Category: Africa

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Cameroun: cases du Cameroun [Cameroon : houses of Cameroon] (1931?) – dir. René Bugniet *

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

Production : Agence economique des territories africaines.

Source : CNC-Bnf

This film was made by René Bugniet, the official cinematographer of the French colony of Cameroon and consists of a series of shots of the many different house styles across the colony, showing how they vary according to the ethnic group and region.

It is not dated but the final sequence shows the Togo-Cameroon pavilion at the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 in Paris, so it seems very likely that the film was completed specifically for that exhibition

An intertitle explains that the Togo-Cameroon paviliion was inspired by Bamiléké architecture. There are various exterior shots of the pavilion with citizens walking about, but the film never actually goes inside. In the final sequence, the film cuts from carvings on the poles of pavilion to similar carvings in situ in Cameroon.

[An interesting footnote is that the Togo-Cameroon pavilion is only pavilion that still survives from the Colonial Exhibition, though today it is a Buddhist temple.]

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Bataille sur le grand fleuve [Battle on the Great River] (1952) – dir. Jean Rouch *

33 mins., colour, sound – French voice-over commentary

Production :  IFAN/ CNC/ Musée de l’Homme.

Sources : CNRS Videothèque no.555; Jean Rouch(DVD collection), Éditions Montparnasse, 2005

Film content  – This film offers a more extended account of the hippopotamus hunting shown in Rouch’s earlier film  Au pays des mages noirs , and was shot in glorious Kodachrome colour stock with his colleague Roger Rosfelder recording the sound on a Sgubbi field tape recorder. It  appears to have been the first film that Rouch showed back successfully to the subjects, an event which resulted in ‘feed-back’ screenings becoming a central feature of his methodology thereafter.

Texts : Henley 2009, Henley 2017

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Amours exotiques: 1. Andantino – Zazavavindrano; 2. Allegro – L’Ève africaine [Exotic Love : 1. Andantino – Zazavavindrano; 2. Allegro – The African Eve] (1925) – dir. Léon Poirier *

56 min., b&w, silent – French titles and intertitles

Source : Part 1 of Amours exotics,  Zazavavindrano is viewable at the Musée Albert-Kahn.

Background – The first part of this film, Zazavavindrano, was made by Léon Poirier in 1924, in parallel with directing the final stages of the La Croisière noire expedition, as it reached Madagascar. Georges Specht, the leading cinematographer on La Croisière noire, also worked on this film and as a result, the technical quality of the film is of the highest standard.

The second part, Allegro- L’Eve africaine, was not viewed for The Silent Time Machine project, but from the accounts available on the web, it appears to consist of a sort of catalogue of rites related to love, as practised by a range of different peoples across sub-Saharan Africa.

Film content – Zazavavindrano is what might now be called an “ethnofiction”, that is, a fictional story with an ethnographic foundation that is performed by local, non-professional actors.

It concerns a young Malagasy couple whose parents forbid them to marry because in the course of a trial cohabitation, the woman has not become pregnant. The couple hatch a plot, which involves the man pretending that he has died. In the meantime, the woman asks for help to conceive from Zazavavindrano, a water sprite who is played by an actress, naked from the waist up, and who is shown, through trick photography, to be living underwater in a natural pool. At his funeral, the man suddenly sits up and all the mourners scatter. In the confusion, the couple elope and shortly afterwards, the story ends happily as the woman realizes that she has become pregnant.

 

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À travers Madagascar [Across Madagascar] (1923) – dir. Dick de Goulay *

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

Source : CNC-Bnf

This film provides a  tour d’horizon of Malagasy life by following around some French colonial officers, wearing pith helmets and carried in stretchers, as they conduct an inspection.

At 42 minutes, it is relatively long for this genre of colonial exhibition film and it covers a great variety of topics: at breakneck speed, it shows various different ethnic groups of the island, a range of forms of architecture, impressive local scenery, economic activities, a fleeting glimpse of a mosque, dances, crafts, sports (wrestling particularly), hairstyles, children’s games – all covered in a series of very brief shots that are interspersed with highly decorated intertitles featuring motifs that seem to be more Central or West African than anything to do with Madagascar.

Whatever its limitations, À travers de Madagascar appears to have circulated widely: Alison Murray Levine reproduces a 1923 poster relating to a regional screening of colonial films in France in which it figures prominently.

Text : Murray Levine 2010, p.116

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Bushman Speaks into the Phonograph {Buschmann spricht in den Phonographen} (1908/1984) – Rudolf Pöch *

56 secs., b&w, originally silent, but approximately post-synchronised in 1984 with a recording made simultaneously on an Archiv-Phonograph

Source :  Filmarchiv Austria, also available in several different forms on the web, for example, here.

This film was shot by Rudolf Pöch in 1908 in what is now northern Botswana whilst he was simultaneously making an audio recording on a phonograph of Kubi, a sixty-year old San man, telling a story about the behaviour of elephants at a nearby waterhole. Much later, in 1984, the image and the audio recording were approximately synchronised by Dietrich Schüller of the Austrian Sound Archive, Vienna.

In its original silent form, this sequence forms part of a 30-minute body of rushes that Pöch shot in southern Africa, mostly otherwise consisting of sequences of dancing and technical processes.

Text : Schüller (1987)

© 2018 Paul Henley