Category: 1920-1944

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À travers le Cameroun, le Gabon et le Congo (1928) – dir. Jean d’Esme and René Moreau *

 

A Sara Kaba woman demonstrates her lip-plates – ‘À travers Cameroun et Gabon’ (1928) – Jean d’Esme and René Moreau

60 mins., b&w, silent – French intertitles

Source :  CNC at Bois d’Arcy 

Background –  This film was shot in the course of an expedition led by the then-renowned journalist and novelist Jean d’Esme, who was accompanied by a professional cinematographer, René Moreau. It appears to be the same as – or possibly a shorter version of – a film that under the title Peaux noirs, was released in 1932 and which is also held by the CNC, but which is currently not viewable.

Both film and journey involved visits not only to the French colonies listed in the title but also to Oubangui-Chari (now the Central African Republic) and Chad. In 1931, d’Esme published a textual account of the expedition, supported by photographs by Moreau (see ‘Text’ below).

Film content – Although largely structured by a journey narrative, there is little focus on the travellers themselves. Curiously however, as is clear from comparison with the textual account, the journey is presented in the opposite order to that in which it took place in reality. Moreover, at various points, the journey narrative is interrupted and instead a sort of catalogue of people or dances encountered throughout the region is presented. As a result, the film is rather disjointed editorially.

In the early part of the film (corresponding in fact to the last stage of the journey), the activities of various European religious orders are presented in a positive, even propagandistic light, culminating in the mass marriage of 60 couples in a Christian ceremony in Brazzaville. This sequence includes a fictionalised scene in which a bearded priest in a pith helment saves a woman from being married to a ‘pagan’ by paying off the prospective husband with some rolls of cloth so that she can marry a Christian instead.

Thereafter, following a catalogue of regional dances, the focus of the film moves north through Oubangui-Chari to Lake Chad, covering many of the same topics as the earlier expedition films in the region – the Banda Dapkwa initiation dance, the Sara Kaba women and their lip-plates, the Moudang “medieval” cavalry, the fishermen with butterfly nets on the Chari river.

Notwithstanding its ideological and editorial shortcomings, À travers … is well shot and contains a number of sequences of undoubted ethnographic interest.

Text : d’Esme 1931

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Voyage au Congo [Journey to the Congo] (1927) – dir. André Gide and Marc Allégret *

‘Voyage au Congo’ (1927) – André Gide and Marc Allégret

113 mins., b&w, silent – French intertitles

Source :  This film has been difficult to see, though a digital copy is viewable in the UK in the BFI Reuben Library while in France, the CNC, in collaboration with the rights holders, Les Films du Jeudi, plan to release a restored version in the near future. For further details see here.

Background   –  This film follows the journey, between September 1925 and May 1926, of the distinguished literary figure, André Gide, then in his mid-fifties, and his lover, thirty years his junior, Marc Allégret, who was later to become an equally distinguished film director.

Arriving by sea on the Atlantic coast, they travel up the Congo river, through Oubangui-Chari to Lake Chad, before turning west and returning to the coast through Cameroon. Although Gide’s name comes first on the credits of the film, it was Allégret who was the actual film-maker, though he had had very little experience prior to the trip.

The contexts in which Voyage au Congo was made are discussed at length in the diaristic accounts later published by Gide and, posthumously, by Allégret. Both offer a highly negative account of the colonial presence in the region, raising important questions about the status of the film that they made. But despite its many merits and the fame of its makers, Voyage au Congo has been curiously neglected in the literatures of both cinema studies and visual anthropology, though this may be related to how difficult it has been to see.

Film content – Even though the journeys took place relatively close in time, covered some of the same ground and even visited some of the same communities, the film that arose from this journey could hardly be more different to La Croisière noire. Although it is structured by the journey itself, as is La Croisière noire , there are very few references to the travellers in Voyage au Congo, or to the colonial presence.

Instead, apart from framing sequences at the beginning and end of the film, referring to the film-makers’ arrival and departure by boat, what Voyage au Congo mostly offers is a series of vignettes of the communities visited, including a particularly charming ethnofictional account midway through the film about the courtship and marriage of a young Sara couple.

Although technically less accomplished than La Croisière noire, the ethnographicness of Voyage au Congo is considerably greater in that it follows social and technical processes through from beginning to end. The intimacy with the African subjects achieved in the ethnofictional passage was not only unprecedented but would not be matched until Jean Rouch’s work in the 1950s.

Texts : Gide 1927, Gide 1928, Allégret 1993,  Ravet 2007

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Danses des Habé, Les [Dances of the Habe People] (early 1920s) – J. Lejards (?) *

The Fulani Girl mask – ‘Les Danses des Habé’ – dir. J. Lejards

2 mins., b&w, silent. English inter titles (in the abbreviated Pathé-Baby version).

Source : an English-language version is available on the Stephendelroser playlist

This film is not attributed to any director, but it has clearly been shot on the same occasion as Danses soudanaises. This begins with a screen title crediting the ‘cinégraphie’ to J. Lejards, a Pathé cameraman who worked in various locations in West Africa, as well as later in Cambodia and Andorra.

On the playlist site, Les Danses des Habé is erroneously said to have been shot in Burkina Faso: in fact, it is a very interesting early film of the masked dancing performed by the Dogon (known as Habé or Habbé to their neighbours, and in early ethnographic literature), who live along the Bandiagara Escarpment of what was then the French Soudan and is now Mali.

This film shows the dances that are performed on the occasion of a dama, a ceremony that brings to an end a period of mourning, This is the same ceremony as Jean Rouch would film more than fifty years later for Le Dama d’Ambara (shot in 1974, released in 1980).

Although the Stephendelroser website dates this film to 1913 or 1915,  it seems very unlikely that Pathé cameramen such as Lejards would have been making films on ethnographic topics in West Africa at the height of the First World War.

It seems rather more likely that it would have been shot in the early 1920s, at the same time as Lejards was shooting a number of other films in West Africa, including La Ville de Djenné (1921). Djenné is also in what then the French Soudan, and is only about 200 kms by road from the Bandiagara Escarpment where this film was shot. Even with the transport available at the time, it is easy to imagine Lejards moving from one location to the other.

 

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© 2018 Paul Henley