Discussion – Francophone film-makers in colonial Africa prior to the Second World War

An article arising directly out of The Silent Time Machine project about early French ethnographic film in Africa has been published by the Project Author in the journal Visual Anthropology (Henley 2020).

The origins of French ethnographic film-making are often dated back to the ‘chronophotographs’ that Félix-Louis Regnault and his assistant Charles Comte – using a device developed by Étienne-Jules Marey – took of a group of Africans attending a colonial exhibition in Paris in 1895. A selection of this work is available on the web here

The following year, 1896, the Lumière brothers filmed a group of Ashanti attending a similar exhibition in Lyon. But it would not be until the first years of the twentieth century that films of ethnographic interest were made in Africa itself.

The ethnographic films made in Africa by francophone filmmakers prior to the Second World War can be loosely grouped into four principal categories:

1. “vues” – films of reportage

The earliest works were relatively straightforward films of reportage, referred to – like all films at the time – as ‘vues’. These films were typically very short, rarely more than ten minutes in duration, and often much shorter. Individual shots typically lasted no more than a minute (approximately the maximum duration of a standard film roll at the time) and were almost invariably taken from a fixed point, on a tripod, and for the most part, using a wide-angle lens. Typically, they had no pronounced intrinsic narrative development: instead they consisted of a series of scenes of one particular place or event, linked together with explanatory intertitles, in the manner of a slide show.

During the early years of the twentieth century, many works of this kind were shot in North Africa, though by the end of the first decade some camera operators were also venturing further south. Many of the operators making these films were working either for the Gaumont and Pathé newsreel agencies or for the Archives de la planète project of the philanthropist banker Albert Kahn, and their works are preserved today in the respective archives of these organisations in Paris. Others can be viewed in the CNC archive, either at the Bibliothèque nationale française (Bnf) in Paris or at their depository at Bois d’Arcy, near Versailles. In the case of Gaumont-Pathé archive, some these films can also be viewed on-line. Further details of all these archives may be found here

The cataloguing of these films is still far from complete. Many more films appear in the Gaumont-Pathé catalogue than are available to view, meaning that they are either lost or remain to be re-discovered. Also, the dating of some of these films is no more than approximate. Much the same applies to the films in the CNC archive.

In the 1920s, many of these early reportage films were abridged and recycled for Pathé-Baby, a series of very short films prepared for the domestic market. Many of these abridged versions appear to have survived when the originals have disappeared. A private playlist on Youtube reproduces many of them here.

A more comprehensive Pathé-Baby collection, but of less good quality, is viewable on-line on the University of Princeton website here.

These short films, despite their brevity and their technical limitations, offer a fascinating glimpse of life in North and West Africa in the early twentieth century as well as of the attitudes of the filmmakers. Out of many possible examples, these are three particularly interesting films that are readily available on the web:

– Une fête arabe au Sahara (1909) – Anon. The feast of a desert prince, a recurrent theme in films of the period. [NB the music has been superimposed by the private playlist editor]. View this film here

– Danses habés (1913), shot by a certain J. Lejards. This shows a series of dances performed at a dama, a ceremony performed by the Dogon of the Bandiagara Cliffs in Mali to bring a period of mourning to an end. Although the interpretation offered of the dances is erroneous, and the dating of the film is questionable, the technical quality is remarkably good for the period. This film may be viewed here

– Petit-métiers marocains – Anon. Dated on the website to 1927, which is the date of the Baby-Pathé released, but from the style and texture of the film, it appears to have been shot very much earlier. Particularly interesting is the presence of Jewish artisans, now mostly long departed from Morocco. This film may be viewed here.

2. expedition films

It was not until the 1920s that ethnographic films of any complexity were made in sub-Saharan Africa. This was the period of the first major expeditions that crossed the continent from one extremity to another, often with a filmmaker in tow and with the journey itself providing the narrative thread for the film. These expedition films were generally very much longer than the reportage films, many lasting up to an hour, sometimes considerably more.

These films were as much about the travellers’ experience as the communities that they visited, and scenes of traditional local life would be interspersed with hunting sequences or shots of remarkable geographical phenomena. They were often accompanied by voice-over commentaries that could be colonialist and racist, while their ‘ethnographicness’ was usually very limited in that they were typically based on very brief visits, sometimes arriving after a particular event had begun or departing before it had finished. But these films could also include sequences of ethnographic interest about certain aspects of traditional ways of indigenous life, many of which are no longer practised.

Major examples of this category of film include:

By far the most celebrated example of this genre in France, this film follows an expedition of Citroën half-track vehicles, known as ‘autochenilles’, over an eight-month period as they cross the Sahara and the forests of Central Africa, eventually arriving at Madagascar in June 1925. On the way, they encounter several groups who would come to feature regularly in this genre of expedition film: the “medieval” horsemen of the small kingdoms and sultanates around Lake Chad, the Kotoko fishermen on the lake and nearby rivers with their butterfly-like nets, the Sara Kaba women with their extraordinarly large lip plates, the initiation dances of the Banda Dapkwa of Oubangui-Chari (now the Central African Republic), the elusive Pygmies of the Belgian Congo, and finally the Mangbetu women whose elongated heads and similarly elongated hairstyles would become an iconic image of the expedition.

Although dated in terms of content and even offensively colonialist by present-day standards, this film was shot by Georges Specht, a major feature film cinematographer and carried a soundtrack partly recorded on location, and, as such, was innovative both aesthetically and technically. In the UNESCO catalogue, it is described, in a passage probably authored by Jean Rouch, as the “first real film on Black Africa”, and as having been made by “a great director, who improvised along the way with a sure talent” (Anon 1967, 40-41). Despite its celebrity, it is difficult to view La Croisière noire due to continuing rights issues, though a copy can be accessed at the CNC archive at Bois D’Arcy. Among many possible texts, Bloom (2006) provides useful analysis and background.

As a sort of by-product of this film, while Poirier and Specht were in Madagascar, they also made a short ethnofiction, Zazavavindrano ou l’Amour malgache, of some 12 minutes, about a young Malgache couple who elope after they have been prohibited from marrying because a trial period of cohabitation has suggested that they are infertile. Aided by a water sprite, they eventually conceive a child.

This film is viewable at the Musée Albert-Kahn. It constitutes the first part of Amours exotiques, a two-part work by Poirer also consisting of L’Eve africaine, a more general comparative film about women in African societies.

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 film that arose from this journey could hardly be more different to La Croisière noire, even though the journeys took place relatively close in time, covered some of the same ground and even visited some of the same communities. 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.

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 see Ravet 2007).

In part, this may due to the fact that it too is 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.

This film is held by the CNC at Bois d’Arcy and was shot in 1928 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.

As with Voyage au Congo, although largely structured by a journey narrative, there is little focus in À travers… on the travellers themselves. Curiously however, as is clear from comparison with the textual account, in this case, 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.

Another distinctive feature of À travers… is that 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. But notwithstanding its ideological and editorial shortcomings, À travers … is well shot and contains a number of sequences of undoubted ethnographic interest.

This is a much shorter film, of barely six minutes, which appears to have been shot around the same time as the Brazzaville mass marriage sequence since the bearded priest who ‘saved’ a young girl for a Christian marriage appears in this film as well. Clearly 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. This shorter film is available in the CNC digital collection in the BnF as well as at Bois d’Arcy.

The central section of this film follows the expedition led by Gourgaud, an aristocratic collector of l’art nègre but also a big game hunter, as it 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, Pygymies 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 subtitle of the film. Gourgaud also shoots a substantial quantity of big game and there are many dramatic shots of the natural environment.

The cinematographer, Joseph Barth, was a major figure of French cinema, and had recently worked with Jean Epstein and G.W. Pabst. At the time of its release and for many years afterwards, Le vrai visage 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 Le vrai visage 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 no more than taxonomical specimens. It is perhaps no coincidence that a second version of the film was released in 1943 at the height of the Vichy period.

A digital copy of this film is available in the CNC collection at the BnF as well as at Bois d’Arcy.

These films were shot by a medical doctor and amateur ethnographer who was active in the colonial campaign to combat sleeping sickness in Central and West Africa between the 1920s and the 1940s. The first film concerns Muraz’s travels in what are now Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon, while the second concerns the Sara peoples of northern Oubangui-Chari (now the Central African Republic). While the European colonial presence is alluded to periodically, and its supposedly beneficial effects in combating fear and superstition are extolled, the progress of Muraz’s own journeys is assumed rather than foregrounded.

Notwithstanding the absurd titles, the execrable voice-over commentary and the sometimes voyeuristic camerawork, the two films contain many passages of ethnographic interest, in relation particularly to sculpture (notably of the Kota and Fang in Gabon), dance and ritual performance, and body modification, including some remarkable examples of scarification and, once again, the celebrated Sara Kaba lip plates.

The quality of the camerawork, apparently performed by Muraz himself is reasonably good, while the sound, although apparently extradiegetic, seems to be based on local African sound recordings. Both films are available in the CNC’s digital collection at the BnF, as well as at Bois D’Arcy.

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. Although highly commended in the UNESCO catalogue, the entry concludes that “La Croisière noire nevertheless remains the masterwork of this genre”. See Anon (1967) pp. 43-44.

3. colonial exhibition films

If the expedition films described above concerned journeys from one extremity of the continent to another, it was also during the 1920s that films based on actual or metaphorical tours around single individual colonies were first made, with a view to promoting those colonies in metropolitan France. Many films of this kind were made specifically to be shown at the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris. These films were typically much shorter than the grand expedition films, and the cinematographers were not from the highest ranks of French cinema. Whereas some colonies commissioned private production companies such as Gaumont and Pathé to make these films, others made their own arrangements. The general context of this form of colonial filmmaking has been well described by Murray Levine (2010)

While many of these films focused on examples of economic and social development under the colonial administration such as ports, railways and health campaigns, others dealt with cultural topics and it is these particularly that include sequences of ethnographic interest. These films include

This appears to be the first in a series of at least a dozen films made by Bugniet in Cameroon in the late 1920s and early 1930s that were commissioned by local colonial agencies. All these films may be viewed in the CNC digital collection inthe BnF.

Bugniet was a colonial cartographer who was asked to make these films as he travelled around the colony on his surveying missions. It is not clear how he acquired the necessary skills, but the technical quality of his work seems to improve as the series progresses. Some of the films are accompanied by music that has clearly been recorded locally.

Many of these films offer little more than a sort of inventory of places and customs, with the human subjects frequently being lined up anonymously in front of the camera as exemplars of a certain cultural ‘type’. Even so, these films have a certain ethnographic interest, albeit in a merely descriptive mode. Towards the end of his career in Cameroon, Bugniet was the cameraman on the cinematographically much more sophisticated film, Sso, described below.

Shot while Poirier was in Madagascar making his feature film Caïn in 1930, the technical and aesthetic quality of this film is far superior to those of most other films in the colonial exhibition category (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.

This film is viewable in the digital collection of the CNC at the BnF.

4. ethnographic process films

It is not until around 1930 that one begins to encounter works by francophone filmmakers in Africa which approximate the form that we would now expect of an ethnographic film in that they follow social or cultural processes through from beginning to end and/or are based on some sort of significant pre-existing relationship between filmmaker and subjects

Interesting examples include:

This film follows a ritual process practiced by the Sakalava of the northwest coast of Madagascar whereby two men can declare themselves to be ritual brothers and confirm their new-found status by the ritual exchange of drops of blood in the course of a public ceremony conducted by a traditional priest in the presence of the local chief, their relatives and members of the wider community,

This film is a small gem: it is beautifully shot on high-quality film stock and shows a sophisticated understanding of film grammar. There has clearly been a degree of mise-en-scène, and some of the sequences, particularly those of numerous participants arriving for the ceremony by catamaran on a nearby beach are more reminiscent of a major feature film than a modest ethnographic documentary.

This film is held in the Gaumont-Pathé archive under the title Cérémonie à Madagascar and can be viewed here. In the Gaumont-Pathé catalogue, this film is given the release date of 1910 and is attributed to Alfred Machin. Celebrated for his wildlife films in Africa before the First World War, Machin visited Madagascar in that year, and made two other short films among the Sakalava. However, this attribution is surely an error since both the technical quality of the film and the sophistication of the film grammar are far greater than anything that was generally achieved before the end of the 1920s, by which time Machin was already deceased. The film grammar of Fati-Dra, coupled with its feature film qualities, lead one to hazard the suggestion that it may have been another film made by Léon Poirier during the time that he spent on the island in 1930 making the feature film, Caïn.

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 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 du 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’. See Balard (1999).

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.

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 the region, 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 general context of the sso is described in Quinn (1980).

Sso, the film, begins with a 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.

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. 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.

Sso can be viewed in the CNC’s digital collection at the Bnf.

Although many francophone filmmakers working in Africa prior to the Second World War had made films with certain ethnographic qualities, Marcel Griaule was only career anthropologist to do so. Starting in 1928, Griaule led five research expeditions to Africa during this period and took a moving image camera on all but one of them. But with the single exception of his third expedition, when he spent two months in early 1935 at Sanga, a Dogon village in the Bandiagara Cliffs of the French Soudan (now Mali), the material shot on Griaule’s expeditions has either been lost or was never of sufficient technical quality to be edited into a film. Surely not coincidentally, it was on this third expedition that Griaule took a professional film-maker with him, one Roger Mourlan, who although only 23, was both experienced and talented. Griaule did not, however, arrange for any kind of sound recording to be made in the field.

Initially, Griaule used the footage for research purposes and to support his lectures, but he was then invited to prepare these two films for an exhibition on Africa that was due to open at the Musée de l’Homme in November 1939. The editing was delayed by the outbreak of the Second World War, but when they were finally completed the following year, the first film provided a general overview of Dogon society, with particular emphasis on subsistence practices, whereas the second concerned the manufacture of the celebrated Dogon dancing masks and their coming out at a ‘funerary ceremony’.

Both films feature a voice-over commentary scripted by Griaule but performed by a professional voice artist. These commentaries are somewhat patronisingly ironic but this tone, and also the relative brevity of the films, might perhaps be explained by the context in which they were intended to be shown. The extra-diegetic music employed in the absence of field recordings in both films will probably seem absurd to most modern audiences.

But if one allows for these shortcomings, both films have certain merits, certainly cinematographically, though Griaule’s later claim that all the action was filmed as it happened, was simply not true: the ‘funerary ceremony’ of the second film was actually paid for and performed at the filmmakers’ request, which would explain why there is no corpse!

Two years later, in 1942, Griaule released two further films, Les Techniques des noirs (15 mins) and Le Soudan mystérieux (13 mins) but these employ many of the same shots and although the ordering of the shots is different and the extradiegetic music is somewhat less ridiculous to modern ears, they represent little more than elongated versions of the first two films.

All four films are available in the Gaumont-Pathé archive, while the first two may be found, albeit with incorrect release dates, on Jean Rouch: une aventure africaine, a DVD box set released by Éditions Montparnasse in 2010. For an excellent discussion of the background of the making of these films, see Jolly 2014 and also Jolly 2016.