A Companion to Documentary Film History. Группа авторов
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for spare change, the voice‐over comments acerbically that the streets of the Latin Quarter were the place “where I found, one morning, civilization in the school of outstretched hands.” In this shift in grammatical number, the voice‐over thereby seems to adopt in free indirect discourse either the presumed inner voice of the on‐screen student or that of the panhandler. With this statement, the representation of an unexpected exchange between strangers in public on the street becomes a possible exchange of voices, and it pointedly takes the place of any standard celebration of the official civilizing mission in French schools. This articulation of the first‐person singular subjectivity of a black African voice coincides with an image of individual benevolence that also ironizes colonial benevolence and promises of equality. The Groupe Africain du Cinéma produced a work of their own that recorded and centered the speaking subject of a black African man, speaking in French in particular, shifting between the singular and the plural and raising the question of how assimilation related to struggles over decolonization. And in doing so, the Groupe put into their work the first‐person speech of such a figure three years before Jean Rouch worked with Oumarou Ganda in Moi, un noir (Treichville) (Vieyra 1958) to create post‐synchronized voice‐over monologues of fantasy and memory about the experience of migration from the French colony of Niger to the Ivory Coast.
In the wake of independence in Senegal and throughout the former French colonies of West Africa after 1960, Afrique sur Seine ’s focus on the perspective of educated elite overseas students and migrants already living in the metropole soon appeared to many audiences and intellectuals as signs of a film eclipsed by and displaced from the prevailing project of creating a new African cinema: it did not satisfy later more urgent pan‐African and nationalist goals to retrieve historical examples of forthright anticolonial cultural production. In this sense, Afrique sur Seine embodied neither the agitational fervor of a work of anticolonial denunciation and mass mobilization, such as Afrique 50, nor an attempt at caustic and ironizing reverse ethnography, which later projects by Rouch and African makers would pursue. Rather it served as a sign of and testimony to the reality of various guarded hesitancies, conflicts, and ambivalences of black Africans situated within yet on the margins of spaces of colonial French white supremacy during a time of late colonial crisis. Its construction marked a particular idiom for formulating political and cultural demands for one form of emancipatory possibility and equality in this fraught period of late colonial politics.
By returning to two significant projects of documentary cinema that emerged out of cultural shifts in anticolonial counterpublicity in the French colonial empire from the 1940s to the 1950s, this essay has argued that documentary makers such as René Vautier and Paulin Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma produced new documentary approaches to the exploration of displacements between the sites of the metropole and the colonies and regarded this field of divisions and crossings on and off screen as a means through which to register the postwar world’s decisively shifting relations of race, nation, and empire, as the terms of colonial power were subject to renewed critique. In a landscape still defined by the French colonial bureaucratic censorship regulations of the Laval Decree, the documentary experimentation in sound and image of Afrique 50 and Afrique sur Seine represented reworkings of these political and formal limits. As this essay’s examination of such techniques as the reuse of footage from Afrique 50 in Afrique sur Seine has proposed, the political provocations contained in these films’ histories of production and their relations to African and French documentary film history begin to become intelligible in all their implications if one analyzes how this colonial context of censorship worked its way into makers’ conception of documentary methods and into the materiality and form of documentary itself.
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