Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 34

In late July and August of 1949, two young French citizens, René Vautier and Raymond Vogel – the former a recent graduate of the national film school IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) and the latter a graduate student in literature at the Sorbonne – left metropolitan France and arrived separately in Dakar. They joined one another in or near Mopti in the Niger River delta region, with the declared mission to shoot a documentary on the colonial administrative territory of French West Africa. The film that resulted, René Vautier’s Afrique 50, holds a significant place in the history of anticolonialist documentary cinema. Its primacy as the “first French anticolonialist film” has underwritten its promotion and revival ever since its initial reception.² Yet around 1950, anticolonial contestation encompassed a range of distinct political stances. To take a critical anticolonial position did not necessarily mean articulating an explicit call for a nationalist revolution for political independence or state sovereignty. The film was a particular kind of French anticolonial film. It made an appeal to French citizens that was thoroughly informed by both French state republican ideals and by the French Communist Party’s (Parti Communiste Français, PCF) patriotic embrace of nationalist identifications to defend France during wartime resistance to Nazi Occupation. At the same time, it attested to the contemporary reality of regional political organizing, more internationalist in spirit, among groups of colonial citizens and subjects in the French West African territories, and it responded to the French colonial state’s violent suppression of this consolidating power.

Afrique 50 was the first film that René Vautier produced, although not the first he worked on. The circumstances of the film’s production were defined by its encounter with police surveillance and colonial administrative authority. This struggle over shooting, editing, and exhibition, as well as Vautier’s own trial and imprisonment, contributed to the film’s subsequent renown, even in the absence of widespread international availability.³ Afrique 50 was initially a commissioned project to depict the conditions of rural village life in the colonial territories of French West Africa l’Afrique occidentale française (AOF). Its sponsorship by the League of Teaching (Ligue de l’Enseignement) marks the film’s uneasy relation to a civil‐society organization that had been closely linked to the French state’s ideals of national popular education and state secularism (laicité) since the period of the Third Republic (1870–1940) and revived under French national reconstruction efforts after the Liberation. Under the commission, Vautier and Vogel were meant to show primary and secondary‐school students in France how French West African villagers lived: it was to be “a small teaching film, in 16mm […] of images reflecting the quotidian reality of African peasantry” (Vautier 1998: 30). After encountering the violent reality of the colonial order, however, the filmmakers turned this work of state‐sponsored civic pedagogy into an explicitly oppositional work that undermined the hierarchical relations of sponsorship and the pedagogical representation of the colonies for the metropolitan center.

The documentary material for Afrique 50 was shot on silent 16 mm black‐and‐white film over several months from 1949 to 1950 in French West Africa, following the filmmakers’ travels from Dakar to Bamako to Abidjan, and in towns throughout the region, principally in the areas of present‐day Mali (Soudan Français), Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta). This material was edited in Paris later in 1950 upon Vautier and Vogel’s separate returns to France. The two filmmakers had been briefly detained in French West Africa during their 1949–1950 journey and then further pursued by French police as they arranged for pieces of footage to be clandestinely sent back to the metropole through multiple intermediaries. For Vautier, this aspect of the production – the survival of the footage and his evasion of authorities – signified a story of solidarity between sites and people across Africa and France. In his account, the clandestine movement of the documentary footage served to embody the clandestine passage of the truth that could not be suppressed. Back in Paris in 1950, the League of Teaching, Vautier’s sponsor, disowned his work and complied with the police by handing over all the positives and negatives left at its office. When Vautier was detained again in Paris by inspectors who questioned him about the footage, he was finally able to retrieve a fraction of the seized footage (21 of some 60 reels) in secret, under their haphazard surveillance. Vautier managed to have this material developed by splicing the footage to the end of reels of undeveloped pornographic films that film laboratories customarily allowed to pass. After he completed and screened the film in 1950, Vautier was convicted of shooting without administrative authorization under the Laval Decree and served a prison sentence of a little more than a year from 1951 to 1952 (Vautier 1998: 45)

In the immediate postwar period, this Laval Decree set strict limits on authorized audiovisual recording, as well as the circulation of films, in the colonial territories, and it constrained documentary filmmakers within the French colonial empire.⁴ The 1934 law took its name from Pierre Laval, who served as Minister of the Colonies between his terms as Prime Minister. Laval’s role in the Vichy government had led to his conviction for high treason and execution by De Gaulle’s new Republic after the Liberation. Officially known as the “Décret du 8 mars 1934,” the Laval Decree was applied first to the jurisdiction of French West Africa, before other territories. This priority can perhaps be explained by the particular interwar political importance of French West Africa for administrators, policymakers, and propagandists who spurred a reform movement called colonial humanism that sought to recast colonial governance and control colonial publicity circuits around new tenets of benevolent scientific administration and economic development.⁵

Yet after the war, the political press began to underline Laval’s Vichy collaboration and the renewed salience of his name. When the French Communist Party–associated film weekly L’Écran Français published a report in May 1951 about Afrique 50 and the prosecution of Vautier and Vogel, the piece was headlined “Afrique Noire: Zone Interdite par Pierre Laval aux cinéastes” (“Black Africa: A Zone Forbidden by Pierre Laval to Filmmakers”) and described Vautier as an opponent of “all the Laval Decrees of the world, against racism and fascism” (Krier 1951).

Although, at the time it was made, Afrique 50 did not become a model for broader, more sustained networks of radical anticolonial documentary activity, the film did represent an exemplary instance of radical documentary methods for constructing sound and image, and their adaptation to emerging anticolonial mobilizations in French intellectual and cultural life. Indeed, the role of metropolitan intellectuals outside the colonies became more important to the anticolonial struggle than before the war; for documentary filmmakers, then, the task was to reject colonial documentary conventions and to translate into cinematic form the causes of political equality and self‐determination emerging from colonial territories. Combining the form of an educational travelogue with a critical inquiry into the conditions underlying uprisings against police repression, Afrique 50 revived styles of critique and protest from an interwar tradition of international solidarity documentary that linked Joris Ivens, Henri Storck, the Workers Film and Photo League, Nykino, and other practitioners who drew on principles and methods of Soviet documentary production back to Dziga Vertov.⁶ In French documentary history, the film’s precedents included the work of the Groupe Octobre and anti‐fascist PCF‐associated political documentary from Popular Front cultural production of the 1930s.⁷ Popular Front committed filmmaking, exemplified by La Vie est à nous (dir. Jean Renoir, Jean‐Paul Le Chanois, Jacques B. Brunius, and Jacques Becker, 1936), addressed inequality at the national level but was limited in its engagement with the political context of colonial empire. But countering state‐sponsored colonial documentary called for a form that distinguished its use of sound and images from both the social and material aspects of cinematic representations supporting colonial rule. The regulation of moving image recording that maintained a stark division between metropolitan and colonial territories constituted a problem for the film’s production and may be read as manifest across its form, from the rhetorical address of Vautier’s voice‐over commentary – a challenge to state voice‐over conventions – to its use of montage as part of its committed engagement with collective political activity.

In the film, colonized people are first represented in scenes of village residents taking part in everyday life and then later in organized party demonstrations: the opening offers the viewer a brisk tour, establishing a representation of work and life in and around the village (which is not given a specific identity other than its proximity to the Niger River). Through a series of brief long‐shot sequences, the film shows views of activities over the course of one day, such as brickmaking, bathing, weaving, millet grinding, rope‐making, hair‐dressing, playing ball, and building pirogues. The voice‐over, with a tone of good‐humored instruction, comments on and likens these scenes to what people do as well in the provinces of metropolitan France, for example, by fishermen in the ports of Brittany (Vautier’s native region) or rugby players in Toulouse. By drawing an analogy between daily life in provincial mainland France and in the colonies the film initially follows a commonplace of colonial documentary that instructs metropolitan spectators. Yet the voice‐over also reminds the viewer that this series of images may be recognized as an instance of the “picturesque” (pittoresque), idealized clichéd images contrasted with the reality of economic exploitation and political violence that his film points to as documentary actuality: “You will see very picturesque things, without a doubt, but little by little you’ll come to realize that the picturesque poorly hides great poverty.”

The film’s critique of the imperial political economy follows this initial depiction of tranquil yet impoverished life in the African countryside, of a village “that is still fortunate in its misery” since “there’s still peace.” The film stresses the evidence of a lack of economic resources and the lack of education for children. While the voice‐over acerbically anticipates that such conditions elicit surprise (“You’re surprised to see a village without a school, without a doctor?”), this address is a prelude to scenes of evidence of colonial state violence (bullet holes, blood stains, burnt huts) and to sequences of analytical explanation of colonial economic conditions (colonized laborers perform arduous work and receive meager wages from colonial state capitalist firms) that the film uses to elicit outrage and mobilize sympathy for the anticolonial cause. The film presents an on‐site tracing of the evidence of a specific colonial massacre, in Palaka in the northern Ivory Coast in 1949, that had been carried out by the French colonial police forces, used by the film to represent the threat that “awaits African villages.” The scene of recent atrocities serves as a stage for the voice‐over to direct the viewer to imagine absent scenes of French state violence on African people, as well as on the villages, land, and animals. Throughout Afrique 50, the specificity of the documentation of the massacre at Palaka continues to characterize the structure of the voice‐over narration. In its mode of address, this principle of naming in speech, of making known names that would otherwise be suppressed by “official images” (and speech) marks the documentary’s aims of denunciation as well as remembrance. The film names both perpetrators, from colonial administrators to colonial companies, and victims, from heroic martyrs to political organizers. The priority that Afrique 50 grants in the voice‐over commentary to the direct designation of names, individually and collectively, and to this style of enunciation, could be said to underpin its model of the politics of truth in documentary representation.

Afrique 50 presents to the viewer an official political party to represent and claim unity for “the African people” as a political actor threatened by and committed to opposing colonial state violence: the mobilizing collective ranks of the African Democratic Assembly (Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, RDA), the mass transterritorial party of imperial citizens founded in 1946 in Bamako in French West Africa. The political party sought to organize people under colonial rule to struggle for greater political autonomy and a form of electoral reorganization that would guarantee equality of rights within the new French Union, as the empire was called after 1946. In alliance with the French Communist Party (PCF) until 1950, the party pointedly did not advocate for sovereign independence from the Union. Aligning with these activities, Afrique 50 can be read as an exposé of colonial administrative atrocities as well as of colonialist‐supported economic exploitation of labor. It therefore stands as an anticolonial solidarity film that contends with the dilemma of speaking from a French metropolitan and an internationalist perspective on the conflicts depicted. It seeks to establish a relation between the sites of metropolitan France and colonial French West Africa, linked in the film by geographic mobility, both at the stage of production and on the level of textual representation.

In linking these two spaces, the film also linked groups of people and institutions at the stage of production. African political figures played a crucial, still unappreciated role in the making of the film, and there is evidence of the film’s West African contacts’ own violation of the Laval Decree that clarifies our sense of the documentary’s challenge to colonial authority and the film’s relevance to histories of authorship in African diasporic documentary. The colonial police placed Vautier and Vogel under extensive surveillance, and the administration was especially concerned with tracking the young filmmakers’ interactions with the RDA, as is revealed in bureaucratic correspondence between officials in the Political Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of the Colonies. A Political Affairs Bureau letter from February 1950 contains a police account of the Vautier‐Vogel activities and portrays their meetings with leaders and village chiefs throughout their French West African tour as a direct challenge to the authority of the colonial administration.⁸ Among Vogel and Vautier’s main contacts were the RDA’s founders and assembly representatives, Gabriel D’Arboussier and Félix Houphouët‐Boigny, as well as Ouezzin Coulibaly (the assembly deputy from Côte d’Ivoire, and the representative of the African section of the League of Teaching), who helped Vautier obtain resources and an additional camera. Coulibaly is even identified in the surveillance report as having shot and “directed” some film footage himself (“prises de vues dirigées par un OUEZZIN COULIBALY”). This line in the colonial state surveillance report remains the only evidentiary trace of this unauthorized African filmmaking activity, and it is not corroborated by Vautier’s memoirs or by Coulibaly’s own writings. It furthermore remains unknown whether particular pieces of footage shot by Coulibaly survived as part of the finished work.⁹ Afrique 50 only bears Vautier’s directing credit, whether for reasons of shielding any West African collaborators from being exposed to prosecution or on the principle that it was a work for which only he could claim final artistic responsibility.¹⁰ Nevertheless, by Vautier’s account, these political leaders, especially Coulibaly, and the RDA party organization, played significant roles in the film’s production and provided crucial support, protection, and guidance. This newly available evidence for Coulibaly’s previously obscured filmmaking role allows one to further define this anticolonial documentary work as emerging from black African collaboration in and outside of the colonial territories. The report’s identification of Ouezzin Coulibaly shows that authorities regarded as a serious political threat the prospect of any film production by colonial subjects, who had recently attained, in the postwar French Union order, the uncertain second‐class status of imperial citizens and formed political parties.

On a textual level, in its construction and rhetorical strategy, the film Afrique 50 culminates by calling the viewer to join in solidarity with the active resistance to a violent colonial administration that is already mobilizing in Africa as well as in France, linked through a closing montage of two political demonstrations, one in metropolitan France and one in French West Africa. This parallel defines the film’s closing refrain listing capital cities: “From Abidjan to Niamey, from Dakar to Brazzaville, the people of France and the people of Africa are shoulder to shoulder, and the African people will hold this place in the common struggle over and against all opposition, until the battle of life has been won.” In fact, in a gesture that would become a motif of militant documentary, the closing montage of Afrique 50 reuses a piece of footage from the final demonstration sequence of La Grande Lutte des mineurs – a 1948 film by Louis Daquin – that serves as an image of the “people of France.” Vautier cross‐cuts from a shot of colonial subjects marching in French West Africa to a medium close‐up panning shot of a black man (wearing a black beret) and an older white woman, marching arm and arm to the Internationale during a metropolitan miners’ strike. This emblematic scene of cross‐racial and inter‐generational labor alliance is inserted to complete a cinematic figuration of border‐crossing metropolitan‐colonial solidarity.

In concert with this montage work, the film’s use of sound, both its voice‐over and its recorded music, departed considerably from the rhetoric and texture defining conventions of state‐sponsored colonial documentaries. Early in the film, Vautier’s self‐recorded voice‐over acknowledges metropolitan spectators’ presumed familiarity with official colonial propaganda: “This is not the official image of colonization, my friends. Colonization here, as it is everywhere, is the reign of vultures.” The film offers a critique of the conventional form of state‐modernist documentary and its authoritative voice‐over by presenting unofficial images of life under colonial rule to the viewer and by anchoring these images in Vautier’s explanatory narration that points to the location of shooting yet also generalizes from the site he is speaking from (linking here to everywhere).¹¹ Phrased in this way, the statement represents the larger project’s model of truth in the medium of documentary filmmaking and its claims to correct dominant modes of representing colonial social and political life in Africa. In the voice of the intellectual as filmmaker, Vautier readily speaks of a true image that replaces a false one.¹²

At the same time that the film explicitly articulates this aim to correct official representations and provide documentary evidence of reality, it embodies this stance in the material quality, tone, and rhythm of the film’s sound. Vautier’s untrained, partially improvised voice‐over brings to the film a rapid delivery and a tone of impassioned anger that function in the text as signs of urgency and determined engagement. For example, especially in the final third of the film, Vautier’s phrasing grows insistent and accelerates as he declaims litanies of martyrs and condemns the administration for a mounting series of shootings, abductions, and massacres, leaving ruins. Vautier’s voice‐over represents the voice of any lone French citizen embracing the anticolonial cause and draws on an apparent poverty of means that becomes the vocalization of unpolished, rough craft. As in political activist speechmaking, the exclamations and even strident tonality of the voice‐over represent the stance of partisan countermobilization decrying exploitation, marking not impersonal analysis but rather a form of distinctive personal participation in that action. The improvised performance of the voice‐over and the crude texture of the work also indicate the priority accorded to documenting the event of the filmmaker’s encounter and to refusing to work in professional, institutional contexts. The film adopts these impoverished and small‐scale aesthetic attributes as badges of authenticity that attest to the truth of its production.

Furthermore, on the soundtrack, there was a political aspect evident not only in the selection of West African music and cultural forms and producers (by way of Paris) but also in the acts of collective performance, gathering, and solidarity their recording required. Vautier recruited Keita Fodéba, the Guinean‐born founder and leader of the Ballets Africains since 1947 in Paris. Vautier and Fodéba had musicians from this ensemble record the music for the soundtrack with the screening of a silent work print of the film during an open‐air concert for 600 attendees, in front of the Confédération Générale du Travail’s Maison du Peuple in the working‐class Paris suburb of Argenteuil.

As Vautier recounts with evident pleasure, the choreography of confrontation was part of this performance and its historical legacy, since the union organization’s building stood across the square from the police station. This event, even as these circumstances cannot be heard in the film’s soundtrack, could be regarded as a notable episode in the history of documentary recording before direct synchronous sound: “the first French anticolonialist film would be given a soundtrack [sonorisé] in the open air, in public, by an African orchestra, under the protection of the working class, and facing the police office charged with seizing it” (Vautier 1998: 43). Closing the circle on the location of production and exhibition, the first screenings of the completed film were organized by Vautier in his Brittany hometown of Quimper, the regional site of his formative French Resistance service. Never seeking nor receiving any visa authorization, the film circulated in 16 mm prints made to be distributed by militant youth and workers’ organizations for noncommercial, private screenings across the country and more widely in Soviet and Eastern bloc film festivals in Warsaw and Leipzig.

The storied history of Afrique 50, its outlaw defiance, suggests its relation to a longer history of the politics of filmmaking between French metropolitan and colonial sites. More broadly, the history of the technical conditions of Francophone African cinema would be defined by the persistence, well after formal political independence, of this colonial norm of an unequal division between metropolitan and (former) colonial sites across the stages of shooting, film processing, editing, and postproduction mixing. For Afrique 50, every stage after shooting was accomplished in metropolitan France. And yet Afrique 50 troubled such divisions in the labor of production and also did so in this arrangement of sites of performance and recording by cutting across and mixing African and French cultural expression and locations to produce the sound of the film.