Category: Films

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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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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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© 2018 Paul Henley