French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (review)

Peter J. Bloom, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, takes a broad interdisciplinary perspective on the subject of French colonial documentary film in this book. Very well informed by first-hand readings and archival research, he draws a complex network of the competing knowledge practices, ideologies and image technologies of the late 19th and early 20th century, aiming to uncover some of the myths around humanitarianism in French colonial visual representations.

The overall scope of the book is to discuss a broad range of colonial imagery and myths of France's Third Republic (1870-1940) and the continuous recycling of media representations "that enact the structure of distorted political objectives, encoded otherness as new forms of technological illusionism" (p. 198). Bloom elaborates on the techniques of the visual media apparatus in which difference served the transformation of French national identity and the reinvention of the conception of the "natural man" in relation to French masculinity during the Franco-Prussian War (18701871) until the end of the interwar period (19181940). By this he attempts to unravel some of the historiographical knots around what he calls the "French colonial media apparatus" that simultaneously displayed and distanced the increasingly assimilated colonial subject [1].

Bloom begins with a contextualization of early chronophotographic documents and colonial film footage as the ultimate mise-en-scène for the masquerade of "civilized techniques" in relation to the concept of the "natural man" in the fields of physiology and gymnastic training techniques and policies as part of the project of French national reform in the late 19th century. In his view, visual technologies ultimately promoted the symbolic order of "natural men" to remake the social fabric of the new political colonial landscape imbued with French national ideology at the backdrop of the prevailing evolutionist anthropological investigations. In the second chapter he discusses the myths associated with the African soldier, in particular the Tirailleurs Sénégalais (Senegalese Sharpshooters) in the context of the collective imaginary of French imperialism with references to early treatments of shellshock effects in relation to ethno-psychiatric approaches to mental health. Bloom then moves from the technologies of the body to a wider geographical mise-en-scène of the colonial imaginary and explores the trans-Saharan crossings sponsored by Citroën and their interconnection to the movement over time with the camera and the railroad. Chapter 4 explores a more "invisible" discourse: that of medical imagery and hygiene reforms and the scientific authority of photography and its relevance for the colonial medical discourse. From there the discussion further explores the emergence of the so-called educational cinema as the basis for the colonial documentary in the interwar period in the context of "colonial consciousness" among the French and the discourse of "crowd psychology." The last chapter moves into the domain of ethnography and global image archives and focuses on the humanitarian ambitions of Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (Archive of the Planet) and the initiatives of the League of the Nations' International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (CIC). There seemed many possibilities for how to conclude this ambitious research project, which opens up a great amount of further questions to elaborate. With the last chapter Bloom decided to turn back to the discussion of the "natural man" situated in a discourse of the body and gender in an intercultural connection and negotiation between France and the United States, manifest in African American performances, boxing "rituals" and the ethnographic spectacle as in the case of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition led by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule.

Bloom very elegantly combines a great variety of discourses in his detailed and in-depth explorations, and he interweaves them seamlessly in his discussions of the identified complex, intersecting imperatives, for example issues relating to gender, economics, popular culture, the social and cultural construction of technology, the...