Category: 1920-1944

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Sso: rite indigène des Etons et des Manguisas [Sso: an indigenous rite of the Eton and the Manguisa] (1935) – dir. Maurice Bertaut *

Male initiation – ‘Sso : rite indigène ..’ – dir. Maurice Bertaut

56 mins., b&w, sound – French voice-over commentary and field sound recordings of music

Production : Le Haut Commissariat (Cameroun)

Source : CNC at the Bnf

Background  –  This substantial film follows the various different stages of a complex male initiation rite, known as sso, which is practised by the Eton and Manguisa, two sub-groups of the Beti, one of the principal ethnic groups of West Africa, with a strong presence in Cameroun as well as in parts of Gabon and the Congo-Brazzaville. The rite takes its name from a particular species of small antelope admired for its speed through the forest.

Now no longer practised, the sso ceremony required the initiands to undergo a series of physical ordeals over the course of six months, along with periods of seclusion and hunting in the forest, and interspersed with ritual battles and dancing in the village plaza.

In order to take place, a sso ceremony had to have a ritual sponsor, who would guarantee the considerable quantities of food and drink consumed. The sponsor could thereby expiate some past moral infraction while at the same time gaining great personal prestige.

The film was directed by Maurice Bertaut, a senior colonial officer in the Cameroun, who had previously written a thesis on the customary law of the Boulou, also a Beti subgroup, while the images and the soundtrack of local music were recorded by René Bugniet, a cartographer who had previously made at least a dozen films for the colonial government of Cameroon.

Film Content  –  The film begins with an interesting ethnofictional sequence in which following the death of his son, a senior man, one Bilima, attributing this loss to a fight that he had had in the past with his brother, undertakes to expiate this infraction by sponsoring a sso ceremony. Thereafter the film follows the unfolding of the ceremony in a largely straightforwardly descriptive manner. This sso turns out to be an impressive affair, involving at one stage perhaps as many as eighty initiands, and featuring many remarkable ordeals and extraordinary dance performances.

Apart from a few occasional lapses, the voice-over scripted and performed by Bertaut, is remarkably free – for the period – of colonialist or racist prejudice.

Meanwhile the shooting and sound-recording by Bugniet is also generally of a high standard, though the film concludes with a particularly voyeuristic final shot, of the the kind that also features in his earlier work, in which he explores the bodies of three young women ‘to dispell any unpleasant memory of the ordeals undergone by the initiands’.

But otherwise, Sso is perhaps the closest pre-war example of the kind of film that would become the standard form of ethnographic film after the Second World War.

Text : Quinn 1980

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Vodoun ceremonies and other topics, Dahomey [Bénin] footage (1929-30) – Père Francis Aupiais and Frédéric Gadmer *

Leader of the cult to Hèbiôssô, god of Thunder dances up to the camera – Dahomey Vodoun footage (1930) – Père Francis Aupiais and Frédéric Gadmer

6-7 hours, b&w, silent.

Source : Musée Albert-Kahn

This material was shot over a period of six months through a collaboration between Frédéric Gadmer, a highly experienced cameraman funded by the ethnographic film patron Albert Kahn, and Père Francis Aupiais, a Catholic missionary priest and ethnographer, who had been living in Dahomey since 1903 and who had long taken a particular interest in the vodoun religion.

Although there are some scenes of everyday life and secular events, the great majority of the material is dedicated to religious topics, including both the activities of Aupiais’ mission and vodoun-related activities.

Since the aim was to provide documentation rather than make a documentary film – as was generally the case with the footage in Kahn’s Archives de la planète – most of this material consists of long static shots from a fixed point using a wide angle lens, though within these constraints, the technical quality of Gadmer’s work is high.

Aupiais regarded vodoun ceremonies as a form of prayer and he was disappointed that it was not possible to record sound, as he regarded music, particularly drum music, as an essential component of vodoun ‘ceremonialism’.

All this material has been carefully catalogued by the Musée Albert-Kahn and should be viewable once the museum opens again in 2018. The museum is also preparing a major exhibition on the work produced by Aupiais and Gadmer, which also includes over 300 photographs. This is due to open in 2020.

Text : Balard 1999

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Fati-Dra ou Serment de l’amitié [The Oath of Friendship] (1929-30?) – Anon *

10 mins., b&w, silent: intertitles in French

Source : Gaumont-Pathé Archives

A beautifully crafted ethnographic process film. Classified in the Gaumont-Pathé archive as Cérémonie à Madagascar, and attributed, erroneously, to Alfred Machin, and equally erroneously, dated to 1910, probably because Machin was known to be filming in Madagascar in that year.

However, both the technical quality of the camerawork, the sophistication of the film grammar and even the material quality of the film stock all suggest that this film would not have been made before the late 1920s.

Given that the leading film director Léon Poirier made several films on Madagascar around this time, could it be that this is one of this works too?

Text : Henley 2017

 

 

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Instantanés malagaches [Snapshots of Madagascar] (1929) – dir. Léon Poirier *

A military band plays to the raising of the tricolour – ‘Instantanées malagaches’ (1929) – Léon Poirier

51 mins., b&w, silent – titles and intertitles in French

Source : CNC – Bnf

Shot while Léon Poirier was in Madagascar making his feature film, Caïn, the technical and aesthetic quality of this film is far superior to those of most other films of this kind made in this period (though it does not have any kind of sound track).

It offers a series of interesting ethnographic vignettes of the many different cultural groups that have made their home on the island, sometimes over many generations, but suggests that these have all been harmonized under the ideals of French colonial governance. The final scene shows a military band playing as the tricolour is raised.

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Terres brûlées (1934) – dir. Charles Dekeukeleire *

55 mins., b&w, sound – voice-over commentary in French, extra-diegetic music

This film was made by one of the leading figures of documentary filmmaking in Belgium of the period. It follows a heavy truck across the Sahara Desert and into the tropical forest of the Belgian Congo, recording the effects of Belgian colonization as well as traditional custom. An extract is viewable here.

While the cinematography is exquisite, the voice-over commentary is painfully colonialist and the extradiegetic music now seems ridiculous.

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Fétichisme (1932) – dir. Jean d’Esme and René Moreau *

6 mins., b&w, silent – French titles and intertitles

Source : CNC at BnF

Background – This short film by Jean d’Esme and René Moreau was clearly made at the same time as À travers le Cameroun, le Gabon et le Congo, and particularly at the time that they were shooting  the Brazzaville mass marriage sequence since the bearded priest who ‘saves’ a young girl for a Christian marriage in that sequence appears in this film as well.

Film content – Self-evidently, fictionalised, Fétichisme purports to show how a ‘sorcerer’ identifies the witch responsible for the sickness of a young boy. This involves a frenetic ceremony during which poison is given to two people, one of whom dies and is therefore presumed to be the guilty party. However, before the ceremony is concluded, the priest turns up and disperses the crowd, confiscating the small wooden statues that had served as the sorcerer’s fetishes.

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Chez les buveurs du sang/ Le vrai visage de l’Afrique [With the Drinkers of Blood/ The True Face of Africa] (1932) – Napoléon Gourgaud and Joseph Barth *

Maasai warriors – ‘Chez les buveurs du sang’ (1931) – Napoléon Gourgaud and Joseph Barth

55 mins., b&w, sound – French voice-over commentary

Production : Films J. de Cavignac

Source : CNC-Bnf

Background – This is an expedition film shot in 1929 and released in various forms and under various titles in the early 1930s. Commissioned by an aristocrat, Baron Napoléon Gourgaud, a big game hunter and collector of l’art nègre, it was shot by Joseph Barth, a leading cinematographer who had recently worked with Jean Epstein on Finis Terrae and would later work on P.W. Pabst’s 1932 reversion of L’Atlantide.

The film follows an expedition led by the Baron, first by sea to South Africa through the Suez Canal, and then northwards by land through Central Africa. It ends with a strange coda, as the expedition descends the Congo River to the Atlantic coast and then makes its way by sea to the island of St. Helena, where the Baron’s great-grandfather had been a companion to his namesake, the Emperor Napoléon, in his final years of exile.

Film Content – It is in the central part of the film that there are certain passages of ethnographic interest as the expedition proceeds from the Cape, through Mozambique and the Belgian Congo to British East Africa.

On the way, the expedition encounters various indigenous groups including the Zulu and San ‘Bushmen’ in South Africa, ‘Kaffres’ in Mozambique, Pygmies and Mangbetu in the Congo, and finally the Maasai in East Africa whose occasional practice of drinking blood drawn off directly from the necks of their cattle provides the pretext for the sensationalist title of the film. Gourgaud also shoots a substantial quantity of big game and there are many dramatic shots of the natural environment.

At the time of its release and for many years afterwards, this film was hailed as a masterpiece of documentary cinema and it does indeed include a number of very well executed sequences of dance accompanied by on location sound recordings, notably those featuring performances by the Zulu, the ‘Kaffres’ and the Maasai.

But most present-day viewers will probably consider it to be no more than a self-aggrandizing safari film, punctuated by various egregiously racist passages, particularly the sequence in which two San women are presented as if they were zoological specimens.

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© 2018 Paul Henley