Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 35

The short documentary Afrique sur Seine, shot on black‐and‐white 16 mm film in 1955, might usefully be considered both a film about displacement and a displaced film, and perhaps it has remained so in both documentary and African film historiography since the moment of its limited exhibition in noncommercial screening spaces throughout Paris. Furthermore, Afrique sur Seine is materially linked to Afrique 50 by an act of appropriation that installs a minute‐long sequence from Vautier’s film in this work by Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma. This piece of displaced film footage is reused with a new voice‐over that turns the sequence into one about the subjective experience of and development narrative about moving from the colonial territories to the metropolitan center. Even in its title’s punctuation, the film raises the question of geographical and cultural displacement.¹³ To speak of “Afrique sur Seine” suggests a town or enclave near water, named on the model of Neuilly‐sur‐Seine, the Paris suburb, or Boulogne‐sur‐mer, the coastal town. Yet it also represents a catachrestic use of language, suggesting that this is a documentary that will propose the improper use of a term. The title Afrique sur Seine may also readily be heard as “Afrique sur scène,” or “Africa on stage,” a play on the representational and performative stakes of the production that would be missed if the film had been given a title such as “Le Quartier africain” or “L’Afrique à Paris.” This form of play implies that beyond its title the documentary explores the translation of this figure of speech into the form of cinema, the use of one bit of language as a placeholder for another, one piece of film as a placeholder for another in a film about place and belonging.

Afrique sur Seine was the first production of the Groupe Africain du Cinéma, a newly formed and short‐lived collective of four young francophone black African filmmaking students, all of whom had disparate backgrounds but had ties to French West Africa, and were linked through formal social organizations and informal circles of overseas students, artists, and intellectuals in Paris.¹⁴ The film was made under the auspices of the Comité du Film Ethnographique, the seat of Jean Rouch’s efforts to support a more inventive form of ethnographic film practice since 1952, situated within the Musée de l’Homme, and it credits the use of materials from its musicology collection. The group’s lack of access to filming in Africa was readily apparent to the makers at the outset. As Rouch later recounted, the young filmmakers attempted to draw on the ethnographic museum’s relationship to Marcel Griaule, the eminent ethnologist, leader of interwar African ethnographic expeditions, and Rouch’s mentor: they “solicited […] an intervention” from Griaule, addressed to the Ministry of Overseas France, “to abrogate the ‘Laval Decree’,” but the appeal did not succeed and no official exception was granted.¹⁵ The Groupe accepted this constraint, working within the state‐centered academic cultural formation of Rouch and the museum world (as uneasily as Rouch at times fit into this milieu), proceeding down a path distinct from the militant labor‐union affiliations of René Vautier.

The Groupe Africain du Cinéma consisted of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Mamadou Sarr, Jacques Mélo Kane, and Robert Caristan. Co‐credited for direction and commentary on the film, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr were both recent graduates of the French national film school IDHEC. Vieyra was born in Dahomey (in the territory that would become Benin), and he had likely gained French citizenship due to his father’s birth in Gorée, one of the Four Communes of Senegal that had been extended citizenship rights, as well as his father’s civil service in the colonial administration. Sarr was born in Senegal. Jacques Mélo Kane, credited as the film’s script manager (under the name “Mélo Khane”), was also Senegalese, and the cinematographer Robert Caristan had been born in French Guiana, bordering Latin America, but grew up in Senegal (his younger brother Georges Caristan would go on to become a preeminent cinematographer, working on Ababacar Samb‐Makharam’s Et la neige n’était plus… [1965] and with Ousmane Sembène).¹⁶

Shot silently and narrated by a post‐synchronized voice‐over, Afrique sur Seine assembles a fragmentary and oblique portrait of the everyday life of black African students living in mid‐fifties Paris around the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain‐des‐Près. In part, the film alludes to the practice of ethnographic documentary, marking its association with the Musée de l’Homme, the central institution of French colonial ethnography. In addition, through the troubled and shifting rhetorical modulations of its mode of address and its revelation of a conflicted subjectivity, the film may now very well appear to documentary film historians – even though the phrase would have had only an emerging currency in the mid‐1950s – as a collective lyrical essay film.

The critical beginnings of a self‐conscious postwar cinematic essay tradition lead back to another project devised within and against this same colonial cultural institution, the Musée de l’Homme: two years earlier, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet made Les Statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die] (1953), as a documentary on the subject of “black art,” under a commission from the publishing house and journal Présence Africaine. As a site of cultural collecting, exhibition, and the ongoing production of cultural knowledge and heritage inextricable from practices of colonial possession and dispossession, the Musée de l’Homme was used by a generation of makers with some access to its holdings in their own critical discursive investigations into not only the history of colonialism, but also the history of a heritage of colonial documentary moving images and recorded sounds. One might even think of Afrique sur Seine when a key figuration of black documentary image‐making and direct address appears in the final incendiary third of Les statues meurent aussi, devoted to the “art of transition” and “art of the present” made by black artists: we see a shot of a black photographer holding his flashbulb camera aloft and pointed directly toward the viewer, as the narrator speaks of images captured everyday (“the sorcerer captures images everyday”). Statues, banned by French censors, exemplified an emerging current in postwar documentary formal experimentation before cinéma verité, in the form of what Marker would later call a “cinematic pamphlet” (Marker 1961: 9). It did so by working toward a particular transformation of literary essayistic commentary and critique, set in relation to newly shot material but also an intricate montage of preexisting archival documentary and newsreel material. In this light, Afrique sur Seine approached similar problems of construction and enunciation, and it especially sought to settle on a way to assemble new and preexisting footage with a voice‐over narration that could produce a work of collective first‐person subjectivity.

Paulin Vieyra effectively took the lead in the Groupe Africain du Cinéma, and through his critical writings, he became its first critic and historian. He would also go on to become the best known and most influential former member of this group, as a critic and organizer. Through his educational and public work, he was integral to revising the limited Western‐authored accounts of the history of cinema in Africa and to writing new, more comprehensive histories of African cinema that chronicled its postcolonial development and rethought its coherence as a project and category for film history. He participated in pan‐African institution‐building, later working for FEPACI (the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes), work that began with his writings for the journal Présence Africaine in the period between the 1956 First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris and the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar. It then continued with the publication of two of the earliest post‐independence historical and critical studies that have shaped the understanding of African cinema as a cultural project – the collection Le Cinéma et l’Afrique (1969) and the work of reference Le Cinéma africain: des origines à 1973 (1975).¹⁷

Hardly unknown, yet still of limited availability for decades, the documentary Afrique sur Seine (1955) has mainly been distinguished as an untimely outlier in the historiography of African cinema. It has been screened as a noteworthy work mostly in the context of African, rather than French, film festivals and events. In 2005, a screening of the film at FESPACO marked the fiftieth anniversary of African cinema south of the Sahara (Ruelle et al. 2005: 13). In many narratives of African cinema, including in Vieyra’s and Jean Rouch’s writings, the film is cited as a milestone, yet framed primarily as a false start or a precursor to the more fully “legitimate” beginnings of an autonomous African cinema made by filmmakers from independent nations in Africa south of the Sahara.¹⁸ It has also been regarded as an emblem for later acts of resistance to dominant cultural representations through the act of speaking back or reclaiming one’s voice against the figure of the colonizer. This change in the politics of enunciation marks a turn in narratives of the colonization and decolonization of culture, of black African producers taking cameras into their own hands and speaking in their own voices to work to consolidate or strategically mobilize a unified identity and call for the making of an African cinema (Thackway 2003). Yet the film also deserves greater attention than it has received by documentary film scholars and in critical histories of documentary film in general. It carries considerable critical value due to the productively troubling occasion and location of its production in relation to histories of cinema in Africa, France, and the French colonial empire. Afrique sur Seine approached its subject of black metropolitan cultural life and colonial racism in a manner that avoided censorship and suppression (unlike Afrique 50 or Les Statues meurent aussi), and it now stands as one of the only postwar documentaries made by colonial subjects or citizens about colonial racism in the French Union before the dissolution of most of the empire in the years surrounding 1960.¹⁹

Crucial to understanding what is at stake in the complexities and contradictions of voice and form in Afrique sur Seine is grasping the act of appropriation that figured in the film’s production. The opening sequence of Afrique sur Seine reproduces the image track of an 18‐shot sequence, lasting 1 minute and 10 seconds, that comes directly from Afrique 50. This reuse of footage, with Vautier’s original narration replaced, is uncredited. In the opening sequence of Afrique sur Seine, the viewer is shown images of young boys playing in an expanse of African countryside at the edge of town – gathering around a spinning snail‐shell top, roughhousing in a game of ball, and jumping into the Niger River – while the voice‐over speaks of the “carefree” pleasures of a past childhood “before the sun” “in our little corner of Africa.” This image sequence is thereby relocated to an historical and memorial past within the documentary, as a piece of documentary film history.

The gesture of including such images shot in French West Africa was highly significant given the censorship conditions defined by the Laval Decree. The provision of this footage made it possible for the Groupe Africain to circumvent its failure to obtain authorization to shoot in the colonies. Several opposing meanings accrue to these images when considered in their relation to the writing of history in images. Whether examined at a historical moment of galvanizing decolonizing activism or at a later time once they belong to the archive of documentary cinema, the incorporation of these images into the body of the film attests to an adherence to the letter of the law. Yet this documentary act also invites one to both imagine a possible violation of the regulation by the Groupe and recall the actual violation committed by Vautier.

Afrique sur Seine ’s reuse of others’ footage may be accounted for as a resourceful act determined by practical necessity and economic scarcity. More significantly, for the purpose of investigating the colonial documentary archive, this cinematic transposition of material bears a complex ideological meaning in terms of voice and subjectivity. This re‐voicing of another’s footage implies both a move toward and away from a certain model of documentary practice and discursive construction in which the use of original material takes precedence. The act inscribes a material and symbolic connection between the makers that at the same time necessarily marks a distance in terms of formal technique, political position, and socially recognized status in terms of race and citizenship. Vieyra and the Groupe Africain spliced in this strip of film at an editing table in Paris. Vautier had shot these images of children during the period of 1949–1950 when he traveled throughout French West Africa on a trip funded by an organization dedicated to the promotion of the republican civic ideals of the French state.

Much later in his life, Vautier would attribute Vieyra’s use of this previously shot footage to their different stances on exhibiting and circulating cinematic works facing possible political censorship. In an interview published in a 2004 issue of Présence Africaine featuring a dossier on Paulin Vieyra’s career, Vautier recounts how he provided the material for this sequence to Vieyra, whom he knew through the film school and elsewhere. This interview appears to be the first published acknowledgement and discussion by either Vautier or Vieyra that the footage had been borrowed, although the uncredited appropriation had never been denied or obscured. Vautier offers his interpretation of Vieyra’s selection and strategy: “The part chosen by Vieyra is therefore very playful compared with the rest of Afrique 50 [. . .] [Vieyra] wanted to avoid having his film censored like mine had been. He wanted it to be seen” (Loftus 2004: 56). By judging Vieyra’s decision to be one of expediency or a desire to avoid censorship, Vautier only notes the most readily apparent difference in tone between the projects. What should not be diminished is the political significance of Vieyra’s decision to select this particular excerpt, of this particular length, and to remove Vautier’s voice, explicitly racialized as that of a white metropolitan French citizen, in relation to the rest of the Groupe’s own film. It should equally be acknowledged that Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma had to consider the distinctly increased risks and suspicion in the eyes of colonial authority they would be subject to as black students and producers. As much as it grew out of economic contingency, this instance of intertextuality exists as an archival reminder of a division in social and political documentation maintained by the colonial regulation of the public sphere, of the fact that black French West African colonial citizens could not be authorized to film in the territory of their birth.

Vieyra’s intervention at the stage of editing resembled practices of archival compilation that were beginning to be more widely explored in postwar French and international documentary culture – in such works as militant films made by the PCF, Joris Ivens’s Song of the Rivers (1954), Nicole Vedrès’s Paris 1900 (1947), Resnais and Marker and Cloquet’s banned Les statues meurent aussi (1953), and even in more experimental works like the Lettrist Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Venom and Eternity (Traité de Bave et d’éternité) (1951).²⁰ Afrique sur Seine ’s reuse of these images in a different register indicates how the restrictive conditions of mobility and access that filmmakers confronted in this period first limited their documentary practice yet thereby incited the development of inventive strategies both of contestation and resignification that relied upon the historicity of the moving image and sound. This extract of film was a fraught strand woven into the text of the film, the unspecified incorporation of images from an unauthorized anticolonial documentary. Though by no means principally a compilation film, as conventionally understood, Afrique sur Seine did take advantage of two significant aspects of the form that suggest its political charge under colonial rule: its avoidance of location shooting and the potential it opened up for a critique of the colonial conditions of nonfiction image production and film heritage.

In the rhetoric and narration of Afrique sur Seine, the sequence’s opening shots of children by the Niger River serve as images of an idealized past, framed to evoke a nostalgic memory and summon a fantasy of what everyday life – figured as traditional and innocent – was like years ago for the collective subject “we” attributed to black African students. The voice‐over’s reference to the “kingdom of childhood” (“royaume d’enfance”) under the sun recalls the celebratory lyrical language of Négritude elaborated by the Senegalese intellectual and future president Léopold Sédar Senghor in his poetry (his collection Ethiopiques was published in 1956) ( Senghor 1956). The vitality of life in Africa is conjured from an articulation of a mythic and nostalgic childhood of innocence. In Afrique 50, Vautier had deployed with brutal irony these images of calm everyday life around a village as a counterpoint to his own voice‐over description of the deprivations of insufficient education and medical care for school‐aged children in “black Africa.” At first glance, in its use in Afrique sur Seine, the final shot in this sequence – an image of two boys in medium shot walking away from the camera to disappear into a thicket of tall grass – suggests the beginning of a linear journey of French state‐led civilizing development. Indeed, the film cuts from the realm of memory that Afrique sur Seine casts as “the time of the kingdom of children” to a view of a Parisian cityscape that the film calls a place to “grow up, and leave home for,” which could even be affirmed as “the capital of the world, the capital of black Africa.”

Yet the idea of development and progress aligned within the framework of French imperial republican universalism is also shadowed by the documentary’s elaboration of a sense of drift. By the end of the work, in fact, Paris is not affirmed as the ruling “capital of black Africa.” The film’s narration of a search rests on a longing for what the voice‐over ultimately calls finding oneself and others in solidarity and fraternity. A scene in the film’s final sequence shows us an interracial group of five people, together and broken down into medium close‐ups, enjoying a meal at a restaurant, a picture of the pleasures of integrated social life and leisure, the hope of fraternity between “black and yellow friends, black and white friends,” to use the film’s own phrasing. Years before Chronicle of a Summer offered similar scenes of political and intellectual group encounters, this image serves as the documentary’s model of openness and social conviviality, a claim to belonging that holds out the possibility of transcending the hierarchical divisions of colonial governance and citizenship within the French Union. The Groupe Africain du Cinéma registers the appeal of this call to individual tolerance and fellowship, as well as the appeal’s limitations, in a work of moving image and recorded speech that is repeatedly drawn to figures of postponement, reverie, and digression, rather than to an articulation of structural conflict and collective action. In other words, it tempers its celebration of fellowship by acknowledging frustrated ideals and impasses. This perspective is finally most clearly evident in its repetition of moments of thwarted belonging, such as a key scene of a misunderstood rendez‐vous between a black man and woman, and especially the ambiguous conclusion represented by its final scene of a solitary man failing to find a companion or dance partner in a nightclub before calling it a night.

The voice‐over initially speaks of Paris as a “center of hope” and “city of promises,” apostrophizing the city through a series of recurrent invocations of its name and the punctuation of long shots of its monuments. Yet it also identifies the disillusionment of colonial elite students observing a city that fails to accord with the precepts of colonial education that upheld notions of metropolitan benevolence and glory: the voice‐over asks, “Paris, where are the gold‐paved streets of our nursery books?” The everyday life of the Paris depicted in the documentary also presents images of a city of working‐class black laborers – we see a restaurant waiter, a meter attendant, a street sweeper – but these are not figures depicted in struggle or collective organizing. The film raises the specter of deprivation and despair, of a Paris of “days without bread, days without hope.” Vieyra and the Groupe Africain structure their film more freely according to a series of variations on re‐enacted encounters of recognition and misrecognition in the relations among fellow students and inhabitants of the Latin Quarter. Rather than adopting the fierce political critique of colonial humanism and fascism inaugurated by Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (2000 [1972]), the film sounds the psychoanalytic and existential concerns over alienation, the voice, and the body elaborated in greater depth in this same milieu by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (2008).

The soundtrack to the film assembles transnational musical traditions and popular styles of the black diaspora in an alternation of passages: first, we hear an alternation of West African djembe and balafon percussion. This piece presumably comes from the credited archives of the musicology department of the Musée de l’Homme, and it recalls the musical accompaniment to Afrique 50 played by Keita Fodéba. Then we hear an alternation of choral and solo singing and of blues jazz guitar, scatting, and Afro‐Cuban cha‐cha‐chá dance music (a 1955 recording of the Enrique Jorrin Orchestra’s “Me Muero” concludes the film with the pointed lyric in Spanish “I’ll die if you don’t come”), a varied composition that can be heard as a sonic counterpoint to any embrace of a monumental and univocal official French culture.

One passage demonstrates especially well the technique of modulating its mode of address and linking these rhetorical shifts in speech to questions about the discourse of civilization and political collectivity. Early in the film, the camera follows the figure of a tall, finely attired black student (played by Philippe Mory) as he walks through a square. The voice‐over narration, having spoken of a plural “we,” narrows in this sequence from evoking a collective voice to speaking in the individual voice of an “I,” the only first‐person singular utterance heard in the film. Over the image of the on‐screen student giving some coins to another black man who is asking for spare change, the voice‐over comments acerbically that the streets of the Latin Quarter were the place “where I found, one morning, civilization in the school of outstretched hands.” In this shift in grammatical number, the voice‐over thereby seems to adopt in free indirect discourse either the presumed inner voice of the on‐screen student or that of the panhandler. With this statement, the representation of an unexpected exchange between strangers in public on the street becomes a possible exchange of voices, and it pointedly takes the place of any standard celebration of the official civilizing mission in French schools. This articulation of the first‐person singular subjectivity of a black African voice coincides with an image of individual benevolence that also ironizes colonial benevolence and promises of equality. The Groupe Africain du Cinéma produced a work of their own that recorded and centered the speaking subject of a black African man, speaking in French in particular, shifting between the singular and the plural and raising the question of how assimilation related to struggles over decolonization. And in doing so, the Groupe put into their work the first‐person speech of such a figure three years before Jean Rouch worked with Oumarou Ganda in Moi, un noir (Treichville) (Vieyra 1958) to create post‐synchronized voice‐over monologues of fantasy and memory about the experience of migration from the French colony of Niger to the Ivory Coast.

In the wake of independence in Senegal and throughout the former French colonies of West Africa after 1960, Afrique sur Seine ’s focus on the perspective of educated elite overseas students and migrants already living in the metropole soon appeared to many audiences and intellectuals as signs of a film eclipsed by and displaced from the prevailing project of creating a new African cinema: it did not satisfy later more urgent pan‐African and nationalist goals to retrieve historical examples of forthright anticolonial cultural production. In this sense, Afrique sur Seine embodied neither the agitational fervor of a work of anticolonial denunciation and mass mobilization, such as Afrique 50, nor an attempt at caustic and ironizing reverse ethnography, which later projects by Rouch and African makers would pursue. Rather it served as a sign of and testimony to the reality of various guarded hesitancies, conflicts, and ambivalences of black Africans situated within yet on the margins of spaces of colonial French white supremacy during a time of late colonial crisis. Its construction marked a particular idiom for formulating political and cultural demands for one form of emancipatory possibility and equality in this fraught period of late colonial politics.

By returning to two significant projects of documentary cinema that emerged out of cultural shifts in anticolonial counterpublicity in the French colonial empire from the 1940s to the 1950s, this essay has argued that documentary makers such as René Vautier and Paulin Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma produced new documentary approaches to the exploration of displacements between the sites of the metropole and the colonies and regarded this field of divisions and crossings on and off screen as a means through which to register the postwar world’s decisively shifting relations of race, nation, and empire, as the terms of colonial power were subject to renewed critique. In a landscape still defined by the French colonial bureaucratic censorship regulations of the Laval Decree, the documentary experimentation in sound and image of Afrique 50 and Afrique sur Seine represented reworkings of these political and formal limits. As this essay’s examination of such techniques as the reuse of footage from Afrique 50 in Afrique sur Seine has proposed, the political provocations contained in these films’ histories of production and their relations to African and French documentary film history begin to become intelligible in all their implications if one analyzes how this colonial context of censorship worked its way into makers’ conception of documentary methods and into the materiality and form of documentary itself.