25 mins. , b&w, silent, intertitles in French.
Production : Pathé
Source : Gaumont-Pathé Archives, PR 1925 53 34
This is an extended reportage film, which, as the title suggests proceeds from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), through what is now central Vietnam and into Cambodia. Although it is essentially a ‘road movie’, it includes a number of brief scenes of ethnographic interest en route.
These include a funeral procession in Saigon, some elegant ‘warrior’ dances, albeit performed for the camera in a park or garden, by some Mnong men (referred to, as was conventional at the time, as Moï, a pejorative term meaning ‘savage’ in Vietnamese), a rural pottery-making sequence, and in Phnom Penh, a public festivity, an extraordinary dragon-boat race on the Mekong, and finally, a performance by the celebrated dancers of the Royal Ballet.
This is a remarkably well-shot film, which apart from one or two examples of ‘crossing the line’, features a sophisticated understanding of film grammar, including cuts from wide to close, beautifully framed establishing shots, a very well-executed tilt up a vast staircase at the Angkor Wat temple and many clever uses of natural light and shadow. Some subtle cross fades have also been added at post-production.
One of the cameramen, Lejards, would appear to be the same operator who shot a number of well made short films in West Africa in the early 1920s.
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