The wo/man in the mirror

Abstract

This article focuses primarily on mirror scenes in Lionel Rogosin’s ground-breaking African film Come Back, Africa (1959). To examine how specular reflections may be influenced by a director’s identity, Rogosin’s film is compared to another African classic, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (La Noire de…) (1966). Despite surprising intertextual similarities, their specular reflections signify two very different filmic gazes. Both films are structured as fictional narratives that exhibit a documentary/fictional synthesis and set in inhospitable racist societies. By exploring how these scenes inform the narrative and identities of the characters, these specular encounters add a layer of meaning to films already firmly established in African cinema history.