In partnership with the American University of Paris, University of Kent, Paris and the University of London Institute in Paris, please join us in our first of a series seminar on Politics of Translation with Jenny Chamarette, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London.
Parallel histories: ethnographies of looking in Left-Bank documentary
In 1965, the famous Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène held a conversation with Jean Rouch, the influential ethnographic filmmaker. While applauding Rouch’s experimental films such as Moi, un noir (1958), he criticised Rouch’s more traditionally ethnographic films in the following terms:
« On y montre, on y campe une réalité mais sans en voir l’évolution. Ce que je leur reproche, comme je le reproche aux africanistes, c’est de nous regarder comme des insectes… » (Cervoni 1996 : 106).
What does it mean to look at someone like an insect? What would the ethics be of this looking, and what kind of temporality would it reveal? These questions are the prompts for this work-in-progress paper, which investigates modes of looking, and the parallel (and uncomfortable) evolutions of cinema, in particular museum documentary and ethnographic film, and colonialism. This paper investigates three interconnected films about African art and objects, ethnography and museums: Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Moi, un noir (Jean Rouch, 1958), and what has been described as Africa’s first feature film, La Noire de… (Ousmane Sembène, 1966). Each of these films engage directly and indirectly with the remains of French and European (post-)colonial power in Africa.
In my work-in-progress, I want to discuss the points of connection between these films’ interests in the objects, archives and collections of museums in France and Europe, and orientalising forms of acquisitive collection. These critical engagements display on the one hand the remit of the political and intellectual concerns of French documentary filmmakers (Rouch, Resnais, Marker), and on the other, the legitimate cautioning by Sembène about the ethical impact of these films’ ways of looking. By revealing the aesthetic limitations within these films, such a critique also indicates the political and ethical occlusions made by white French filmmakers about black African worlds. By looking particularly at the invocations of objects as part of the ‘ethnographic screen’ of these films, I want to examine how these occlusions reveal important connections and tensions between the histories of cinema, the museum, and the painful history of colonial power.
Jenny Chamarette
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London