practices— postcolonialism.
Despite deconstruction and postcolonialism’s deviations from post-structuralism, Third Cinema’s attempt to restore historicism to structures has created a disjunction within film discourse that allows us to theorize ways in which deconstruction and postcolonial thought may come together to amend contradictions as dialectic relationships. An analysis of La Noire de…’s realist and fantastical elements allow for an amending of Solanas and Getino’s manifesto by returning to the question “what is cinema?” Ultimately, Third Cinema’s attempt to bear witness to decolonial revolution and restabilize meaning is the lacuna in which deconstruction and postcolonial theory meet, a visual and metaphysical anchoring of thought as both embodied presence— being— and preserved revenant.
Truth in Light of Realism
In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida discusses the multiple meanings of pharamakon in Plato’s Phaedrus. Criticizing Plato’s logocentric tradition, Derrida reveals that pharmakon may mean both poison and cure. For Plato, writing decapitates the importance of memory, the hierarchy of eidos, and readers ability to distinguish truth from metaphor. There is such a thing as good writing, which is writing that leads to truth, though writing may never be a truth, instead constantly imitating rather than producing. Derrida called this idea tautological: “Writing would be pure repetition, dead repetition that might always be repeating nothing, or be unable spontaneously to repeat itself, which also means unable to repeat anything but itself: a hollow, cast-off repetition…” (Derrida, Dissemination, 135-136). This tautological nature destabilizes the idea that a truth may exist at once, muddled by constant mimesis and writing that becomes nothing as it assumes everything.
More importantly, unlike Plato, who thought of writing and the arts as a certain number of removes from the eidos, Derrida’s idea that writing may be “unable to repeat anything but itself” means that, for him, appearance, in writing for example, is a presence of the idea in of itself. This, the discourse around what is living, present, and thus real, is where deconstruction and cinema intersect. There is an affinity between Derrida’s thought and Third Cinema’s hyper-realism, which seeks to replace consumer society’s images of reality with reality itself, through, for example, documentary (Solanas and Getino, 6). However, it’s unclear whether or not the pioneers of Third Cinema thought of cinema as a truth itself or a mimetic medium that leads to truth. Solanas and Getino wrote that “The cinema of the revolution is at the same time one of destruction and construction: destruction of the image that neocolonialism has created of itself and of us, and construction of a throbbing, living reality which recaptures truth in any of its expressions” (6). This is in line with what the Lumière brothers did in early cinema when they created the first motion picture, La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (1895), which captured everyday workers leaving a factory, and L’Arrivèe d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895), which captured a locomotive pulling into a station; like Third Cinema, the brothers used the Cinématographe to document real people, not actors, and real events, not staged ones.
This is the crux of filmic realism— capturing the “the dynamism of life, of nature and its manifestations, of the crowd and its eddies. All that asserts itself through movement depends on it. [The camera] lens opens on the world” (Kracauer, “Basic Concepts,” 292). Thus, the point for both Derrida and film theorists is not pure eidos, but rather life’s essence, a trace of fleeting truth(es). Derrida even concedes that law and reason, crucial determinants in Plato’s logocentrism, seek to “stabilize precisely because stability is not natural; it is because there is instability that stabilization becomes necessary; it is because there is chaos that there is a need for stability” (Derrida, “Remarks,” 86). Opting for pluralism, if we, as Derrida insists, thought of deconstruction not as a method but an epistemology, it becomes clear that the idea of a truth only exists in the chaos of everyday life— this means the flow of workers’ dresses as they walk in La Sortie des ouviers de l’usine Lumière, or the rustling leaves and passengers’ look of anticipation in L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.
Often touted as the opposite of the Lumière brothers in early cinema, Méliès staged illusions in place for “authentic” reality, employing elaborate plots and camera tricks. “Lumière appealed to the sense of observation, the curiosity about “nature caught in the act”; Méliès ignored the workings of nature out of the artist’s delight in sheer fantasy” (Kracauer, “Basic, Concepts,” 293). In the 1904 Le Voyage à travers l’impossible, for example, scientists attempt to journey to the sun using railroads, submarines, etc., and his satirical illusions were not an exploitation of cinema, rather part of cinema’s technology— “the use of masks, multiple exposure, superimposition as a means of summoning ghosts, the lap-dissolve, etc.” (294). Still, despite Méliès deviation from the first motion picture, it holds that the camera-eye can capture, in Blaise Cendrars’ words, “certain “emanations, luminous or otherwise, which have worked on the film and given it a soul” (295). Even in staged reality, fringes of meaning surround theater sets and leave its trace; “human faces are molded by inner experiences, and the patina of old houses is a residue of what has happened in them” (Kracauer, “Inherent Affinities,” 303). This idea is not far off from Derrida’s idea of trace and survivance in cinema, in which parts of those people and things captured by the camera are cut off from themselves and emanate, as a presence, on screen forever (Cahill and Holland, 13). When Solanas and Getino writes of Third Cinema’s “construction,” then, they did not mean pure mimesis nor pure eidos; “construction of a throbbing, living reality,” instead, speaks for itself in the eddies of movement, Siegfried Kracauer’s “flow of life,” which is particular to film. Several documentary-esque scenes La Noire de… mix actors with real residents of Senegal; confused looks of Senegalese people as they stare into the camera, the sand kicked into the air with each step a child takes, and tarp, used for shade from the beating sun, dancing with the wind— all of these elements and the way they have taken up time and space are preserved as (a) presence in film.
It is the postcolonial filmmaker’s job to capture the instability and pluralism of life and if cinema were considered a visual and auditory language, it too would follow that it is neither memory nor knowledge, but rather a thing in of itself, confounded by the material reality around it. Artist Hito Steyerl wrote of things as Walter Benjamin imagined them— things with agency to speak through forces, tensions, and energies. What is of interest to us is the idea that things, like the film reel and, even, the image, are “bruised” with history:
“Because a thing is usually not a shiny new Boeing taking off on its virgin flight. Rather, it might be its wreck, painstakingly pieced together from scrap inside a hangar after its unexpected nosedive into catastrophe. A thing is the ruin of a house in Gaza. A film reel lost or destroyed in civil war. A female body tied up with ropes, fixed in obscene positions. Things condense power and violence. Just as a thing accumulates productive forces and desires, so does it also accumulate destruction and decay” (Steyerl, 5)
Steyerl brings questions about realism to the level of material and, thus, to the level of truth. In line with Derrida’s thinking, Third Cinema cannot help but communicate everything as the amalgamation of historical forces compounding on its form, through the “flow of life” that destabilizes truth and eidos— cannot help but historicize structures, including its own.
The lack of neutrality and the impulse towards historicism Solanas and Getino identifies in documentary and Third Cinema more broadly is something Derrida gets wrong, and it is a symptom of Western thought. In an 1998-2000 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, Derrida introduces cinema as “a drug, entertainment par excellence, uneducated escape, the right to wildness,” evoking “gluttonous joy” (de Baecque and Jousse, 24-25). This meant believing what’s on screen without believing, which is itself another believing (27). From Derrida, there is no effort to treat cinema as a piece of writing— of neither knowledge nor memory. This isn’t to say cinema was not taken seriously by academics like Derrida; this is to say that the disregard for cinema as a potential pharmakon and, at the very least, a potential political tool in deconstruction theory decades after the emergence of Third Cinema is, nonetheless, a labor the so-called Third World is tasked with, rescuing deconstruction from Western canons, let alone Derrida’s corpus.
For Third Cinema, this believing without believing is the ultimate product of capitalist, neocolonial ideologies, which presented film as no more than a consumer good filled with spectacle and entertainment. A crucial part of the manifesto is about rescuing the medium from “the ideological and economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the lords of the world film market, the great majority of whom were from the United States” (Solanas and Getino, 1). Despite Derrida’s treatment of cinema as an other, Third Cinema rightly identifies film as a poison in neocolonial nations, still conceding that it can be a militant cure dedicated towards a truth.
Voice as Presence
Although Derrida does not consider cinema as anything more than entertainment, he does identify cinema as always a presence. In the same interview with Cahiers du cinéma, Derrida introduces the idea of specters, which he writes extensively on in Spectres of Marx. For Derrida, cinema “lets one see new specters appear while remembering (and then projecting them in turn onto the screen) the ghosts haunting films already seen” (de Baecque and Jousse, 27). though specters mark “a relation to what is no longer or not yet’’ (Fisher, 19). Ghosts in cinema are much like his idea of the trace, although specters they obscure time, bearing not only the past, but also the future. There are two registers for spectrality according to Derrida:
“The first is the “elementary spectrality” rooted in the ontogenetic aspects of the cinematic apparatus and its photographic base. All cinematic impressions are by their very “nature” spectral. From the processes of inscription and storage that preserve luminous traces of the bodies and decisive moments that pass before the camera’s lens to their temporally displaced reanimation and representation at the scene of projection, cinema generates a series of ghosts and spectral relations. The second register or layer issues from the “staged” or fictional spectrality of an image’s content, be it a supernatural narrative or a reference to specters of history…” (Cahill and Holland, 12)
The first register describes the form— spectrality is inherent to cinema and its technologies. This includes the ability to add voiceover, for example, in La Noire de… Diouana rarely speaks— only to the cab driver, Madame, and Monsieur— and, when she does, her voice is usually nondiegetic. Though Diouana is played by Mbissine Thérèse Diop, she is voiced by Toto Bissainthe. While it is speculated that the change in cast is due to budget issues, it brings into conversation the limits and possibilities of cinema. Bissainthe’s voice in voiceover is not anchored to a body nor does it exist in the world of the film, yet it is only heard because it looms over the world like a god or other spectral being. Despite the lack of embodied presence signified by Bissainthe’s voice, it is the “invisibility” of her voice, its non-visual nature, that presses on Diouana’s visibility— of Diouana “speaking” even after both the film ending physically (e.g., after it is shot and being edited) and her dying by suicide—, preserving in time what use to be and what is now through cinematic technology.
Derrida thought of the voice in cinema as of the same nature as recorded images: “they are of the same essence, that of a “quasi presentation” of an “itself there” of the world whose past will be, forever, radically absent, unpresentable in its living presence” (de Baecque and Jousse, 33). The nondiegetic nature of Diouana’s voiceover means that only the spectators have access to “her voice” while Madame and Monsieur quite literally remain oblivious to the voice of the colonized— it is only through cinema, as a medium and as a technology, that ghosts can be heard. As film theorists of the realistic tendency have argued, cinema preserves presence and, even, Derrida’s trace.
Sembène further compounds the colonized diegetic silence through his shots of Senegal. Opening shots of the film follow Diouana at the port of Marseille as she arrives in France for work and capture the daily workings of the port— a white steamship blaring its horn, passengers gathering bags, and families talking (Sembène, 2:07-2:40). The bustle is audible, people are speaking in French. Diouana brings audiences back in time to Senegal on the morning she embarked on looking for work. A man, who we see as running a “letter-writing” business, speaks to her in French, which she also uses to reply (12:10). As she walks by the National Assembly, elected officials also speak in French (13:13). When she gets hired by the Madame, Diouana runs back to the Medina, yelling “J’ai dû travailler chez les Blancs!” though her mother and those passing by remain silent (17:38-18:20). Note that Diouana speaks in past tense here as if she’s been revived from the dead. Further, in all of these scenes, Bissainthe’s voice is superimposed onto Diouana’s body; there is something off about how her lips move with her speech. This incongruency in body and voice is somatically felt by audiences.
The lack of “authentic” speech from Diouana and her Sengalese neighbors is in part because Sembène was not able to create a film in an African language and was required to use French, a practice in imperial film industries Solanas and Getino identified in their manifesto (2). It is not a coincidence that the only other characters Sembène allows to speak (in French) are men with closer proximity to French colonial powers, such as assembly men. The letter writer literally serves as a means to and facilitator of French culture— the Senegalese cannot speak unless it is in French. When Diouana’s mother sends her a letter, it is in French and the monsieur must read it for her: “Ma chère fille Diouana, c’est moi ta mère qui t’écrit cette lettre (my dear daughter Diouana, this is your mother writing)”— it is not her mother writing (Sembène, 37:00). The Monsieur replies for Diouana as she does not know how to write. Bissainthe’s voice is heard again as Diouana tears up her mother’s letter: “C’est pas vrai, c’est pas ma lettre non plus. Elle vient pas de ma mère a plus que je n’ai demandé à Monsieur de me fiare une lettre (That’s not true and it’s not my letter. My mother didn’t write it and I didn’t ask him to write a letter for me)” (38:44-38:55). Thus, Diouana’s voice is ventriloquized; she is spoken for twice— both in the film’s content and its form.
This overwriting of speech is a colonialist practice. In another light, silence combined with a double superimposition is also a deconstructive practice. A deconstructive reading of a text takes “into account the rupture that the silent lands have created in the existing language and culture” (Aker, 344). It is decisively part of the deconstructive method to recognize the impossible— the ability for Senegal to speak for itself and in French— within the established, possible reality of colonialism. Through laws that require colonial subjects, including filmmakers, to speak in the colonists’ language, a rupture is created within the film industry when what is excluded is put into an artificial layer of words. Sembène’s utilization of voiceover technology disintegrates binaries, such as absence/presence, diegetic/nondiegetic, past/future, and living/dead, into plurality and spectrality, a deconstructive practice not (yet) extended to film studies.
Conclusion
If Plato were, indeed, wrong about his logocentrism and faith in eidos and Derrida’s deconstruction rightly identifies written text as always-already haunted by traces and mimesis of the past, then specters and ghosts of colonialism— an aesthetics of hauntology— can, too, be presences. Derrida’s second register of spectrality deals with content. It’s interesting that the examples of specters he provides to Cahiers du cinèma are inherently political, “such as the victims of state repression and the martyrs of revolutionary struggles” (Cahill and Holland, 12). In La Noire de…, an African mask holds the ghosts of neocolonialist struggle. As the Monsieur returns the mask home to Senegal, African music plays over the film world, and it is one of the rare moments in which audiences here African dialect in the film. The multiple voices of the soundtrack, again, are not embodied, setting the scene for phantasm and Third Cinema revolution. The song in dialect is the no-longer of the “silent lands” that create Sembène’s present-day Senegal. A little boy takes the mask and follows Monsieur as he leaves in a hurry (Sembène, 56:30-58:09). This succession of shots marks the end of the La Noire de… and symbolize a haunting to come, a haunting which is invigorated by spirits of the past.
A criticism of Third Cinema is often that “revolutionary cinema cannot exist before the revolution” (Solanas and Getino, 1). Deconstruction answers this critique by framing the revolution not as a moment in history, but all history itself, and, like writing, cinema answers to not eidos, but existence, archive, realism, etc. as a presence. The idea that cinema can be revolutionary before the revolution is the ultimate embrace of spectrality and, indeed, reverses mimesis. Third Cinema’s embrace of realism is that which is, in Socratic terms, present, unveiled, and naked. Yet also, unapologetic and alive, cinema’s technology allows for the histories otherwise forgotten to find an always-already presence: “Differance, the disappearance of any origi- nary presence, is at once the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of truth. At once. "At once" means that the being-present (on) in its truth, in the presence of its identity and in the identity of its presence, is doubled as soon as it appears, as soon as it presents itself. It appears, in its essence, as the possibility of its own most proper non-truth, of its pseudo-truth reflected in the icon, the phantasm, or the simulacrum” (Derrida, Dissemination, 168). Deconstruction and postcolonial cinema, especially Third Cinema, can be at odds, but it would be amiss for those interested in militant cinema to relinquish deconstruction to Western canons or to ignore the ways in which cinema can add to deconstruction studies, being both text, or image, and recorded speech.
