Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 33

In the decade following World War II, a fraction of independent documentary cinema on the left emerged from struggles over decolonization within western European empires. This current appears now as a scattered set of projects all designed to make new sense, in moving image and sound, of the crisis in relations among territory, public, race, nation, and empire that anticolonial political movements continued to raise. In the context of the French colonial empire, documentary cinema registered in its formal innovations and public controversies the emergence of new possibilities for social and political transformation. The most radical work did so by confronting how colonial state regulations and cultural institutions policed the production and circulation of documentary cinema. And at its most incisive, this documentary work openly addressed the imperial political order straining to uphold stable administrative and political divisions between the metropolitan center (representing a ruling continental nation of France, identified with mainland Europe territory) and colonial overseas territories. For its makers and critics, documentary filmmaking offered a way to cut across boundaries that sought to keep metropolitan space and time distinct and apart from colonial geographies and histories.

This essay returns to the archive of French colonial documentary to analyze the material and discursive relations between two of these projects – René Vautier’s denunciation of colonial atrocities in his counter‐travelogue Afrique 50 [Africa 50] (1950) and the conflicted collective portrait of the metropolitan everyday life of black African students in Paris made by Paulin Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma in Afrique sur Seine [Africa on the Seine] (dir. Mamadou Sarr and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, prod. Groupe Africain du Cinéma, 1955). It describes how these films seized on documentary’s capacity to shift modes of public address and reflected on the displacements involved in the cinematic act of historical recording and social intervention. It also asks how, in documentary constructions claiming to represent opposition to French late colonial rule, we can regard the montage of new images produced under the threat of colonial state censorship and of existing images reused in new contexts, and how we can make sense of the sounds used in relation to these images. Documentary and its modes of address afforded filmmakers a means to critique norms for representing the relationship of voices and images to social reality. And theirs was an intervention that was especially incisive in the postwar period of political contestation over late colonial rule, when a new rhetoric of modernization, development, and technical expertise was supplanting an older set of official rationales about the French civilizing mission.

Afrique 50 and Afrique sur Seine bear a specific relation to the site of colonial French West Africa (before political independence was secured in 1958 and 1960) in imperial geography, a region that stood as a key point of reference for African diasporic and pan‐African cultural, intellectual, and political developments in the postwar era.¹ When examined together, the films demonstrate how documentary voice‐over and montage techniques emerged in response to political conditions of constraint. By confronting or evading censorship restrictions and by addressing cross‐territorial movement in their production and circulation, the two documentaries are usefully understood as works that posed unsettling questions about crises in the representation of belonging across colonial and metropolitan publics.

René Vautier and Paulin Vieyra each published autobiographical accounts of their early documentary efforts and their confrontations with colonial authorities, and they often credit themselves with originating particular forms of anticolonial filmmaking that adopt the perspectives of respectively French metropolitan citizens or colonized subjects. Their own insistent activities of critical self‐definition indicate the deepening fault lines over cultural identity and belonging that emerged at a time when political mobilizations and social and intellectual movements began to dismantle prevailing colonial‐era articulations of race, nation, and empire. In retrospect, each project attests to an attempt to imagine a political future that would overcome the metropolitan domination of colonial territory and colonized peoples. These films have been at once singled out and marginalized, but their important position within documentary film history is revealed when we pay attention to their different inscriptions within African and French film histories.