The origins of French ethnographic film-making are often dated back to the ‘chronophotographs’ that Félix-Louis Regnault and his assistant Charles Comte took of a group of Africans at the Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale, which took place in Paris, on the Champs de Mars adjacent to the Eiffel Tower, in 1895.
They used a ‘chronophotographic gun’, a device developed by the medical scientist Étienne-Jules Marey. This recorded the images onto rolls of sensitised paper. This device represented a considerable technical advance, but the images that it produced could not be subsequently projected.
Source : In this sample on the web, both the Italian voice-over and the music have been superimposed by a recent editor
Text :Rony 1996, pp. 45-73.