Tag: J. Lejards

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Á Travers la Cochinchine et le Cambodge [Through Cochinchina and Cambodia] (1925) – Brut and Lejards

The Mnong “have a profound artistic sense which comes through in their warrior dances” – ‘À travers la Cochinchine et le Cambodge’ (1925) – Brut and Lejards

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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Lejards, J. (active 1920 -1930?)

J. Lejards is something of an enigma, since little is known about him, not even what his initial stands for.

What is known is that around the time of the First World War, he was active in West Africa working for Pathé: the earliest work on which his name appears and of which we are aware is Danses soudanaises. This shows Dogon masked dancing, probably at Sangha in the Bandiagara Cliffs, in present-day Mali. This has been dated to 1915, though it would seem to have been shot in the same place and on the same occasion as the very interesting film Danses habés which has been dated to as early as 1913. However, this also appears in a Pathé catalogue as part of package of films released in 1922.

This latter date fits in better with the dates attributed to other Pathé films shot in West Africa on which Lejards name appears, such as La Ville de Djenné (1921) and Passage de rivière au Togo française (1922-23).

Lejards’ name then appears again as the director (along with a certain Monsieur Brut), of  Á Travers la Cochinchine et le Cambodge, which is dated in the Pathé-Gaumont archives catalogue to 1925. In 1930, the same catalogue indicates, he was involved in making another Pathé film, this time  in Andorra.

The photograph of  the ‘reporter Lejards’ (above) was published in Ciné Magazine no.7 in 1933, though it is not clear when the photograph was actually taken. However, it seems very likely that it was taken while he was shooting the sequence in the Royal Palace at Phnom Penh that features in Á Travers la Cochinchine et le Cambodge, probably in 1924 or 1925. (Many thanks to Joëlle Hauzeur for supplying this image).
 

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Danses des Habé, Les [Dances of the Habe People] (early 1920s) – J. Lejards (?) *

The Fulani Girl mask – ‘Les Danses des Habé’ – dir. J. Lejards

2 mins., b&w, silent. English inter titles (in the abbreviated Pathé-Baby version).

Source : an English-language version is available on the Stephendelroser playlist

This film is not attributed to any director, but it has clearly been shot on the same occasion as Danses soudanaises. This begins with a screen title crediting the ‘cinégraphie’ to J. Lejards, a Pathé cameraman who worked in various locations in West Africa, as well as later in Cambodia and Andorra.

On the playlist site, Les Danses des Habé is erroneously said to have been shot in Burkina Faso: in fact, it is a very interesting early film of the masked dancing performed by the Dogon (known as Habé or Habbé to their neighbours, and in early ethnographic literature), who live along the Bandiagara Escarpment of what was then the French Soudan and is now Mali.

This film shows the dances that are performed on the occasion of a dama, a ceremony that brings to an end a period of mourning, This is the same ceremony as Jean Rouch would film more than fifty years later for Le Dama d’Ambara (shot in 1974, released in 1980).

Although the Stephendelroser website dates this film to 1913 or 1915,  it seems very unlikely that Pathé cameramen such as Lejards would have been making films on ethnographic topics in West Africa at the height of the First World War.

It seems rather more likely that it would have been shot in the early 1920s, at the same time as Lejards was shooting a number of other films in West Africa, including La Ville de Djenné (1921). Djenné is also in what then the French Soudan, and is only about 200 kms by road from the Bandiagara Escarpment where this film was shot. Even with the transport available at the time, it is easy to imagine Lejards moving from one location to the other.

 

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© 2018 Paul Henley