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  • The Ambivalence of French Funding
  • Olivier Barlet (bio)

All the underdeveloped nations, dependent on us yesterday, and today our special friends, request our aid and our assistance. But why should we give them that aid and assistance if it isn't worth our while?

—General de Gaulle

The Choice to Intermix

African cinema, if we discount colonial cinema, began in the independence era. The 1934 Laval Decree forbade filming in the French African colonies without prior authorization.1 Even when made by Europeans, anticolonial films were banned, notably René Vautier's Afrique 50 / Africa 50 (France, 1950) for its denunciation of colonial atrocities, and the admirable play of black and white lighting that is Les Statues meurent aussi / Statues Also Die by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais (France, 1955), whose crime was to show how colonial trade was killing black African art. While pioneers had begun making films in the 1920s in Tunisia and Egypt,2 the beginnings of sub-Saharan African filmmaking are generally dated back to the 1955 film Afrique sur Seine, shot in Paris. Other films preceded it, however. In Madagascar in 1937, Raberono filmed the commemoration of the centenary of the death of Rasalama Rafaravavy, the first Madagascan martyr.3 Under the auspices of the Congolese Film Club established in 1950, Albert Mongita shot La Leçon de cinéma / The Film Lesson in 1951 on the lawn of the Léopoldville golf course in the Belgian Congo, and Emmanuel Lubalu shot Les Pneus gonflés / Pumped Tires in 1953 with the actor Bumba.4 In Guinea in 1953, Mamadou Touré shot the twenty-three-minute, 16mm short film Mouramani, based on a tale about this ancient Guinean king. It is striking to note then that one finds the same legend in film as in literature, for, rather than looking any further afield, black African literature is considered to have begun in 1921 with Batouala by the Martinican René Maran. The roots of this myth no doubt lie in the novel being awarded the Goncourt literary prize. [End Page 205]

So why do people refer only to Afrique sur Seine? The screenplay of this twenty-one-minute, 16mm short shot by the Senegalese filmmakers Mamadou Sarr and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (born in Porto-Novo to a Dahomean mother and Brazilian father) was the product of the discussions of the Groupe africain de cinéma set up in 1952.5 Its scenes set in Africa are made up of ethnographic footage. As the credits specify, the film is presented "Under the patronage of the Musée de l'Homme Ethnographic Film Committee." Opening with rural shots of Africa and children swimming in a river, the film begins with this commentary: "To the face of the sun and our ancestors, we cried our independence, jealous, carefree, unaware of the world that surrounded us." But it also, and not without bitterness, depicted "some aspects of African life in Paris," heralding other films on the immigrant experience that would be shot in the years to come, notably Désiré Ecaré's Concerto pour un exil / Concerto for an Exile (Côte d'Ivoire, 1968) and A nous deux, France / To Us, France (1970), and Paris, c'est joli / Paris is Pretty (Niger, 1974) by Inoussa Ousseini, which also features a hobo.

"The Paris of days of hunger, of days of desperation," is portrayed in Afrique sur Seine; Mamadou Sarr and Paulin Vieyra's commentary juxtaposes the harsh realties of immigration (the hobo, the street cleaner) and an edifying echo of colonial propaganda, inaugurating a filmic discourse of repulsion/fascination that positions the West both as the land of dreams and nightmares.6 Opening on shots of children diving into the Niger River and insisting on their unawareness of "the world around us," the film portrayed Africans as carefree children ignorant of the rest of the world. Describing Paris as "the centre of hopes, of all hopes," the commentary declaims: "In going to discover Paris, in going to seek Africa on the Seine, we cherish the hope of finding ourselves, the hope of meeting, encountering civilization. Hail the genius of the men of freedom, of equality! Hail the peaceful victories of...

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