Complex Realism: Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Emergence of West African Documentary Film

Born in Dahomey and trained in France, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra made his career in postcolonial Senegal. A director, producer, and film critic, his early films mark simultaneously the origins of the West African cinema and of West African documentary. When situated in its regional and transnational contexts, Vieyra's work demonstrates that early West African documentary was varied, innovative, and always political. In Afrique sur Seine / Africa on the Seine (1955), Une Nation est née / A Nation Is Born (1961), Lamb / Wrestling (1963), and Môl (1966), Vieyra experimented with both documentary content and style, exploring the boundaries between nonfictional and fictional narrative strategies and expanding documentary's formal and geographical boundaries. These films constitute an important contribution to global documentary, a revolution within a tradition that had been tightly bound to the French colonial project as well as a new tradition and model for contemporary African documentarists.