Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Colonial Cinema

2021; Indiana University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/blackcamera.12.2.02

1947-4237

Armes,

African history and culture studies

Colonial Cinema Roy Armes (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure A. Film poster for the French film Brazza ou l'épopée du Congo / Epic of the Congo (dir. Léon Poirier, 1940, France). Image in the public domain. [End Page 10] If we are to address questions of the history and culture of nationhood, the particular form taken by the intersection of contemporary history, culture, and politics which manifestly is a crucial question for the recent experiences of most of the world's population, we ought similarly to consider not what 'identity' is … but how actual, specific, socially and historically located people, and groups of people, themselves articulate their self-conceptions, their historical experience and their place in society. James McDougal1 North Africa has given us better wines than we could have imagined. I see no reason why she should not, tomorrow, give us the best French films.2 —French actor Harry Baur, 1937 The cinema reached Africa at much the same time as it spread across Europe and the United States. There were film shows in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1896, in Tunis and Fez in 1897, Dakar in 1900 and Lagos in 1903. The initial impulse behind this worldwide spread was purely commercial: the desire to exploit to the full the commercial potential of what its inventors, like the Lumière Brothers, feared might be just a passing novelty. But as film narrative developed in length and complexity, the export of film took on a new significance. As Férid Boughedir has observed: "Cinema reached Africa with colonialism. Its principal role was to supply a cultural and ideological justification for political domination and economic exploitation."3 In many ways cinema succeeded in this role: "A native worker performs better when he believes that the representatives of colonial power are his betters by race, and that his own civilization is inferior to that of the whites."4 Little one-minute films were also shot in Africa at the turn of the century, as the Lumière operators made a habit of shooting local "views" (a comparatively simple procedure since Lumière's cinematograph was both camera and projector combined).The aim was both to increase the attractiveness of the Lumières' local screenings and to provide films for subsequent worldwide [End Page 11] distribution. The Lumière catalogue of 1905 contains over fity such views shot in North Africa. One of Lumière's leading operators, whose career is of particular interest, is Alexandre Promio (1868–1926). He shot little scenes in Algiers and Tlemcen as early as 1896 and worked in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt in 1897, returning to North Africa once more in 1903. Promio, who discovered the East on his first trip to Algeria, remained fascinated by it, but, as Jean-Claude Seguin notes, his gaze "may be subtle, but it is nonetheless obviously orientalist."5 Promio went on in 1912 to work for the film and photographic service of the French government in Algiers, where he stayed for twelve years. Seguin sees a continuity in his thirty-year career, which can serve as an exemplar for the development and use of cinema in colonial Africa as a whole in the early years of the twentieth century. Working for the Lumière company for ten years, Promio "had explored the planet to reveal its comical, surprising or simply exotic aspects." For the French administration he had subsequently "journeyed across the colony, travelling in the service of the vast propaganda project inspired by the French authorities."6 The arrival in Tunisia in 1919 of the director Luitz-Morat—a former stage partner of Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux camélias and of Réjane in Madame Sans-gêne—to shoot scenes for his feature film The Five Cursed Gentlemen/Les Cinq gentlemen maudits,7 marked a new stage in the exploitation of the African colonies, namely their use as locations for foreign feature films. Of the handful of films set in West Africa, most—such as Léon Poirier's Brazza or The Epic of the Congo / Brazza ou l...