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