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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.