A Companion to Documentary Film History. Группа авторов
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analytical explanation of colonial economic conditions (colonized laborers perform arduous work and receive meager wages from colonial state capitalist firms) that the film uses to elicit outrage and mobilize sympathy for the anticolonial cause. The film presents an on‐site tracing of the evidence of a specific colonial massacre, in Palaka in the northern Ivory Coast in 1949, that had been carried out by the French colonial police forces, used by the film to represent the threat that “awaits African villages.” The scene of recent atrocities serves as a stage for the voice‐over to direct the viewer to imagine absent scenes of French state violence on African people, as well as on the villages, land, and animals. Throughout Afrique 50, the specificity of the documentation of the massacre at Palaka continues to characterize the structure of the voice‐over narration. In its mode of address, this principle of naming in speech, of making known names that would otherwise be suppressed by “official images” (and speech) marks the documentary’s aims of denunciation as well as remembrance. The film names both perpetrators, from colonial administrators to colonial companies, and victims, from heroic martyrs to political organizers. The priority that Afrique 50 grants in the voice‐over commentary to the direct designation of names, individually and collectively, and to this style of enunciation, could be said to underpin its model of the politics of truth in documentary representation.
Afrique 50 presents to the viewer an official political party to represent and claim unity for “the African people” as a political actor threatened by and committed to opposing colonial state violence: the mobilizing collective ranks of the African Democratic Assembly (Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, RDA), the mass transterritorial party of imperial citizens founded in 1946 in Bamako in French West Africa. The political party sought to organize people under colonial rule to struggle for greater political autonomy and a form of electoral reorganization that would guarantee equality of rights within the new French Union, as the empire was called after 1946. In alliance with the French Communist Party (PCF) until 1950, the party pointedly did not advocate for sovereign independence from the Union. Aligning with these activities, Afrique 50 can be read as an exposé of colonial administrative atrocities as well as of colonialist‐supported economic exploitation of labor. It therefore stands as an anticolonial solidarity film that contends with the dilemma of speaking from a French metropolitan and an internationalist perspective on the conflicts depicted. It seeks to establish a relation between the sites of metropolitan France and colonial French West Africa, linked in the film by geographic mobility, both at the stage of production and on the level of textual representation.
In linking these two spaces, the film also linked groups of people and institutions at the stage of production. African political figures played a crucial, still unappreciated role in the making of the film, and there is evidence of the film’s West African contacts’ own violation of the Laval Decree that clarifies our sense of the documentary’s challenge to colonial authority and the film’s relevance to histories of authorship in African diasporic documentary. The colonial police placed Vautier and Vogel under extensive surveillance, and the administration was especially concerned with tracking the young filmmakers’ interactions with the RDA, as is revealed in bureaucratic correspondence between officials in the Political Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of the Colonies. A Political Affairs Bureau letter from February 1950 contains a police account of the Vautier‐Vogel activities and portrays their meetings with leaders and village chiefs throughout their French West African tour as a direct challenge to the authority of the colonial administration.8 Among Vogel and Vautier’s main contacts were the RDA’s founders and assembly representatives, Gabriel D’Arboussier and Félix Houphouët‐Boigny, as well as Ouezzin Coulibaly (the assembly deputy from Côte d’Ivoire, and the representative of the African section of the League of Teaching), who helped Vautier obtain resources and an additional camera. Coulibaly is even identified in the surveillance report as having shot and “directed” some film footage himself (“prises de vues dirigées par un OUEZZIN COULIBALY”). This line in the colonial state surveillance report remains the only evidentiary trace of this unauthorized African filmmaking activity, and it is not corroborated by Vautier’s memoirs or by Coulibaly’s own writings. It furthermore remains unknown whether particular pieces of footage shot by Coulibaly survived as part of the finished work.9 Afrique 50 only bears Vautier’s directing credit, whether for reasons of shielding any West African collaborators from being exposed to prosecution or on the principle that it was a work for which only he could claim final artistic responsibility.10 Nevertheless, by Vautier’s account, these political leaders, especially Coulibaly, and the RDA party organization, played significant roles in the film’s production and provided crucial support, protection, and guidance. This newly available evidence for Coulibaly’s previously obscured filmmaking role allows one to further define this anticolonial documentary work as emerging from black African collaboration in and outside of the colonial territories. The report’s identification of Ouezzin Coulibaly shows that authorities regarded as a serious political threat the prospect of any film production by colonial subjects, who had recently attained, in the postwar French Union order, the uncertain second‐class status of imperial citizens and formed political parties.
On a textual level, in its construction and rhetorical strategy, the film Afrique 50 culminates by calling the viewer to join in solidarity with the active resistance to a violent colonial administration that is already mobilizing in Africa as well as in France, linked through a closing montage of two political demonstrations, one in metropolitan France and one in French West Africa. This parallel defines the film’s closing refrain listing capital cities: “From Abidjan to Niamey, from Dakar to Brazzaville, the people of France and the people of Africa are shoulder to shoulder, and the African people will hold this place in the common struggle over and against all opposition, until the battle of life has been won.” In fact, in a gesture that would become a motif of militant documentary, the closing montage of Afrique 50 reuses a piece of footage from the final demonstration sequence of La Grande Lutte des mineurs – a 1948 film by Louis Daquin – that serves as an image of the “people of France.” Vautier cross‐cuts from a shot of colonial subjects marching in French West Africa to a medium close‐up panning shot of a black man (wearing a black beret) and an older white woman, marching arm and arm to the Internationale during a metropolitan miners’ strike. This emblematic scene of cross‐racial and inter‐generational labor alliance is inserted to complete a cinematic figuration of border‐crossing metropolitan‐colonial solidarity.
In concert with this montage work, the film’s use of sound, both its voice‐over and its recorded music, departed considerably from the rhetoric and texture defining conventions of state‐sponsored colonial documentaries. Early in the film, Vautier’s self‐recorded voice‐over acknowledges metropolitan spectators’ presumed familiarity with official colonial propaganda: “This is not the official image of colonization, my friends. Colonization here, as it is everywhere, is the reign of vultures.” The film offers a critique of the conventional form of state‐modernist documentary and its authoritative voice‐over by presenting unofficial images of life under colonial rule to the viewer and by anchoring these images in Vautier’s explanatory narration that points to the location of shooting yet also generalizes from the site he is speaking from (linking here to everywhere).11 Phrased in this way, the statement represents the larger project’s model of truth in the medium of documentary filmmaking and its claims to correct dominant modes of representing colonial social and political life in Africa. In the voice of the intellectual as filmmaker, Vautier readily speaks of a true image that replaces a false one.12
At the same time that the film explicitly articulates this aim to correct official representations and provide documentary evidence of reality, it embodies this stance in the material quality, tone, and rhythm of the film’s sound. Vautier’s untrained, partially improvised voice‐over brings to the film a rapid delivery and a tone of impassioned anger that function in the text as