only an emerging currency in the mid‐1950s – as a collective lyrical essay film.
The critical beginnings of a self‐conscious postwar cinematic essay tradition lead back to another project devised within and against this same colonial cultural institution, the Musée de l’Homme: two years earlier, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet made Les Statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die] (1953), as a documentary on the subject of “black art,” under a commission from the publishing house and journal Présence Africaine. As a site of cultural collecting, exhibition, and the ongoing production of cultural knowledge and heritage inextricable from practices of colonial possession and dispossession, the Musée de l’Homme was used by a generation of makers with some access to its holdings in their own critical discursive investigations into not only the history of colonialism, but also the history of a heritage of colonial documentary moving images and recorded sounds. One might even think of Afrique sur Seine when a key figuration of black documentary image‐making and direct address appears in the final incendiary third of Les statues meurent aussi, devoted to the “art of transition” and “art of the present” made by black artists: we see a shot of a black photographer holding his flashbulb camera aloft and pointed directly toward the viewer, as the narrator speaks of images captured everyday (“the sorcerer captures images everyday”). Statues, banned by French censors, exemplified an emerging current in postwar documentary formal experimentation before cinéma verité, in the form of what Marker would later call a “cinematic pamphlet” (Marker 1961: 9). It did so by working toward a particular transformation of literary essayistic commentary and critique, set in relation to newly shot material but also an intricate montage of preexisting archival documentary and newsreel material. In this light, Afrique sur Seine approached similar problems of construction and enunciation, and it especially sought to settle on a way to assemble new and preexisting footage with a voice‐over narration that could produce a work of collective first‐person subjectivity.
Paulin Vieyra effectively took the lead in the Groupe Africain du Cinéma, and through his critical writings, he became its first critic and historian. He would also go on to become the best known and most influential former member of this group, as a critic and organizer. Through his educational and public work, he was integral to revising the limited Western‐authored accounts of the history of cinema in Africa and to writing new, more comprehensive histories of African cinema that chronicled its postcolonial development and rethought its coherence as a project and category for film history. He participated in pan‐African institution‐building, later working for FEPACI (the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes), work that began with his writings for the journal Présence Africaine in the period between the 1956 First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris and the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar. It then continued with the publication of two of the earliest post‐independence historical and critical studies that have shaped the understanding of African cinema as a cultural project – the collection Le Cinéma et l’Afrique (1969) and the work of reference Le Cinéma africain: des origines à 1973 (1975).17
Hardly unknown, yet still of limited availability for decades, the documentary Afrique sur Seine (1955) has mainly been distinguished as an untimely outlier in the historiography of African cinema. It has been screened as a noteworthy work mostly in the context of African, rather than French, film festivals and events. In 2005, a screening of the film at FESPACO marked the fiftieth anniversary of African cinema south of the Sahara (Ruelle et al. 2005: 13). In many narratives of African cinema, including in Vieyra’s and Jean Rouch’s writings, the film is cited as a milestone, yet framed primarily as a false start or a precursor to the more fully “legitimate” beginnings of an autonomous African cinema made by filmmakers from independent nations in Africa south of the Sahara.18 It has also been regarded as an emblem for later acts of resistance to dominant cultural representations through the act of speaking back or reclaiming one’s voice against the figure of the colonizer. This change in the politics of enunciation marks a turn in narratives of the colonization and decolonization of culture, of black African producers taking cameras into their own hands and speaking in their own voices to work to consolidate or strategically mobilize a unified identity and call for the making of an African cinema (Thackway 2003). Yet the film also deserves greater attention than it has received by documentary film scholars and in critical histories of documentary film in general. It carries considerable critical value due to the productively troubling occasion and location of its production in relation to histories of cinema in Africa, France, and the French colonial empire. Afrique sur Seine approached its subject of black metropolitan cultural life and colonial racism in a manner that avoided censorship and suppression (unlike Afrique 50 or Les Statues meurent aussi), and it now stands as one of the only postwar documentaries made by colonial subjects or citizens about colonial racism in the French Union before the dissolution of most of the empire in the years surrounding 1960.19
Crucial to understanding what is at stake in the complexities and contradictions of voice and form in Afrique sur Seine is grasping the act of appropriation that figured in the film’s production. The opening sequence of Afrique sur Seine reproduces the image track of an 18‐shot sequence, lasting 1 minute and 10 seconds, that comes directly from Afrique 50. This reuse of footage, with Vautier’s original narration replaced, is uncredited. In the opening sequence of Afrique sur Seine, the viewer is shown images of young boys playing in an expanse of African countryside at the edge of town – gathering around a spinning snail‐shell top, roughhousing in a game of ball, and jumping into the Niger River – while the voice‐over speaks of the “carefree” pleasures of a past childhood “before the sun” “in our little corner of Africa.” This image sequence is thereby relocated to an historical and memorial past within the documentary, as a piece of documentary film history.
The gesture of including such images shot in French West Africa was highly significant given the censorship conditions defined by the Laval Decree. The provision of this footage made it possible for the Groupe Africain to circumvent its failure to obtain authorization to shoot in the colonies. Several opposing meanings accrue to these images when considered in their relation to the writing of history in images. Whether examined at a historical moment of galvanizing decolonizing activism or at a later time once they belong to the archive of documentary cinema, the incorporation of these images into the body of the film attests to an adherence to the letter of the law. Yet this documentary act also invites one to both imagine a possible violation of the regulation by the Groupe and recall the actual violation committed by Vautier.
Afrique sur Seine ’s reuse of others’ footage may be accounted for as a resourceful act determined by practical necessity and economic scarcity. More significantly, for the purpose of investigating the colonial documentary archive, this cinematic transposition of material bears a complex ideological meaning in terms of voice and subjectivity. This re‐voicing of another’s footage implies both a move toward and away from a certain model of documentary practice and discursive construction in which the use of original material takes precedence. The act inscribes a material and symbolic connection between the makers that at the same time necessarily marks a distance in terms of formal technique, political position, and socially recognized status in terms of race and citizenship. Vieyra and the Groupe Africain spliced in this strip of film at an editing table in Paris. Vautier had shot these images of children during the period of 1949–1950 when he traveled throughout French West Africa on a trip funded by an organization dedicated to the promotion of the republican civic ideals of the French state.
Much later in his life, Vautier would attribute Vieyra’s use of this previously shot footage to their different stances on exhibiting and circulating cinematic works facing possible political censorship. In an interview published in a 2004 issue of Présence Africaine featuring a dossier on Paulin Vieyra’s career, Vautier recounts how he provided the material for this sequence to Vieyra, whom he knew through the film school and elsewhere. This interview appears to be the first published