1 1 The federation of French‐ruled West Africa (l’Afrique‐Occidentale française, or the AOF) was a significant administrative entity from 1895 to 1958, with continuity across various reorganizations from the colonial empire under the Third Republic to the French Union under the Fourth Republic constitution (1946) and ending with the formation of the French Community under the Fifth Republic constitution (1958). At its height, the AOF was composed of the colonies of Senegal, Mauritania, Soudan (Mali), Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Dahomey (Benin), Niger, and the mandated territory of Togo.

      2 2 All French‐to‐English translations in this essay are my own. The film critic and historian Georges Sadoul may have inaugurated this designation in 1951 when he wrote that Vautier “has already toppled the wall of silence on colonialism with his Afrique 50, which in one sure blow is the first French anticolonialist film.” This defense is reprinted on the back cover of Vautier’s memoirs, but I have not succeeded in locating an original source, perhaps from an uncollected journalistic piece (Vautier 1998). The combination DVD and book Afrique 50 / De Sable et de sang insists upon the credit, used by Vautier himself, and refers to Vautier’s film as the “first anticolonial French film” (“le premier film anticolonial français”) (Azam and Richard 2013).

      3 3 See the pamphlet Afrique 50, Collection “Les Cahiers de Paris Expérimental,” no. 3, ed. Christian Lébrat (Paris: René Vautier / Éditions Paris Expérimental, Lébrat 2001), which contains an English translation by Tami L. Williams. See also Ungar (2011); Vautier (1998).

      4 4 See the full text of the “Décret Laval” included in the folder “Réglementation – A.O.F.” Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 1733, ANOM/FM1/AP/1733. The decree was printed in the federal register, Journal Officiel de la République Française, no. 60, 11 mars 1934, p. 2541.

      5 5 On the historical, political, and technological context shaping the Laval Decree and the roles of Vautier and Vieyra, see Diawara (1992 : 22–24). See also Genova (2013: 24–30). Paulin Vieyra, later drawn on by Manthia Diawara, pointed to the introduction of synchronized sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the main context for reforming colonial regulations due to the heightened concerns of administrators about more effective colonial counter‐publicity made possible by this development. See Vieyra’s early work of African film historiography, “Propos sur le cinéma africain,” Présence Africaine no. 22 (October–November Vieyra 1958: 106–117). On the ideas, institutions, and initiatives of the “new colonial rationality” of the interwar reformers, see Wilder (2005).

      6 6 See Thomas Waugh’s analysis of the heritage of the “international solidarity” genre in committed documentary and its recurrent features, such as the “demonstration trope.” (Waugh 1999; Waugh 2016).

      7 7 On these lineages in French committed filmmaking, see Buchsbaum (1988) and Marie (2005).

      8 8 The folder titled “Affaires Vogel et Vauthier [sic]” contains a February 12, 1950 six‐page letter to the Ministry of the Colonies that reports on Vogel and Vautier as RDA “agitators.” See Archives Nationales d’Outre‐mer, Fonds ministériels, Direction des Affaires Politiques, Box 2145, Dossier 3, ANOM FM1/AP/2145/3, “Affaires Vogel et Vauthier [sic].” Because current French law imposes a 60‐year delay in accessibility (“délai de communicabilité”) on these archival records concerning “national defense,” this file only became available to archival researchers in 2010. As similar records become accessible, historians will have new state sources to interpret and incorporate into studies of late colonial‐era regulations of moving image and sound production and exhibition.

      9 9 For more on Ouezzin Coulibaly’s history in the RDA movement, see Coulibaly (1989).

      10 10 After the title card “Afrique 50 / Film de René Vautier,” the film only provides two additional title cards: one to credit the sponsor and the date of shooting (“Tourné pour la Ligue / de l’Enseignment / en 1949‐1950”) and one for the soundtrack consisting of the recorded musical accompaniment and scripted voice‐over, crediting the orchestra leader Keita Fodéba for the former: “Musique de Keita Fodeba / Texte de René Vautier.”

      11 11 On the integral alignment between methods of modernist formal montage and classical state voice‐over with the welfare‐state ideology of political authority, see Jonathan Kahana’s analysis of New Deal‐era American documentary cinema (Kahana 2008: 89–140).

      12 12 Vautier’s notion of the documentary vocation follows this model: “to become a documentary maker. The objective was evidently to put a truth into images; as the role of the censor was to veil [voiler] all or part of a truth that doesn’t conform to the official truth, I was condemned from the start to fight against it!” (Vautier 1998: 9).

      13 13 The phrase “Afrique sur Seine” is used by Jean Rouch 15 years later as the title for the second section of his film Petit à Petit (1969, released in 1971), in which his frequent collaborators, the Nigeriens Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahim, stage the fiction of visiting Paris to conduct a “reverse ethnography” of European life, in a scenario partly inspired by the reversals of Persian Letters (title of the first section in the film). In 1961, one reviewer wrote that Chronicle of a Summer could be called “Afrique‐sur‐Seine” since it depicted the “Africans of Rouch” in Paris (Bory 1961: 169).

      14 14 In 1953, the journal Présence Africaine devoted an issue, entitled “Black Students Speak…” (“Les étudiants noirs parlent…”), to the new rising postwar generation of African students. Présence Africaine no. 14 (1953). The number of black African and Caribbean overseas students in Paris and the metropolitan provinces grew considerably from some 250 in 1946 to 2000 in 1955 and some 5500 in 1960, according to the National Ministry of Education. A number of postwar associations, such as the Fédération des étudiants d’Afrique noire en France (FEANF), founded in 1950, represented this growing visibility (Blanchard 2011: 192–193).

      15 15 Neither Rouch nor Vieyra provide this particular detail about the appeal made to Griaule elsewhere in their other accounts (Rouch 1967: 21).

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