Introduction*
The
thesis of this essay will be the question of politics and aesthetics in René
Vautier’s anti-colonial documentary Afrique
50. To examine this I will do a
formal analysis of Afrique 50 by
examining what the film presents and how it presents it. I will argue that Afrique 50 is a significant contribution
to the Classic Documentary movement by building upon Joris Iven’s The Spanish Earth. I will do a historical
analysis of Afrique 50 by examining
what is its social context. In regards to its social context, topics that will
be addressed include French colonialism and film censorship. Vautier’s
background and career will also be explored. Finally what makes Afrique 50 so valuable is how by being
made outside of the traditional production methods it could have been as
critical as it is.
Censorship
In
her article Inscribing the historical:
film texts in context, one of the few English texts to discuss Vautier, Rosemarie
Scullion describes the importance of a historical analysis, “film studies
scholars have begun to consider the ways in which historical processes shape
the meanings films generate and the contexts in which they are received." This is important to do justice to the historical complexities of the period.
As well as to better understand the representation of the past and the culture
that contributed to it. Scullion writes:
Films can display their historicity by
capturing and conveying the sensibility of a particular age. Created in
conditions that are, consciously or unconsciously, shaped by their own
historical moment, the work of interpreting such films involves describing
dominant conditions and apprehending the prevailing mind-set of the era while
also examining how films engage that particular setting.
Scullion examines the defined absence of the French film industry,
namely that of government censorship of films. This is particularly important
in discussing the work of Vautier who has gone up against French censorship
numerous times over his career. The political censorship of films was done by the
French government agency of the Commission de controle des films cinematographiques
(Film Oversight Board). Scullion describes its history and role as:
Although parity between government and
industry representatives was restored in 1952, struggles continues over the
constitution of a body that, in principle, held absolute authority over all
fiction and documentary films made in France. In exercising its powers, the
board had a range of restrictive measures at its disposal. The July 1945
decree, in conjunction with a more stringent order issued in 1961, allowed the
board to restrict access to films deemed unsuitable for certain age groups, to
issue warnings concerning content, to demand modifications and cuts, to ban
films entirely, and to withhold the permit required for their foreign export.
Roland
Barthes in Mythologies provides an
example of the “official” portrait of French colonialism in his description of
a young African soldier on the cover of a copy of Paris-Match. Barthes writes,
But, whether naively or not, I see very
well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons,
without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that
there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the
zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.
It
is against this public image of France that Vautier would be reacting to in Afrique 50 and throughout his career as
a filmmaker. The government censorship institutions will also make it difficult
for him to do so whether by confiscating his prints, prohibiting their
screenings or by jailing him.
Afrique
50: History
Vautier
describes his life story and the impetus for Afrique 50 in his autobiography Caméra
citoyenne. In the chapter on Afrique
50, which was re-printed in Mémoire Populaire,
Vautier describes how the project began in its original form. Vautier was
twenty-one years old at the time. In 1949, the Ligue de l’Enseignement (French
Educational Bureau) proposed to him that he makes a film for French students
that would “show how the villagers in French West Africa live.” There was
nothing revolutionary about the project. He was just supposed to go there,
document the sights with his 16mm camera, and then to edit them. It sounds like
what they wanted was something equivalent to a Gaumont-Pathé travelogue
newsreel.
But once he arrived in French West
Africa, with a group of peers that had similar diplomatic projects, the guide
from the domestic government insisted Vautier to film the pineapples in the
garden of the Niger offices… Instead, Vautier wanted to film the local dam
workers that he thought better reflected the quotidian reality of the African
landscape. Vautier asked an engineer about the worker’s harsh working conditions,
and the engineer answered that it was cheaper to pay Africans to maintain and
run the dam then it would be to set it up electrically (this anecdote would
make it into Afrique 50). Vautier
asked why they didn’t unionize, and the engineer answered that the previous men
who tried to unionize were (wrongfully) arrested for three years. Agitated by
what he was hearing, Vautier fought with this engineer. This led to him being kicked
out of his group and wanted by the authorities.
Vautier’s desire to provide a testimony
about this colonial exploitation motivated his journey through French West
Africa. He had to travel with precaution, and was lucky to get help from some
sympathizers, because the authorities wanted to arrest him since what he was
doing was illegal. During his voyage he would film the dehumanizing realities
of the Africans by French colonialism. Vautier’s hope was to eventually show this
footage to reveal to his fellow countrymen what was happening abroad in the
name of France. It was a lot of work and dangerous for Vautier to bring the
footage back to France, edit it, and then project it for an audience. For
example, a lot of the film stock was at first confiscated (Vautier only got a
small portion of it back), to get it developed the film stock was attached to
film-reels of pornography to avoid it getting caught by the censors, and it
never got a projection visa so it had to always be projected illegally.
In 1950 in France there were voices of
dissent about Colonialism in Africa, but these voices were not popular to
express, and were at times suppressed. There was no anti-colonialism in French
cinema before Afrique 50. The film
historians attribute this lack of anti-colonialism in French cinema due to the
previously mentioned hardship and censorship that was in place in order to
prevent it. As well as to the fact that cinema’s methods of production demands
more work, organization and collaboration (e.g. travel, processing, projections
visas etc.) than say a personal speech or article. Though in recent
documentaries about French colonialism there is now evidence that there had
been some critical newsreels. For example, in one newsreel there are French
soldiers going around shooting Africans.
Afrique
50: Film Form
The
following is a description of Afrique 50’s
formal qualities. Afrique 50 is around
18 minutes (there was more footage, which was confiscated by the authorities). Afrique 50 was filmed on 16mm film
stock, it’s in black-and-white, and the shots aren’t long. It consists of many
quick shots, edited together, in a rhythmic fashion. Its music is by Keita
Fodeba and Vautier himself reads the voice over.
Its documentary formal qualities are in
the John Grierson tradition of the classic documentary, like Industrial Britain or Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon, following the mantra
of “a creative treatment of actuality.”
So it is similar in that respect but it would be unfair to compare Afrique 50 to these other works, as it
would not be taking into account its militant and interventional qualities. The
cited British documentaries begin with certificates acknowledging that they
have been “Passed for Universal Exhibition” by the British Board of Film
Censors. Song of Ceylon, which is
about the Sinhalese people in Sri Lanka, never departs from being a cinema of
attraction travelogue and presents its subjects, as would a good ethnographer, by
just documenting them from an exterior perspective, presenting their ritualized
customs as spectacle. This is very far from what Vautier was doing.
To better understand Afrique 50, it is also valuable to contrast it with Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous. Vautier has publicly argued about French censorship (“We talk
about censorship – when we talk about it – only when it hits, cuts and
destroys”) with Rouch, who, as Vautier as argued, with his films didn’t go
against, therefore, maintained the colonial order. Where in something like
Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous, which was made 5 years after Afrique 50 in 1955, there is the strong
impression of forethought and pre-planning, which reflects its authorial
perspective. One of Afrique 50 main
attributes is its roughness. The
filming conditions were hostile and this shows in the quality of the image. For
Vautier there is an immediacy and urgency to his images. Where Rouch captures the
Africans dramatizing their folkloric rituals, Vautier’s cinema does not allow
for this theatricality and captures images that represent the site of crisis of
colonial oppression.
Vautier is actually closer to
someone like Joris Ivens, a filmmaker who Kees Baker describes as “one of the
most important documentary filmmakers of the twentieth century,”
and in particular the documentary form of Afrique
50 owes a lot to The Spanish Earth.
It is worth bringing up the scholarship around Ivens to better understand the
documentary forms that Vautier, by way of Ivens, is working with. It is also
interesting to note how both filmmakers have written autobiographies Caméra citoyenne for the latter and The Camera and I for the former, which
illustrates how with these engaged filmmakers that their lives, practice and
work are very much intertwined and that the process of filmmaking can be, and
is, just as interesting as the final product itself.
José Manuel Costa, in his essay, Joris Ivens and the Documentary Project,
writes about the creation and rise of the documentary in the Twenties and Thirties,
It is a way of seeking the renewal of the
language of film, by coming out of the limitations of the studio, opening a new
film practice, using reality – and the opposing resistance of reality – in
order to achieve a genuinely new creative mood, one that is not overburdened by
industrial conventions. In this sense, it uses the road opened by the genius of
Flaherty, but it does so with its own new program, which includes confronting
contemporary social reality and contradictions, the analysis of our present
world.
Costa
distinguishes between the key figures that contributed to the invention of the documentary form,
during the transition to sound cinema,
All those three matrices (Ivens, Grierson, and Lorentz) were responsible for a
common pattern of artistic search and social concern that has been definitely
associated with the genre (the latter being what we could call a pattern of social productivity). But neither the
Grierson public education approach
nor the lyric Rooseveltian approach
of Lorentz identified as clearly as did Joris Ivens with the very boundaries of
that process and with the process itself – that is, the assumption of the
avant-garde spirit and its progressive assimilation into a social, political,
and historical intervention.
Costa
situates Ivens work within the avant-garde tradition as well as with the
political intervention. In particular Costa analyzes Ivens’ The Spanish Earth and his later Le 17e Parallèle and its engagement with
war. Costa sees in The Spanish Earth one
of the first cinematic documentaries where an artist (Ivens, but also Ernest
Hemingway) goes to a war-zone, in this case the Spanish Civil War, and constructs
itself, its narrative form, as the war is unfolding. Even though Vautier’s
formation is different and even though Afrique
50 isn’t a war documentary, Ivens tradition of political engagement is the
same lineage that Vautier is building upon when he makes Afrique 50.
While Georges Sadoul, a communist film
historian, in his essay un maître du cinéma
vérité puts Ivens in the tradition of vérité
long before the popularization of the term. For Sadoul, “Vertov, Flaherty,
Joris Ivens, these three major creators are the three “grands patrons” of cinéma vérité.”
For Sadoul, by way of Ivens, vérité literally
means truth. This is different then how the term is now traditionally known for
where it applies more to the movement in the Sixties and Seventies sparked by
more light and mobile cameras of the capturing of people on the fly in the
immediacy of lived experiences. Sadoul quotes a text by Ivens from Les Lettres francaises in 1963 that
elaborates on their definition of cinéma
vérité,
In certain cases, cinéma vérité forces
the creation of militant films. In this situations there are brutal forces that
intervene to extinguish the truth through diverse forms: censorship, police
etc. Also in a period where truth isn’t always easy to say, it is instructive
and comforting to re-read Bertolt Brecht discussing the “five obstacles towards
saying the truth,” it is this truth that would escape us if we didn’t have the
liberty to express ourselves through screens, to share with a public our
researches about the truth.
It
is this militant film tradition, in the name of “truth,” that Vautier builds
upon from Ivens. There is also another connection between Vautier and Ivens. In
1950 in Varsovie at the Festival Mondial de la Jeunesse the jury that was
presided by Joris Ivens gave Afrique 50
the Mondial de Jeunes Realisateurs prize for the best documentary.
Afrique
50: Content
Afrique 50 opens on a positive tone: perhaps to not
totally shock its potential audience at the time with the awfulness it will be
critiquing by the end, or perhaps as a way to avoid censorship just by showing
the start of it to people (though it would have already been censored), or
perhaps to follow through with the original pedagogical goals of the project. But
the tone of Afrique 50 at the
beginning is positive. Children are looking at the camera and smiling and
putting out their tongues. Women are grinding millets. Women are bathing. On
top of this footage there is the discussion of natural resources. There are
scenes of rope making. There are scenes of women with pretty hair braids and
others of women cutting men’s hair. The voice-over is comforting as the speaker
reassuringly guides the spectator through this community. There are fishermen,
just like the ones in Brittany (where Vautier is from, a region in the
northwest of France), who are making fishing nets. There are boating scenes. There
are children that are playing and they go swimming in the Niger River.
Then, after six minutes of footage, the
music gets faster and more intense, and the documentary starts to become
critical. Vautier describes this community as being “very lucky in its misery,
because it is peaceful.” He then contrasts it with another village, Fallaqa in
the northern Ivory Coast. The city couldn’t pay the enforced taxes so the local
forces, which are comprised of French officers, killed them. This is
accompanied by footage of houses riddled with bullet holes. There are scenes of
dying animals. Vautier says, “This is not the official image of the
colonization.”
This critique of French colonialism
becomes the direct subject of Afrique 50.
Vautier compares French colonialism to that of vultures surrounding its
dying prey. Vautier criticizes the exploits of these corporations who label
their initiatives as representing “progress.” The accused’s are West African
Commercial Company, the Companie Francaise de L’Afrique Occidentale, GABOME,
The French African, the French Niger, The French Company of Ivory Coast, and
Unilever.
The focus then shifts towards the Markala
dam on the Niger River, which produces electricity for the French colonizers.
The local Africans operate the dam manually because it is cheaper to pay them
then it would be to set it up electrically. The Africans are made to work in
dangerous situations. They are overworked and are underpaid. There is footage
of the workers breaking rocks. They harvest and grind millet. They are out
working in the cotton and peanut fields. It is not only the adult men that are
working but also the women and children. They are shown working in plantations.
The workers get paid fifty francs a day, and if they get killed on the job
their widow are to receive five-hundred francs. All the while the profits at
Unilever go up exponentially.
The narrator Vautier elaborates on how
the French abolished slavery in 1946 but now charge taxes (and we’ve already
seen what happens if they aren’t paid) so the locals are forced to work for
these dehumanizing industrial companies. There is footage of the boats out on
the coast waters that are ready to export the African natural resources.
Following the intense footage of
workers performing manual labor accompanied by an voice-over track critiquing
French colonialism, Vautier ends Afrique
50 with inspiring footage of the people uniting, and protesting. There is
perhaps the chance of a better future for them but the African people, with the
help of the French, will need to protest and fight. The French population needs
to see what is going on in French West Africa in their name. Vautier by making
this film is doing his part. The people will need to be in solidarity with one
another. Afrique 50’s conclusion is
that of solidarity and activism. It has gone from idle observation to critical
interrogation to unifying protest.
René Vautier
The
classic story of Vautier is that he fought as a teenager during the occupation in
the French resistance and when he was sent to Africa he fought there too. He
was a communist then, and still is, and at the age of twenty-one years old in
1949 the Ligue de l’enseignement en Afrique sent him to make a pedagogical film
about how people lived in the French African colonies. It was filmed in the Ivory
Coast between 1949 and 1950 during the colonial repression. Vautier was angry
at the hypocrisy that was ruling the African French colonies and the lack of
information about it back in France. So he decided to fight back with a film
camera. The filmmaking medium is a lot more cumbersome to work with especially for
this kind of project. Some of the hardships Vautier experienced include how he
had to film illegally in a foreign country where he had to put himself in
danger and had to escape authorities. When he returned back to France with the
footage (some of it was stolen), he still had to then process it (he did so by
attaching the film stock to pornography, which wasn’t being checked by
censors). And finally, after it was completed Vautier ended up getting a
one-year prison sentence.
Sadoul would hail Afrique 50 as the first anti-colonialist film and would speak
highly of Vautier in his Dictionaire des
Cineastes.
The film did not get a theatrical release in a commercial cinema but instead
played in political rallies, most notably by the communist, as well as in
social meetings. Vautier speaks of the film being seen by a great number of
people.
Afrique
50 was officially banned
for fifty years. In 1996 Vautier, who thought the film to be lost, received a
restored copy of the film from the French Ministery of Culture who wanted to show
it in the French embassies in Africa as a sign that demonstrates that there was
a pronounced anti-colonial tendency in France that goes as far back as 1950.
The African film critic Paulin Soumanou Vieyra in Presence Africaine wrote about it, “The originality of the film is
to be able to highlight the veritable causes of the African genocide.”
Following the official (re-)release of Afrique 50 in 1996 there has been many
new studies on Vautier’s cinema. There is an anecdote of Vautier who contacted
the representatives of the Larousse Dictionary on Filmmakers asking them to be
included in their volume and they turned him down. Their reason that they gave him
was that he wasn’t a filmmaker but a militant. This has been for a long time the
general perception on the subject of Vautier’s cinema. One of Vautier’s biggest
supporters in this period of re-emergence has been the French film-critic
Nicole Brenez who has famously said, "The most important film in the
history of cinema is Afrique 50."
In this period Vautier also published his
memoir Caméra citoyenne and Cahiers du Cinema also did a feature on
him in their special issue on cinema’s relation to history.
More recently L’association Mas O Menos restored his film Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès which played at the Venice Film
Festival (and was positively featured in Film
Comment) and Les Mutins de Pangée just published a new book on him. Many of
Vautier’s short-films and documentaries about him are now also easily
accessible on YouTube.
Vautier’s Films
It
worth noting that Vautier was still a film student at the L'Institut des
hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) when he worked on Louis Daquin’s La Grande Lutte Des Mineurs, which is is
about a mass protest at a mine by its workers. The Daquin film, similar to Robert
Ménégoz’ Vivent les dockers, were
part of a genre of agit-prop films of the period whose function was to document
social injustices and to promote solidarity and revolutionary protest. The
majority of them were done in the name of the communist party and they
reflected a Marxist approach to social change and class differences. These
cinematic forms would greatly contribute to Afrique
50’s aesthetic.
To cite some of Vautier’s other films
there is Un homme est mort, Une nation l'Algérie, Algérie en flammes, J’ai huit ans, Avoir 20
ans dans les Aurès and Techniquement
si simple.
Algérie
en flammes is an anti-colonial
documentary. It’s more traditional in its reportage than Afrique 50. Vautier’s footage was used in Yann Le Masson and Olga
Baidar-Poliakoff’s J’ai huit ans,
which goes from children drawings of African culture to harsh images of the
war. In Techniquement si simple a gluttonous
Frenchman talks about working at an oil field in Algiers and living with an Arab
who he would come to despise for his poverty and life style.
Vautier’s most famous other film after Afrique 50 is Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès, which is a full-length fictional film
made from real testimonies by French soldiers during the Algerian war. It takes
place in April 1961 in the Aurès where a group of French soldiers confronts
another group of the Armée de libération nationale. After a fight they pick up
some of their soldiers as prisoners. Then they reflect on their time there and
how their views on the war have changed as they have become more skeptical. Vautier
had to go on a hunger strike to get the censors to allow it to be shown at
Cannes.
In 1962 Vautier would also live in Tunisia
to set up a film cooperative, the Algerian Audio-Visual Center, where he gave
cameras to the locals for them to make their own films. This is why he would
come to be known as the father of Algerian cinema. He would also create his own
production company l’Unité de production cinématographique Bretagne where he
would make his own films more freely.
But Vautier isn’t alone even though he
might have been one of the first to make an anti-colonial film. Some of Vautier’s
peers who made anti-colonial cinema include: Phillippe de Broca made a war documentary
Algerian War, Pierre Clément was an
important cinematographer who contributed to making anti-colonial films, and
there is Yann Le Masson and Olga Baidar-Poliakoff who worked with Vautier on J’ai huit ans.
Conclusion
All
of this goes to show that Vautier is really conscious of the political and
aesthetic context that his images contribute to. Vautier builds upon a rich
history of political documentaries both in terms of the Ivens vérité tradition and within a communist
agit-prop tradition. Vautier’s body of work as a filmmaker has evolved and grew
over his life. There is also a cinematic and poetic quality to his images that
is never used to undermine the radical politics that they want to convey.
Brenez compares Vautier’s
films to Karl Marx’s early poems. “Ce
picturesque cache bien une grande misère,” writes Brenez, “Vautier
represents the archetype of an engaged filmmaker ... for Vautier, images
can create and argument that can lead to a real critique in the visual debates
of the world and its horizon would be a state where the world would be more
just.” The
variety of films that Vautier made from experimental shorts, traditional and
poetic documentaries, to feature films display his experimentation with
cinematic forms. He has built his own repertoire of gestures, images, and
stylistics that conveys his power of conviction.
If late in his life he is now interviewed
a lot about his body of work, he is finally providing a reverse-shot of the person
who built some of film historie's most powerful images. The person responsible
for the camera that fought back French colonialism with Afrique 50 and his entire body of work is now more freely able to
communicate his views. Vautier’s anecdotes on the conditions of when he created
his films are fascinating. His experiences, motives and politics are a guiding
example. By finally having Vautier’s films more easily accessible
they can be better studied and discussed. The hope of all of this would be to
inspire and raise the level of integrity of its spectators to acknowledge
crimes against humanity and to fight these injustices. Afrique 50 describes a crime of the past but it would be naïve to
think that there aren’t still crimes like this happening today. The power of
Vautier’s conviction in the film camera and in the moving images that it
creates still continues to inspire.
*This an essay that I wrote for my Classic Documentary class at York University where I'm doing my Masters in Cinema and Media Studies. - D.D.
No comments:
Post a Comment