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
