a commissioned project to depict the conditions of rural village life in the colonial territories of French West Africa l’Afrique occidentale française (AOF). Its sponsorship by the League of Teaching (Ligue de l’Enseignement) marks the film’s uneasy relation to a civil‐society organization that had been closely linked to the French state’s ideals of national popular education and state secularism (laicité) since the period of the Third Republic (1870–1940) and revived under French national reconstruction efforts after the Liberation. Under the commission, Vautier and Vogel were meant to show primary and secondary‐school students in France how French West African villagers lived: it was to be “a small teaching film, in 16mm […] of images reflecting the quotidian reality of African peasantry” (Vautier 1998: 30). After encountering the violent reality of the colonial order, however, the filmmakers turned this work of state‐sponsored civic pedagogy into an explicitly oppositional work that undermined the hierarchical relations of sponsorship and the pedagogical representation of the colonies for the metropolitan center.
The documentary material for Afrique 50 was shot on silent 16 mm black‐and‐white film over several months from 1949 to 1950 in French West Africa, following the filmmakers’ travels from Dakar to Bamako to Abidjan, and in towns throughout the region, principally in the areas of present‐day Mali (Soudan Français), Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta). This material was edited in Paris later in 1950 upon Vautier and Vogel’s separate returns to France. The two filmmakers had been briefly detained in French West Africa during their 1949–1950 journey and then further pursued by French police as they arranged for pieces of footage to be clandestinely sent back to the metropole through multiple intermediaries. For Vautier, this aspect of the production – the survival of the footage and his evasion of authorities – signified a story of solidarity between sites and people across Africa and France. In his account, the clandestine movement of the documentary footage served to embody the clandestine passage of the truth that could not be suppressed. Back in Paris in 1950, the League of Teaching, Vautier’s sponsor, disowned his work and complied with the police by handing over all the positives and negatives left at its office. When Vautier was detained again in Paris by inspectors who questioned him about the footage, he was finally able to retrieve a fraction of the seized footage (21 of some 60 reels) in secret, under their haphazard surveillance. Vautier managed to have this material developed by splicing the footage to the end of reels of undeveloped pornographic films that film laboratories customarily allowed to pass. After he completed and screened the film in 1950, Vautier was convicted of shooting without administrative authorization under the Laval Decree and served a prison sentence of a little more than a year from 1951 to 1952 (Vautier 1998: 45)
In the immediate postwar period, this Laval Decree set strict limits on authorized audiovisual recording, as well as the circulation of films, in the colonial territories, and it constrained documentary filmmakers within the French colonial empire.4 The 1934 law took its name from Pierre Laval, who served as Minister of the Colonies between his terms as Prime Minister. Laval’s role in the Vichy government had led to his conviction for high treason and execution by De Gaulle’s new Republic after the Liberation. Officially known as the “Décret du 8 mars 1934,” the Laval Decree was applied first to the jurisdiction of French West Africa, before other territories. This priority can perhaps be explained by the particular interwar political importance of French West Africa for administrators, policymakers, and propagandists who spurred a reform movement called colonial humanism that sought to recast colonial governance and control colonial publicity circuits around new tenets of benevolent scientific administration and economic development.5
Yet after the war, the political press began to underline Laval’s Vichy collaboration and the renewed salience of his name. When the French Communist Party–associated film weekly L’Écran Français published a report in May 1951 about Afrique 50 and the prosecution of Vautier and Vogel, the piece was headlined “Afrique Noire: Zone Interdite par Pierre Laval aux cinéastes” (“Black Africa: A Zone Forbidden by Pierre Laval to Filmmakers”) and described Vautier as an opponent of “all the Laval Decrees of the world, against racism and fascism” (Krier 1951).
Although, at the time it was made, Afrique 50 did not become a model for broader, more sustained networks of radical anticolonial documentary activity, the film did represent an exemplary instance of radical documentary methods for constructing sound and image, and their adaptation to emerging anticolonial mobilizations in French intellectual and cultural life. Indeed, the role of metropolitan intellectuals outside the colonies became more important to the anticolonial struggle than before the war; for documentary filmmakers, then, the task was to reject colonial documentary conventions and to translate into cinematic form the causes of political equality and self‐determination emerging from colonial territories. Combining the form of an educational travelogue with a critical inquiry into the conditions underlying uprisings against police repression, Afrique 50 revived styles of critique and protest from an interwar tradition of international solidarity documentary that linked Joris Ivens, Henri Storck, the Workers Film and Photo League, Nykino, and other practitioners who drew on principles and methods of Soviet documentary production back to Dziga Vertov.6 In French documentary history, the film’s precedents included the work of the Groupe Octobre and anti‐fascist PCF‐associated political documentary from Popular Front cultural production of the 1930s.7 Popular Front committed filmmaking, exemplified by La Vie est à nous (dir. Jean Renoir, Jean‐Paul Le Chanois, Jacques B. Brunius, and Jacques Becker, 1936), addressed inequality at the national level but was limited in its engagement with the political context of colonial empire. But countering state‐sponsored colonial documentary called for a form that distinguished its use of sound and images from both the social and material aspects of cinematic representations supporting colonial rule. The regulation of moving image recording that maintained a stark division between metropolitan and colonial territories constituted a problem for the film’s production and may be read as manifest across its form, from the rhetorical address of Vautier’s voice‐over commentary – a challenge to state voice‐over conventions – to its use of montage as part of its committed engagement with collective political activity.
In the film, colonized people are first represented in scenes of village residents taking part in everyday life and then later in organized party demonstrations: the opening offers the viewer a brisk tour, establishing a representation of work and life in and around the village (which is not given a specific identity other than its proximity to the Niger River). Through a series of brief long‐shot sequences, the film shows views of activities over the course of one day, such as brickmaking, bathing, weaving, millet grinding, rope‐making, hair‐dressing, playing ball, and building pirogues. The voice‐over, with a tone of good‐humored instruction, comments on and likens these scenes to what people do as well in the provinces of metropolitan France, for example, by fishermen in the ports of Brittany (Vautier’s native region) or rugby players in Toulouse. By drawing an analogy between daily life in provincial mainland France and in the colonies the film initially follows a commonplace of colonial documentary that instructs metropolitan spectators. Yet the voice‐over also reminds the viewer that this series of images may be recognized as an instance of the “picturesque” (pittoresque), idealized clichéd images contrasted with the reality of economic exploitation and political violence that his film points to as documentary actuality: “You will see very picturesque things, without a doubt, but little by little you’ll come to realize that the picturesque poorly hides great poverty.”
The film’s critique of the imperial political economy follows this initial depiction of tranquil yet impoverished life in the African countryside, of a village “that is still fortunate in its misery” since “there’s still peace.” The film stresses the evidence of a lack of economic resources and the lack of education for children. While the voice‐over acerbically anticipates that such conditions elicit surprise (“You’re surprised to see a village without a school, without a doctor?”),