In Translation: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra

"First Comes the Ear": Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Politics of African Languages

Those years of growing awareness were also years of ember … Africa was looking ahead. … Witness to such key moments, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra filmed everything … day and night.

—Ousmane Sembène, "Moment d'une vie: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra"

Seldom is the historian also a witness to and even, to a certain extent, an artisan of that whose history it tells. Such is Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, a man invested in African cinema on so many levels.

—Présence africaine, "Le cinéma africain: Des origines à 1973"

Films have been made and seen in Africa since cinema's inception, but the 1950s mark the time when Africans themselves gained access to the equipment and training necessary to start making their own films. In a decade rife with decolonizing ruptures, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) would spearhead the establishment of African cinema as a filmmaker, theorist, and historian. I have selected the texts translated here, "Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa" (1975) and "Remarks on African Cinema" (1978), because they highlight an important thread in the evolution of Vieyra's multilayered engagement with African cinema: his unwavering commitment to recognize the cultural and political significance of African national languages for establishing an African cinema. These translations reveal the extent to which Vieyra's views on language in the African postcolonial context shaped his ideas about cinematic ontology, the technological and institutional implications of audiovisual translation (especially dubbing) in the management of cinematic multilingualism, and the cinema's role in disrupting colonial legacies. At the same time, the selected pieces showcase some of the many roles that Vieyra played throughout his life in the emergence of postcolonial African cinema.

Published as part of Vieyra's pioneering summative history of African cinema (Le cinéma africain: Des origines à 1973), the chapter "Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa" (1975) starts with an outline of the reasons African languages are marginalized as legitimate vehicles of knowledge and culture. This necessary preamble then serves to propel Vieyra's argument in favor of a cultural policy that would ensure that cinema in Africa uses African languages as key vectors of knowledge about Africa and as the support on which its visual cultures are deployed. Ultimately, Vieyra argues in favor of dubbing as a way to make African cinema more accessible to Africans and to help establish more equal cultural exchanges between the newly decolonized African nations and between these nations and the rest of the world.

The second translated text, "Remarks on African Cinema" (1978), is an interview that took place between Vieyra and African cinema scholar Pierre Haffner (1943–2000) while both attended the Seventh Carthage Film Festival in Tunis. This interview demonstrates how the ideas developed in the previous piece come to bear on Vieyra's conception of cinematic ontology. The interview also situates Vieyra's work in the late 1970s as a filmmaker, as Ousmane Sembène's production manager, and as a critic and historian.¹ To film and media scholars, the most interesting part of this piece will likely be the "first comes the ear" theory that Vieyra briefly outlines. According to Vieyra, the cinematic medium is first and foremost grounded in language and sound, so that when audiences experience a "mixed visual" such as sound cinema, that experience is informed first and foremost by what meets the ear, more so than the eye. Vieyra's conceptualization of the cinematic medium is thus deeply informed by his understanding of orality as central to African cultures, a phenomenon whose relationship to African cinema he contextualized in "Film and the Problem of Languages in Africa." By diverging from the primacy of the visual, Vieyra's 1970s writings can be seen to turn film theory on its head in ways generally attributed to Western figures such as Michel Chion. And while Vieyra's "first comes the ear" theory is but one of several elements that can be derived from his writings and thinking on film, its renegotiation of the audiovisual contract stands out because it constitutes an unrecognized contribution...