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.
References
1 Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 1733 (n.d.). ANOM/FM1/AP/1733. Dossier “Réglementation – A.O.F.”
2 Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 2145, Dossier 3 (n.d.). ANOM FM1/AP/2145/3. Dossier “Affaires Vogel et Vauthier [sic].”
3 Azam, O., assisted by A. Richard (eds.) (2013). Afrique 50 / De Sable et de sang. Paris: Éditions Les Mutins de Pangée.
4 Blanchard, P. (ed.) (2011). La France noire: trois siècles de présences. Paris: Eds. La Découverte / Groupe de recherche Achac.
5 Bory, J‐L. (1961). Review of Chronique d’un été, Arts, October 25, 1961. Reprinted in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un été, special issue of Domaine Cinéma no. 1, Cahiers trimestriels, (Winter 1961–62). Paris: InterSpectacles, 1962, 169.
6 Buchsbaum, J. (1988). Cinéma Engagé: Film in the Popular Front. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
7 Césaire, A. (2000 [1972]). Discourse on Colonialism (trans. J. Pinkham. 1950/1955). New York: Monthly Review Press.
8 Coulibaly, O. (1989). Combat pour l’Afrique, 1946–1958: La Lutte du R.D.A. pour une Afrique nouvelle (ed. C. Gérard). Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines.
9 “Décret Laval.” (1934). Journal Officiel de la République Française, no. 60, 11 mars 1934, 2541.
10 Diawara, M. (1992). African Cinema: Politics & Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
11 Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. R. Philcox. 1952). New York: Grove Press.
12 Genova, J.E. (2013). Cinema and Development in West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
13 Haffner, P. (1984). Quatre Entretiens avec Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (III), Deuxième Partie. Peuples Noirs Peuples Africains 40: 26–40. http://mongobeti.arts.uwa.edu.au/issues/pnpa40/pnpa40_04.html.
14 Harrow, K. (ed.) (1999). African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
15 Kahana, J. (2008). Voice‐Over, Allegory, and the Pastoral in New Deal Documentary. In: Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary, 89–140. New York: Columbia University Press.
16 Krier, J. (1951). Afrique Noire: Zone interdite par Pierre Laval aux Cinéastes. L’Écran Français, no. 307, May 23–29. Partially reprinted in: Afrique 50 / De Sable et de sang (eds. O. Azam with Richard, A.), 74–77. Paris: Éditions Les Mutins de Pangée.
17 Lébrat, C. (ed.) (2001). Afrique 50. Collection “Les Cahiers de Paris Expérimental” no. 3 (trans. T.L. Williams). Paris: René Vautier / Éditions Paris Expérimental.
18 Leyda, J. (1964). Films Beget Films: Compilation Films from Propaganda to Drama. London: George Allen & Unwin.
19 Loftus, M. (2004). Entretien avec René Vautier. Présence Africaine 170, special issue “Hommage à Paulin Soumanou Vieyra,” 55–59.
20 Marie, L. (2005). Le Cinéma est à nous: Le PCF et le cinéma français de la Libération à nos jours. Paris: L’Harmattan.
21 Marker, C. (1961). Commentaires. Paris: Seuil.
22 Pfaff, F. (1988). Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–), Senegal. In: Twenty‐Five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Bio‐Bibliography, 289–303. New York: Greenwood Press.
23 Présence Africaine (1953). no. 14 “Les étudiants noirs parlent…”
24 Rouch, J. (1967). Préface.). Premier catalogue sélectif international de films ethnographiques sur l’Afrique noire, 20–29. Paris: UNESCO.
25 Ruelle, C., Tapsoba, C., and Speciale, A. (eds.) (2005). Afriques 50: Singularités d’un cinéma pluriel. Paris: L’Harmattan.
26 Senghor, L.S. (1956). Ethiopiques. Paris: Seuil.
27 Thackway, M. (2003). Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub‐Saharan Francophone African Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
28 Ungar, S. (2011). René Vautier’s Afrique 50 and the Emergence of Anti‐Colonial Cinema. L’Ésprit Créatur 51 (3): 34–46.
29 Vautier, R. (1998). Caméra citoyenne: mémoires. Rennes, France: Éditions Apogée.
30 Vieyra, P.S. (1958). Propos sur le cinéma Africain. Présence Africaine no. 22 (October–November): 106–117.
31 Vieyra, P.S. (1969). Le Cinéma et l’Afrique. Paris: Présence Africaine.
32 Vieyra, P.S. (1975). Le cinéma africain: des origines à 1973. Paris: Présence Africaine.
33 Waugh, T. (1999). Joris Ivens and the Legacy of Committed Documentary. In: Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (ed. K. Bakker), 171–182. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
