From Vues To Ethnofiction

Visual Anthropology
ISSN: 0894-9468 (Print) 1545-5920 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvan20
From Vues to Ethnofiction: French Ethnographic

Filmmaking in Africa before Jean Rouch
Paul Henley
To cite this article: Paul Henley (2020) From Vues to Ethnofiction: French Ethnographic
Filmmaking in Africa before Jean Rouch, Visual Anthropology, 33:1, 32-80, DOI:
10.1080/08949468.2020.1696126
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2020.1696126
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Visual Anthropology, 33: 32–80, 2020
# 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0894-9468 print/1545-5920 online
DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2020.1696126
From Vues to Ethnofiction: French

Ethnographic Filmmaking in Africa before
Jean Rouch
Paul Henley
This article offers an overview of the very substantial body of films of ethno-
graphic interest produced by French filmmakers working in Africa before Jean
Rouch arrived on the scene. It identifies a number of genres. For the first two deca-
des this work largely took the form of short films of reportage, mostly shot in
North and West Africa by anonymous operators working for newsreel agencies.
Then, in the 1920s, longer and technically more complex films based on transre-
gional and even transcontinental expeditions began to appear. Films offering an
inventory of cultural traditions in particular French colonies also emerged in this
decade. Also to be considered are films based on extended field research, from the
1930s onwards. We conclude with a brief analysis of the originality of Jean Rouch
as he developed a new form of ethnographic filmmaking in the late 1940s.
LE CONTINENT NOIR
Such is the prominence of Jean Rouch (1917–2004) in the history of French

ethnographic filmmaking in Africa that there is a tendency to overlook the
very substantial body of films1 of ethnographic interest made before his early
work in the 1940s. Certainly, before that, no French filmmaker working in
Africa combined his level of skills with his academic qualifications as an
anthropologist with a doctorate. Furthermore the genre of ethnographic film-
making as we know it barely existed in Africa, or indeed anywhere. But if the
term “ethnographic” is taken to apply to any nonfiction film that is concerned
with customary sociocultural practices, and if this term is understood to denote
a relative rather than an absolute quality, then there were many films made by
French filmmakers in Africa in the first half of the 20th century that showed a
significant degree of “ethnographicness”.2
PAUL HENLEY is a Professorial Research Fellow and former director (1987–2014) of the
Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. His most recent book is
Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film (Manchester
University Press, 2020). E-mail: paul.henley@manchester.ac.uk
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at
www.tandfonline.com/gvan.
32
From Vues to Ethnofiction 33
Figure 1 Locations of French ethnographic film-making in Africa, 1897–1951. (Courtesy of Peter

Blore, University of Manchester Graphics Support Workshop)
My aim here will be to offer an overview of this body of work. The sheer
quantity of material is truly astounding, particularly as contrasted with the
very few such films that were produced in Britain’s African colonies over the
same period. Initially, this filming was mainly done in the French colonies of
the Maghreb, but already by the time of World War I it had spread to sub-
Saharan West Africa and Madagascar. By the end of the 1920s French film-
makers were at work all over the continent (Figure 1).
In considering this material I will also discuss how changes in technology
and filmmaking practice affected the nature of the films produced; while in a
final section, I shall briefly consider Rouch’s early work, and will describe how
these films, while featuring some of the conventional tropes of the French
ethnographic filmmaking tradition as it then was, also contained the seeds of
his own distinctive approach.
The motivations of French filmmakers working in Africa in the early 20th
century were quite diverse. Prior to World War I their films consisted mostly
of reportage. The films were usually just a few minutes long, and were made
during brief visits by newsreel filmmakers to satisfy the great interest of cin-
ema audiences in France at that time in the exotic realities of Africa—not only
the dramatic scenery and distinctive fauna, but also the moeurs et cou ^tumes of
the human inhabitants. After World War I the films became more substantial,
the motivations more varied: some were by-products of geographical explor-
ation, others accounts of expeditions that were little more than glorified safaris,
34 P. Henley
while others again were in effect visual inventories of the resources, human
and natural, to be found in particular colonies. The identity of the makers or
sponsors was also varied: some were vehicle manufacturers seeking to promote
their products, others individuals with a broad range of idiosyncratic motiva-
tions, while others still were agencies of the State whose concern was to pro-
mote the colonial project in metropolitan France. It was only in the 1930s that
films of ethnographic substance came to be made that were based in some
sense on extended field research.
Yet whatever the motivation or identity of the makers, the underlying ideo-
logical thrust of all these films was with very few exceptions the same, namely
to celebrate, with varying degrees of explicitness, the French colonial project in
Africa and its supposed ability to impose both physical and political order on
the potentially rich but also lamentably indolent and disease-ridden continent
noir. These films therefore offered views of African life often couched in terms
that would today be broadly considered ethnocentric or patronizing, and in
the worst cases would be condemned out of hand as egregiously racist.
However, if this framing discourse is controlled for, and the presentist temp-
tation to judge them against current moral or political standards is avoided,
these films may be read, faute de mieux, as giving an important testimony to
traditional forms of African social and cultural life in the early 20th century,
many of which have since been entirely abandoned. Of course, these films
could also be read as a series of ethnographic accounts of the French colonial
presence in Africa, although a reading of that kind lies beyond the scope of
this article.
SOURCES
The first extensive inventory of ethnographic films made in Africa was the
UNESCO catalog published in 1967. Jean Rouch played an important part in
compiling this volume: not only was he its general editor, writing many of the
“appreciations” of particular films, but he also wrote the much-cited Appendix
entitled “Situation et tendances du cinema en Afrique”—originally a report for
UNESCO in 1961 (Rouch 1967a, 1967b). But since then, and particularly since
the development of digital archives in this century, it has become clear that
both the number and the variety of films of ethnographic interest made in
Africa in the early 20th century are very much greater than the UNESCO cata-
log implied. Moreover, as digital cataloging becomes increasingly more sophis-
ticated and widespread, the accessibility of these films is also correspondingly
expanding. Many of them can now be easily viewed on one’s computer;
indeed, quite a few may be viewed via “The Silent Time Machine,” a website
about early ethnographic film that I myself have prepared.3
There are two principal physical archives for films of the sort that I consider
in this article, the Centre national du cinema et de l’image animee (henceforth
CNC) and the Gaumont-Pathe Archives. The main archive of the CNC is
located in an old fort in Bois d’Arcy, near Versailles, but digital versions of
many of their holdings are available at various other places in France, notably
at the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. But although there is an

online catalog of the CNC archive, the films themselves are not available
remotely. While the CNC archive contains films made by a broad range of dif-
ferent companies and individuals, the Gaumont-Pathe Archives (henceforth
GPA) holds primarily films produced by or in conjunction with these two
well-known newsreel companies since the early 1900s. Not only does the GPA
offer an extensive online catalog, but many of the films are available online
too. However, neither the GPA nor the CNC catalog is definitive: both have
their inconsistencies and lacunae.4
Two further resources are the Pathe-Revue, and the Pathe-Baby collection,
both indirect online sources of the Pathe material that can be accessed via the
Web. The Revue, launched in 1919, was a sort of cinematic magazine produced
for theatrical distribution: each edition would package together a number of
short nonfiction films on broadly educational subjects. Often the films in these
packages would be abridged versions of Pathe films made many years before-
hand. The Pathe-Baby collection, launched three years later, was a body of
films distributed on 9.5 mm film and aimed at the domestic market. It covered
films of every genre and every subject, including many that are of some ethno-
graphic interest. As with the films in the Revue packages, these ones were
often abridged versions of films originally made for theatrical distribution.
They are rarely more than two or three minutes long, and the technical quality
in the case of the Pathe-Baby films is very low. Yet these abridged versions are
often the only ones currently available, and in the absence of the originals they
at least give one an idea of the material being produced by reportage film-
makers before and during World War I.5
Another archival source is the Musee Albert-Kahn, situated in Boulogne-
Billancourt, a suburb of southwest Paris. This houses the Archives de la
Planete, set up in 1912 by a wealthy merchant banker, Albert Kahn
(1860–1940). The extraordinarily ambitious aim of this archive was to docu-
ment all human customs across the globe as comprehensively as possible. Its
underlying motivation was Kahn’s rather unworldly belief that by presenting
this material to the elite figures whom he invited to screenings at his mansion
in Boulogne—intellectuals, leading politicians, religious authorities, military
figures—it would be possible to promote international understanding and
hence world peace.6
Most of the material in the Archives de la Planete was shot by operators
commissioned by Jean Brunhes (1869–1930), a distinguished geographer at the
College de France whom Kahn had appointed to direct the project. Their prin-
cipal task was to take photographs, using the recently developed Lumiere
Autochrome color process. Of these, they took some 72,000 between 1912 and
1933 (when the project came to an end, after Kahn had lost his fortune in the
stock market crash of 1929). But they also shot around 165 hours of silent
black-and-white 35 mm footage. They were asked to document not just the
standard customs of ethnographic film at the time, i.e., technical processes and
ceremonies, but also the small and usually unconsidered details of everyday
life—people walking in the street, women washing clothes, breast-feeding of a
36 P. Henley
baby. However, there was no intention to turn this material into edited films,
but simply to produce documentation that could be shown to Kahn’s elite
audiences. Accordingly most of the material in the archive takes the form of
long, wide-angle shots with an unvarying frame, taken from an unvarying pos-
ition. However, in addition to the material directly commissioned by Brunhes,
the archive also holds some 15 hours of edited films purchased from commer-
cial production companies.7
Although the Archives de la Planete gathered material from some 48 coun-
tries, film footage from the French colonies in North Africa and from Egypt is
particularly prevalent. The only film material in the archive from sub-Saharan
Africa was shot in Dahomey (now Benin) in 1930, just before the archive
closed. This is a particularly significant body of work, which I shall return
to below.
1895–1920S: VUES, AND FILMS OF REPORTAGE
The French tradition of ethnographic filmmaking is often traced back to the

earliest days of cinema, to the spring of 1895, when Felix-Louis Regnault
(1863–1938) and an assistant, Charles Comte, shot a series of short sequences of
Africans moving in various ways—walking, sitting, running, jumping and
climbing trees—and engaging in certain activities such as pottery-making and
pounding grain with a mortar and pestle. These sequences lasted no more than
a few seconds and were filmed not in Africa but in Paris, either at a colonial

exhibition beside the Eiffel Tower or in the laboratory of Etienne-Jules Marey
(1830–1904), Regnault’s academic mentor. He designed the chronophotographe,
the shotgun-shaped device used by Regnault and Comte to record the images
(Figure 2).
Regnault was not a professional filmmaker but rather a research scientist,
more specifically a physiologist, and he shot these sequences because he was
interested in exploring the relationship between modes of locomotion and
racial identity. The images that he and Comte made with the chronophotographe
could not be projected, but this was no worry since Regnault’s aim was not to
present his works to general audiences but rather to create visual documents
that could be examined in private by fellow researchers interested in locomo-
tion. Bits of his film strips were printed down the margins of his articles.8
As a filmmaking technique the chronophotographe was soon superseded by
the cinematographe, devised by the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, who
owned a photographic plate factory in Lyons. The cinematographe consisted
essentially of a hand-cranked mechanism inside a hardwood box on a tripod.
It operated with 50-foot rolls of celluloid film, with a maximum duration of
around 50 seconds (depending on how fast it was cranked by the operator).
The tool was highly portable and within two years of its first use in the spring
of 1895, Lumiere operators were traveling far and wide with it, including to
Africa. In contrast to the footage generated by the chronophotographe, the films
shot with the cinematographe were specifically intended for projection: they
Figure 2 Chronophotographic images taken by Felix-Louis Regnault and Charles Comte in

Paris in 1895. (A) “Three Clothed Men Walking” filmed in the laboratory of Etienne-Jules
Marey. (B) “Soudanese Climber” filmed at a colonial exhibition beside the Eiffel Tower.
Figure 3 Lumiere operator Alexandre Promio in North Africa. (A) Funeral procession in Cairo
(Promio 1897). (B) Display of ‘bassours’, Le Kreider, Algeria (Promio 1903a).
were initially called vues, literally “views.” Indeed, in the early years of cinema
it was by this term that all films were known.
The first filmmaker to shoot vues on the African continent appears to have
been the leading Lumiere operator, Alexandre Promio (1868–1926), who trav-
eled through Algeria and Tunisia in December 1896 and January 1897. Most of
his material consists of vues of local people going about their business in the
street, in markets and in ports, but in Algiers he also shot a muezzin at prayer
(Promio 1896). He then moved on to Egypt where, in March–April 1897, he
shot a funeral procession (Promio 1897) as well as miscellaneous shots of peo-
ple, donkeys and camels in the streets, also the Pyramids, and some technically
innovative tracking shots taken first from a train and then from a boat on the
Nile (Figure 3A). In 1903 he returned to Algeria and Tunisia, this time accom-
panying the French president, Emile Loubet, on an official visit. Most of the
38 P. Henley
vues from this second trip show presidential walkabouts and military displays,
but in Biskra, some 400 km southeast of Algiers, Promio shot an Arab wedding
procession (Promio 1903a). Also, at a similar distance southwest of the capital,
in Le Kreider (today El Kheither), he filmed a display of camels carrying elab-
orately decorated bassours, i.e., large baskets enclosed by tasseled cloths or car-
pets in which Muslim women could travel without being seen by third parties
(Promio 1903b; Figure 3B).9
The vues shot by Promio in Africa in 1903 were among the last to be pro-
duced by the Lumiere company since shortly afterwards, remarkably, the com-
pany decided that cinema had no commercial future and they therefore gave
up all film production in order to concentrate on making their Autochrome
color photographic plates instead. But by this time the Lumieres’ position as
the principal producer of nonfiction films in France was already being chal-
lenged by a number of other companies, including Pathe and Gaumont
in particular.
Over the next three decades these, together with some smaller companies,
would develop a new format for nonfiction filmmaking, which I shall call the
reportage film. During the course of a typical Lumiere screening a series of
vues, each lasting less than a minute, would be screened one by one, with no
necessary connection between one vue and the next. In contrast the material
produced by the newsreel companies would be presented in the form of a sin-
gle composite film made up of a sequence of shots edited into a simple narra-
tive with the aid of intertitles. Thus, for example, a film about a particular
town (a very common topic) would show various different facets of the
town—the streets, the market, important buildings, perhaps some sort of reli-
gious event or musical performance—with each facet being introduced by an
intertitle. Similarly, a reportage film about a particular event would show vari-
ous different stages of the event, each introduced by an intertitle. Considerable
care was lavished on the graphics of these intertitles, often beginning with an
elaborate opening title and finishing with a stylish “Fin.”
Over the course of these three decades one can discern a developing filmic
grammar in reportage films. Initially they consisted simply of a series of shots
about a given subject, linked by intertitles. But as time went by they began to
feature an element of internal narrative development around a beginning–mid-
dle–end story, reinforced by the intertitles. The shots themselves also became
more varied. Whereas Lumiere vues were invariably shot with an unchanging
wide-angle framing at some distance from the subjects, reportage films would
typically intersperse close shots with wide shots, and when there was no inter-
vening intertitle some attention would be given to how one shot abutted
another, so as to avoid “jump cuts.” Tentative pans and even tilts also began
to appear.
At the same time camera technology was improving rapidly. Whereas the
Lumiere cinematographe carried a 50-ft. roll of film that lasted for less than a
minute, the widely-used Debrie Parvo, launched in 1908, was equipped with
an internal 400-ft. magazine that would run for over six minutes. Although
individual shots, once edited, still tended to be very short—they would often
be much shorter than the typical 50-second length of a Lumiere vue—the over-
all length of reportage films increased considerably. By 1910 films lasting
around five to seven minutes were commonplace, and by the 1920s they were
often twice that length.
The camera operators who worked on these films were seen as mere technicians
with no authorial claim over the material they shot. The footage they produced
could be edited and re-edited into several different films, over many years, and
would often not carry their names. Although they were usually provided with the
equipment by the production houses, the operators had to supply the film stock
themselves and were then paid per meter of exposed material returned. As mater-
ial shot abroad could command double the rate paid for material shot in France,
operators were soon traveling all over the world (Leprohon 1945, 19–21).
Many of those who went abroad in the early years of the century went no
further than the French colonies in the Maghreb. The Gaumont-Pathe Archives
contain many reportage films shot in this region then, and many of these can
be viewed online. A full review of this large body of material is beyond the
scope of this article, but several general themes may be identified. Many of the
films offer general portraits of day-to-day life in the quartiers indigenes of towns
and villages. Interestingly, these often include Jewish inhabitants most of
whose descendants would surely have emigrated from the region after World
War II (see, for example, Anonymous 1914, 1919a, 1924a, nd(a)). Ancient reli-
gious centers, such as Kairouan in central Tunisia (Anonymous 1918) and par-
ticularly Tlemcen in northwestern Algeria (Moreau 1923), are a frequent focus
of attention. Mosques and worship generally are also a recurrent theme, both
in the form of mainstream expressions of Islam (Alexandre 1912, Beno^ıt-Levy
1929) as well as specific cults: the remarkable ecstatic dancing and self-mortifi-
cation of the Aissawa brotherhood features in a number of films (Alexandre
1916, Anonymous 1920a, 1929). Also frequent are films about the so-called petits
metiers of the streets, including musicians and beggars as well as craftsmen
and food vendors (Anonymous 1908a, 1911, 1919b, 1920b, nd(b)).
Another feature of Maghrebian urban life that won particular attention from
French filmmakers was the institution of the harem. Numerous films purport
to reveal the normally hidden life of the harem and show women either veiling
or unveiling themselves (Anonymous 1916, 1923, nd(c); Figure 4). Rural areas
are also well represented. The oases of the Saharan desert and its camel-riding
inhabitants, the Tuareg of the Hoggar mountain region, clearly exercised a
powerful hold on reportage filmmakers’ imaginations (Anonymous nd(d)), as
did the horse-riding Berber and sheep-herding Bedouin populations further
north (Anonymous 1921, 1922).
One particularly well-executed example of the reportage genre is Une
reception chez un Caïd dans le sud Algerien (Anonymous 1909–1924). As the title
suggests, this film concerns a feast in the Algerian desert hosted by a caïd, that
is, an important Berber chief. Like many reportage films it is not only anonym-
ous but also difficult to date exactly since it exists in a number of different
forms, with slightly varying titles and with several different dates. In the col-
lection of Pathe-Baby films available on the Web it appears in two different
40 P. Henley
Figure 4 Nefta, la perle du Djerid (Beno^ıt-Levy 1929) features a number of the standard
tropes of reportage films about the Maghreb. (A) A bride veils herself in preparation for her
marriage. (B) Later, she departs in a ‘bassour’ at the head of a desert caravan.
versions, one slightly longer than the other. The shorter version is dated to
1909, the longer to 1923: here the first date could refer to the original date of
production, the second to the date of release in the Pathe-Baby collection.
Another version crops up in the Pathe-Revue in 1924 in much higher quality
and beautifully colorized, though disappointingly this version covers only the
first part of the event.
From an ethnographic film-history point of view, Une reception chez un Caïd
is of particular interest because it summarizes the feast in an effective and eco-
nomical manner, incorporating some “before” and “after” shots and thereby
enhancing the beginning–middle–end narrative shape of the film (Figure 5).
After a graphically elaborate opening title, it begins with the caïd sitting at his
tent entrance, dictating invitations to a scribe. These are carried off on horse-
back to the invitees, who are then seen arriving at the caïd’s tent. In a remark-
ably cinematic shot, from inside the tent, he is shown going out to greet them.
The women of the caïd’s group also greet the visitors though they are hidden
within large bassours. In the 1924 Pathe-Revue version an intertitle adds that as
the guests arrive, these “mysterious” women ululate with joy. This is followed
by a striking shot of a group of men walking toward the camera holding aloft
skewers of roasted lamb. As these men dine with the caïd on the lamb and
couscous —“the national dish” as an intertitle puts it—a group of musicians
and dancing girls arrive to entertain them. Deploying a clever mix of wide and
close shots, the film then cuts back and forth between the dancers, the various
musicians and the watching dignitaries. It concludes with the guests leaving
on horseback, silhouetted against the setting sun, and followed by a handsome
“Fin” end-title.10
Though the great majority of these early reportage films were shot in the
Maghreb, some filmmakers ventured further afield. One of these was a certain
Charles Martel, a member of the Societe de geographie de Paris who spent a
year in Addis Ababa in 1909–10 and shot the material for L’Abyssinie au temps
Figure 5 Une reception chez un Caïd (Anonymous 1909–1924) is a well-executed example of

the reportage genre with a clear narrative structure. The caïd welcomes his guests, as do his
womenfolk in their bassours (A,B); the meal of grilled lamb and couscous is served (C,D),
followed by music and dance (E,F). The film ends with a classic closure sequence (G,H).
42 P. Henley
de Menelik (Martel 1909–10). This film runs for 24 minutes—exceptionally long

for the period. However, in contrast to Une reception chez un Caïd, there is no
clear narrative structure to this film: instead it is a rather random compilation
of extracts from the 15 hours of rushes that Martel is said to have shot
(Fontaine 2013). The technical quality of this material is limited and consists
mainly of a series of wide shots. It is also of limited ethnographicness.
Although there are some posed sequences of Afar, Issa and Oromo dances, as
well as shots of everyday life around the city, including a charming sequence
of a schoolteacher giving classes in the open air, most of the film is dedicated
to sequences of Ethiopian soldiers marching here and there, the Emperor
Menelik himself, and various political events. This suggests that intelligence
gathering may have been at least one of the motivations behind this film.
Reportage films of some ethnographicness were also already being made in
sub-Saharan West Africa during this early period. A number of these are iden-
tified as having been made in “the Soudan.” In the French colonial era that
term corresponded principally to the colony that would become modern Mali,
though it could also be used in a more general way to include adjacent regions
of West Africa. An early Pathe catalog refers to Baignade de Soudanais
(Anonymous 1897), a film of about 50 seconds, which is described as being
about a group of “Sudanese” enjoying themselves swimming and diving in the
Niger river. I have not been able to view this film and it may even be lost. The
date is suspiciously early, but if it were correct this would make it contempor-
aneous with Alexandre Promio’s early films in Algeria and Egypt that seem to
have been the first films of ethnographic interest ever made in Africa. It would
certainly make it the first such film to be shot in sub-Saharan Africa.
In addition to its questionably early date, Baignade de Soudanais is also a very
isolated case: the next film shot in West Africa that is widely cited in the cata-
logs is Promenade au Soudan, also produced by Pathe, but not released until
1908 (Anonymous 1908b). This film consists of a series of single shots linked by
intertitles, but without any internal narrative development. Most of the shots
appear to have been set up for the camera. The film begins with a group of senior
men dancing with long knives, while kora players stand in the background pro-
viding music. This is followed by a brief shot of a group of men in Islamic prayer,
and then various shots related to subsistence activities or crafts—the return from
market, herding goats, blacksmithing, leather work, weaving, and finally women
washing clothes. The exact location is not indicated, but one of the blacksmiths as
well as the weaver are identified in the intertitles as “Dahomeen” (Beninois in
modern parlance). This, coupled with the reference to journeying in the title
(a “promenade”) suggests that the shots may have been taken in various loca-
tions around “the Soudan” broadly defined.
About the time of World War I a number of films were shot in West Africa
by a Pathe operator who—unusually—is named in the opening titles. This sug-
gests that he was something of a celebrity though, if so, this did not extend to
giving more than the initial of his first name, for the titles simply state
“Composition et cinegrafie de Monsieur J. Lejards.” He appears to have been a
sort of stringer, shooting films in various parts of the region. From an
Figure 6 Monsieur J. Lejards films the Dogon. (A) The ‘turtle dove’ dance on stilts
(misidentified as ‘Dance of the Ostriches’) in Les Danses Habe. (B) Antelope mask
(misidentified as a ‘Little Monkey’ mask) in Danses soudanaises. Although sometimes assigned
different dates, these two films were clearly shot on the same occasion, as indicated by the
spectator in a white hat seated on the ground who appears in both images.
ethnographic point of view his most interesting material concerns the Dogon
of the Bandiagara Cliffs, in what is today central Mali. Again, as with so many
early reportage films, this material is difficult to date precisely. The shooting of
some of the original footage has been dated to 1913, while other parts have
been dated to 1915, though all the material would appear to have been shot on
the same occasion. Part of this material also appears in a Pathe-Revue package
released in 1922, so that is the terminus ante quem.11
This material is most readily available in the form of two Pathe-Baby films. The
more elaborate of these is Les danses Habe (Lejards 1913). (Habe is a name of the
Dogon sometimes used by neighboring groups.) This shows a series of masked
dances of the kind performed at a dama, a ceremony that brings a period of mourn-
ing to an end. Particularly remarkable are the sequences of the so-called “turtle-
dove” dancers on stilts, and of the kanaga dancers striking the ground with their
head-dresses in a swirling motion. The other film, Danses soudanaises (Lejards 1915),
shows a brief pantomime in which a dancer wearing a Hyena mask attacks two
others wearing Cow and Monkey masks, but is then scared off by a young cow-
herd (Figure 6).
From a cinematographic point of view both are stylistically very simple, con-
sisting merely of a series of wide-angle shots of the performances, intercut
with the intertitles and a few closer, clearly posed, shots of individuals wearing
masks. While Danses soudanaises could be said to follow the story of the panto-
mime, in Les danses Habe there is no sense of narrative development nor of the
broader event of which the dances are a part. Moreover, it is clear from the
intertitles that Lejards had a very limited understanding of what he was film-
ing. Even so, the dances are competently covered cinematographically and can
be readily identified on the basis of the well-known subsequent research of
Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, not to mention the film that Jean
Rouch made with Dieterlen about this same ceremony, Le Dama d’Ambara
(Rouch and Dieterlen 1980), released some sixty or more years later.12
44 P. Henley
Another name that emerges from behind the general cloak of anonymity sur-
rounding these operators in Africa is that of Alfred Machin (1877–1929). Born
in Pas-de-Calais, close to the Belgian border, in later life Machin would become
an important figure of both Belgian and Dutch cinema, making a number of
well-received fiction films and comedies as well as a much admired series of
reportage films from the front-line of the First World War. But Machin began
his career as a Pathe operator making films about hunting and wildlife in East
Africa, particularly around the upper reaches of the Nile in what was then the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and now is the Republic of South Sudan. In the years
1907–10 he led two extended filmmaking expeditions to this region, during the
course of which he came into contact with the Shilluk, a pastoralist group liv-
ing in the region of Bahr-al-Gazal river (Figure 1). Here Machin and his young
assistant Julien Doux shot the material that would be used to edit a number of
films about the Shilluk.13
The two principal films to be cut from this material were Les Chillouks, tribu
de l’Afrique Centrale (Machin 1910a) and Moeurs et coutumes des Chillouks (Machin
1910b), the first about 51=2 minutes long and the second about 7 minutes. I have
not been able to view these films, but from the descriptions in the Pathe cata-
logs the first appears to have been primarily about dances, the performance of
mock combat and hairstyles, while the second is concerned more with subsist-
ence practices, principally cattle herding and house building. The Shilluk also
appear in various sequences of another film, around 4 minutes long, shot in
Fashoda, a small outpost that in 1898 had been the scene of a famous stand-off
between French and British colonial forces (Machin 1910c). All three films were
first distributed as part of a ten-part Pathe series, “Voyage en Afrique”
(Lacassin 2001, 29).
In the 1920s two much shorter films were cut from the same material: En
Afrique: Au Bahr El Gazal, 21=2 minutes long, which was distributed through the
Pathe-Revue (Machin 1922a), and Une fête chez les Chillouks au Bahr El Ghazal,
barely a minute long, which was distributed through the Pathe-Baby collection
(Machin 1922b). Despite the similarity in the titles of these short films, there is
no overlap of material between them. Machin’s name does not appear on
either work but they were undoubtedly made by him, since he also published
photographs of the subjects that were clearly taken at the same time as the
filming (Lacassin 2001, 27, 191, 193, 195).
Neither of these latter films could be considered cinematographically or
ethnographically outstanding. En Afrique … begins with a set-up shot of a
number of Shilluk emerging from an adobe-walled house. The film then offers
various wide-angle shots of Shilluk body decoration and hairstyling before
segueing into a sequence of a man shooting a bird with a bow and arrow. Not
only has this scene clearly been set up but the hunter is almost certainly not
Shilluk. It ends with a sequence that anticipates the racist safari films of the
1920s, in that it shows the Shilluk ludicrously dressed in European clothes so
as to welcome some European visitors. Similarly, Une fête chez les Chillouks,
while mostly consisting of dances and a mock combat performance, ends with
another safari film trope, as children are shown sitting in a semi-circle
Figure 7 Alfred Machin films the Shilluk. (A) The opening shot of En Afrique … (Machin
1922a) recycled by Dziga Vertov in One Sixth of the World (1926). (B) In Une fête chez les
Chillouks, a phonograph intrigues some children (Machin 1922b).
marveling at a phonograph. The final shot shows a monkey going round and
round on the turntable (Figure 7).14
Machin is also widely credited with having shot the first ethnographic
films to be made in Madagascar. Two of these also feature in “Voyage en
Afrique,” the Pathe series released in 1910. According to the Pathe catalog
Moeurs et coutumes des Sakalaves (Machin 1910d), around 61=2 minutes long,
offers some general views of life among an ethnic group living along the
northwestern coast of the island, while the other film, Une briqueterie
Sakalave a Ankavandra en Afrique orientale française (Machin 1910e), is only 41=2
minutes long and focuses more narrowly on the making of the clay bricks
that typify Sakalava architecture.
However, there are several grounds for doubting whether Machin actually
made these films. For a start, it is not clear when he might have done so. In
some sources, it is suggested that he made them around the same time as his
expeditions to the Upper Nile; but in Machin’s own account (1911) of his film-
making expeditions to Africa, he makes no mention of the great island. As
Madagascar lies some 3500 km to the south of the Upper Nile region, it could
hardly be considered as a minor detour that he somehow overlooked when
writing up his experiences. This leads one to suspect that these two
Madagascan films may have been shot by someone else but were included in
the “Voyage en Afrique” series by Charles Pathe, Machin’s proverbially canny
producer, in order to piggyback on Machin’s already established reputation.
A third film shot on Madagascar and supposedly released in 1910 is also
attributed to Machin. This one is available through the GPA, where it is cata-
loged under the title Ceremonie a Madagascar. It is ten minutes long and very
skillfully made. If there is some doubt about Machin’s involvement in the mak-
ing of the other two Madagascan films mentioned, in the case of this third film
there is absolutely no possibility that Machin could have been its author. Not
only is the cinematography far superior to that of the Shilluk films but the
editing is far more sophisticated: the mise en scene is in a completely different
league. Even the technical quality of the film stock seems superior to anything
46 P. Henley
Figure 8 The film grammar of Fati-Dra (Anonymous nd(e)), including close-up reverse shots
(A, B) and highly cinematic establishing shots (C, D) suggest that it is unlikely to have been
made before the 1920s.
that would have been available to Machin in 1910. I have therefore classified it
as an anonymous work in the Filmography (Anonymous nd(e)).
The title given on the film itself is Fati-Dra ou Le Serment de l’Amitie and it
concerns a ceremony, still practised today, in which two Sakalava men
exchange formal oaths and some drops of blood as a sign that they consider
themselves brothers. In the film, after a sequence in which the two men go to
invite the local prince, the ceremony takes place on an open arena overlooking
a beautiful bay in the presence of the prince and his wives as well as a large
crowd of visitors who arrive by catamaran on the nearby beach.
Many of the sequences in this film have clearly been carefully orchestrated,
in the manner of a major feature film. Particularly memorable is a sequence in
which a crowd of some forty women, all dressed in white, run down the beach
to welcome the flotilla of catamarans bringing the visitors. More generally, the
virtuosity of the camerawork (there are even hand-held shots at sea on the cat-
amarans) and the sophisticated use of film grammar–cuts from wide to close,
reverse angles, cut-aways, establishing and closure shots–all suggest that this
film is unlikely to have been made before the 1920s (Figure 8). Even if given
this latter date, it is a film of significant ethnographic import that deserves to
be much better known.15
1920S–1930S: EXPEDITIONARY FILMS AND COLONIAL INVENTORY FILMS
Immediately following World War I the reportage films shot in Africa became
progressively more sophisticated, particularly those shot in the Maghreb and
West Africa. Both Gaumont and Pathe began to produce enseignement series
that were specifically intended for use as teaching aids. The technical quality
of the cinematography and the editorial complexity of these films were both
considerably higher than those of the reportage films produced prior to the
war, even if the general format was much the same.
Reportage filmmakers also began to travel further south, shooting a number
of films in Central Africa. These included two produced in 1920 by Eclair
(which was a film production house before it became a leading camera manu-
facturer). One of them, Les grands marches du Congo belge, offers a pleasantly
descriptive account of vendors coming and going, and of elaborately costumed
dancers performing at a market (Anonymous 1920c). The other, Chez les
Watuzzis, is perhaps more interesting, certainly politically so. Set in Ruanda-
Urundi, shortly after the colony had been taken from the Germans and given
to the Belgians through the Treaty of Versailles, this film has as its main “star”
Musinga, the leader of the Tutsi (the “Watuzzis” of the title; Anonymous
1920d). He is a tall and aristocratic-looking figure, reminiscent of the Tutsi
characters who would later appear in Luc de Heusch’s historical ethnofiction,
Rwanda: Tableaux d’une feodalite pastorale (de Heusch 1955). In an early intertitle
it is claimed that Musinga reigns over two million people, and most of the film
involves his subjects coming to pay homage to him. These supplicants include
a group of bahutu, i.e., Hutu women dancers whose ankles are “imprisoned in
heavy copper bracelets,” as an intertitle observes. Also in attendance are
Belgian colonial authorities, who in the film appear to be very friendly with
Musinga but who, a decade later, would conspire to depose him. Although the
maker of neither film is identified, they are stylistically and technically similar,
suggesting that they were probably made by the same operator on a single trip
to Central Africa.16
However, in addition to these increasingly sophisticated reportage films,
French filmmakers working in Africa in the 1920s developed a new form that
would result in the making of much more substantial films of ethnographic
interest. This was the genre of the expeditionary film. Films in this genre were
typically very much longer than the reportage films: many were over
30 minutes, some an hour or more, and at least one approached two hours.
Rather than presenting a series of shots of a single place or a single event, as
reportage films typically would do, in the expedition film the chronology of a
journey provided the principal narrative thread.17
Another difference was that French expeditionary films of the 1920s and
1930s in Africa tended to celebrate the colonial project much more overtly than
did the earlier reportage films. At the same time, and not coincidentally, they
also tended to be more explicit in their denigration of indigenous custom as
backward or even perverse. These differences reflected a more general growth
of increasingly chauvinistic attitudes in the interwar years in France, as well as
48 P. Henley
a greater awareness on the part of State agencies of the potential propaganda

value of film (Leprohon 1945, 63; Murray Levine 2010, 115–49).
The ethnographicness of films in the expedition genre was often quite lim-
ited. Typically they would recount how, amidst all manner of natural obstacles
heroically overcome, the filmmakers had encountered a range of ethnic groups
and had filmed short sequences about them. These usually concerned cere-
monial events, subsistence activities or architecture, or simply showed people
standing self-consciously before the camera, either as individuals or lined up
in a group in order to exemplify the racial or cultural “type” of the group in
question. Even so, and almost despite themselves, many of these films contain
material that is of some ethnographic interest, at least in a straightforward
descriptive sense.
Both then and now, by far the most celebrated of these interwar African
expeditionary films was and is La Croisiere noire (Poirier 1926). The film fol-
lowed eight Citr€ oen autochenilles—literally “autocaterpillars,” i.e., motor
vehicles with caterpillar tracks instead of rear wheels—as they proceeded over
the course of some 20,000 km, from Colomb-Bechar, an Algerian garrison town
close to the Moroccan border, south across the Sahara to the Niger river basin,
then east and south through the French colonies of Central Africa and the
Belgian Congo, before arriving finally at Antananarivo, the capital of
Madagascar. The whole journey took eight months, ending in July 1925. For
the final phase the expedition divided into four groups at Kampala, one going
north to seek out the source of the Nile, the others going south to Mombasa,
Dar-es-Salaam and even the Cape, but all eventually reuniting in Madagascar
(Figure 1).
The film as well as the expedition were paid for by the Citro€en manufac-
turing company, and at one level both could be read as no more than a
publicity stunt intended to promote Citro€en caterpillar-track vehicles as a
more effective means of crossing the difficult terrain of the Sahara and
Central Africa than either entirely wheeled vehicles or railways. But dedi-
cated as it is in an opening title to “The Young People of France” and sup-
ported logistically in various ways by colonial authorities, La Croisiere noire
can also be read as a resounding reassertion of French imperial ambitions
after the pyrrhic victory of the First World War (Piault 2000, 109–13;
Murray Levine 2005).18
The technical quality of La Croisiere noire was remarkably high for the period: it
also involved field sound recordings that were later incorporated into a sound-
track. The director, Leon Poirier, and the cinematographer, Georges Specht, were
both already well-established figures of French cinema: Poirier (1884–1968) had
directed a number of feature films, while Specht had been the principal cinema-
tographer on L’Atlantide, a hugely successful feature film, directed by Jacques
Feyder and released in 1921, in which the central character is an Arabian “queen”
who lures European men to her citadel, lost in the Sahara desert.
As is typical of the genre, the main narrative thread of La Croisiere noire is
provided by the expedition itself and the various heroic endeavors of the expe-
ditionaries along the way (Figure 9A,B). But at the same time, as they pass by,
Figure 9 La Croisiere noire (Poirier 1926) recorded the expeditionaries’ heroic endeavors, but
also, en route, (C) Sara lip-plates and (D) the distinctive coiffure of the Mangbetu.
the filmmakers record various phenomena of ethnographic interest, some of

which would become recurrent tropes of French expeditionary films in Africa.
These include displays of dancing and of horsemanship by the Djerma of
Niger, a visit to one of the small Islamic sultanates west of Lake Chad, Kotoko
fishermen on the lake itself in their long canoes, with nets shaped like butterfly
wings suspended from the stern, the disturbing lip-plates of Sara women in
Chad (Figure 9C), and the ganza initiation ceremony of the Dakpa Banda in the
colony of Oubangui-Chari (today the Central African Republic).
More unusually, they also filmed an open-air court case about a matter of
stolen fish among the Wagenia of the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic
Republic of Congo). There is also a brief sequence of meeting with a group of
“pygmies,” while a sequence about the practice of cranial deformation and the
resulting remarkable coiffure of Mangbetu women gave rise to the abiding
iconic image that appeared on publicity posters for the film and had a dra-
matic impact on Parisian fashions (Figure 9D). Many years later, while
acknowledging the imperial tenor of the film and the fact that the filmmakers
knew little about what they were filming because they were constantly on the
move, Jean Rouch praised the directorial skill of Poirier, describing La Croisiere
noire as “the first true film” to be made in sub-Saharan Africa (1967a, 376–77;
1967b, 40–41).
50 P. Henley
In addition to the main film, several subsidiary films were cut from what was
shot during this expedition. The screen-studies scholar Peter Bloom estimates these
at “more than fifty” (2008, 81). While many were on subjects also dealt with in the
main film, at least one was a completely separate venture. It was a short fiction
film that Poirier and Specht made together, based on a legend told by the Merina
people of central Madagascar. The actors were also Merina and their performances
were said to be largely improvized, with Poirier intervening directorially as little
as possible (Leprohon 1945, 269). It thus appears to have been an early example of
the genre later to be dubbed “ethnofiction.”
The title of this film is Zazavavindrano, ou l’Amour malgache (Poirier 1925). The
story involves a young couple whose parents forbid them to marry because in
the course of a trial cohabitation the woman has failed to become pregnant.
The couple hatch a plot, which involves the man pretending he has died while
the woman asks for help to conceive from Zazavavindrano, a water spirit. At
his funeral, the man suddenly sits up and all the mourners scatter. In the con-
fusion the couple elope and shortly afterwards, the story ends happily as the
woman realizes that she is finally expecting a child.19
La Croisiere noire was released in March 1926 to great fanfare: the premiere
was even attended by Gaston Doumergue, the President of France. An exhib-
ition of objects brought back by the expedition ran for several months in a
wing of the Louvre with, at its center, an autochenille surrounded by stuffed
animals. Josephine Baker, the celebrated exotic (but American) dancer, was a
regular presence at the numerous gala events associated with screenings of the
film (Bloom 2006, 153–54). Indeed, La Croisiere noire continues to dominate his-
torical accounts of filmmaking in colonial Africa to this day, so much so that it
has tended to overshadow the many other French expeditionary films contain-
ing some element of ethnographic interest that were being made in Africa
around the same period.
One of these was a sort of dress rehearsal for La Croisiere noire itself. This
film, La Traversee du Sahara (Castelnau 1923), was shot by Paul Castelnau
(1880–1944), who in addition to holding a geography doctorate had also
trained as a filmmaker and was one of the operators contributing to Kahn's
Archives de la Planete. Like La Croisiere noire, this film was sponsored by
Citro€en, involved many of the same expeditionaries, and also followed a group
of autochenilles, this time only five, as they made their way from the railhead at
Touggourt in Algeria across the Sahara to Timbuktu, in what is now Mali
(Figure 1). Including the return journey to Touggourt, the complete expedition
covered 6,000 km and lasted for three months, from December 1922 to March
1923 (Leprohon 1945, 64).20
The principal film was released in 1923, but the material was then reworked
and released again as a twelve-part series under the general title, Le Continent
mysterieux (Castelnau 1924). As described by Peter Bloom, this incorporated
various sequences of some ethnographic interest, including one that showed
bare-breasted Nailiyat women from Ouargla in Algeria performing the danse
du ventre (belly dance), and another showing Chaamba Berber riders demon-
strating their horsemanship (Bloom 2008, 80–81).
In response to these films sponsored by the Citro€en company, Renault, its

main industrial rival in France, also took to sponsoring expeditionary films
aimed at demonstrating that their vehicles too could cross the desert, even
without caterpillar tracks. Bloom suggests that two such films were made, each
of which followed an expedition featuring Renault vehicles equipped with six
twinned and tire-clad wheels on three axles. The first of these films covered
the so-called Mission Gradis-Estienne, an expedition that followed much the
same route across the Sahara as the Citro€en expedition had done a year earlier.
Under the title La premiere traversee rapide du desert (329 heures), this film was
released in 1924, hard on the heels of the Citro€en film (Anonymous 1924b). Its
title was not just almost identical to that of the Citro€en film but was also
clearly intended to suggest that the Renault vehicles could cross the Sahara
more quickly than the autochenilles (Bloom 2006, 150; 2008, 86–87).
Similarly, the title of the second Renault expeditionary film, Les Mysteres du
continent noir (Anonymous 1926) was very close to that of the Citro€en 12-part
series. This film was released in 1926, the same year as La Croisiere noire, and
followed the so-called Mission Gradis-Delingette expedition. This lasted for
eight months, just as the Citro€en venture had done, and also covered the full
length of the African continent, starting in Oran, in French Algeria, and ending
in Cape Town, after passing through French Equatorial Africa. As Bloom
describes it, this film includes various sequences of potential ethnographic
interest, though they involve what he considers an excessively voyeuristic
interest in various forms of female bodily mutilation, including scarification
and the by-then already sensationalized lip-plates of the Sara women of Chad
(Bloom 2008, 86; cf. Leprohon 1945, 69–70).
As a film, Les Mysteres du continent noir is now largely forgotten, while La
Croisiere noire has come to stand in a metonymic fashion for the whole genre of
interwar films about French automotive expeditions across Africa. Ironically
however it was the wheeled Renault vehicles that provided the first trans-
Saharan automotive service while the autochenilles proved to be little more than
a commercial dead end (Bloom 2008, 89–90).
The Sara lip-plates, which had featured in both La Croisiere noire and Les
Mysteres du continent noir, turned up yet again two years later in footage shot
by Rene Moreau, an experienced reportage filmmaker who was the cinematog-
rapher on an expedition through French Equatorial Africa led by the eminent
writer Jean d’Esme (1894–1966). During the course of this expedition, which
lasted almost a year, Moreau shot some fourteen hours of material. D’Esme
had originally intended to use this merely as documentation on the basis of
which he would write a novel and a series of lectures (Leprohon 1945, 217–18).
But in fact two major films were cut from the footage. Neither appears in the
UNESCO catalog, but both films are in the catalog of the CNC, which attrib-
utes the direction of both to Moreau. One of these, troublingly entitled Peaux
noires (literally, “black skins”), is reported to be 90 minutes long. In the catalog
it is given a release date of 1932 and is described as a sound film (Moreau
1932). However, the film itself is not currently viewable at any of the CNC
establishments. The other film, A travers le Cameroun, le Gabon et le Congo
52 P. Henley
Figure 10 A travers le Cameroun, le Gabon et le Congo (Moreau 1928b). (A) Kotoko

fishermen on the Chari river, which flows into Lake Chad. (B) Moundang dancers at Lere, close
to the Chad-Cameroun border.
(Moreau 1928a) is silent and runs for less than an hour. It is not given a release
date in the CNC catalog, but a 35 mm print can be viewed at the main CNC
archive at Bois d’Arcy.
From an editorial point of view, A travers le Cameroun, le Gabon et le Congo is
something of a hybrid. It conforms to the expeditionary film format in that it is
structured grosso modo around the journey of the expedition and there are
many references throughout the film to the fact that a journey is under way.
Indeed, this journey is much more extensive than is suggested by the title
because, in addition to the colonies mentioned there, the expedition also
passed through Oubangui-Chari and Chad. Strangely, however, as is evident
from d’Esme’s textual account (1931), this journey is presented in the film in
an order different from that in which it occurred in reality. So after an arrival
scene at the port of Douala in Cameroon, the first reel, i.e., the first ten
minutes, is largely concerned with visits to Catholic churches, missions and
colonial monuments in the French Congo and Gabon, when actually the exped-
ition only passed through these latter colonies right at the end of the trip. The
second reel is then dedicated to a fictional story in which a Catholic missionary
enables an African woman to marry a fellow Christian by paying off the bride-
wealth that her prospective pagan husband was expecting from her family.
The third reel offers a catalog of dances and ritual events in no coherent geo-
graphical order, and again not in the order in which the expedition encoun-
tered them. Only midway through the fourth reel does the expeditionary
format reassert itself, as the film follows the expedition on its journey north
through Oubangui-Chari and into Chad.
As a cinematographer Moreau was clearly very skilled. Many of the topics
covered in this film echo familiar tropes of French expeditionary films in
Central Africa: in addition to the Sara lip-plates, they include the ganza initi-
ation ceremony of the Dapka Banda, and the Kotoko fishermen with their
butterfly-shaped nets (Figure 10A). In southwestern Chad the expedition vis-
ited the village of Lere, where they filmed the horsemen whose chain mail and
checkered horse blankets would remind many a French colonial traveler of
medieval knights. They also filmed the ritual performances of the Moundang,
including the mysterious masked figures, clad in all-embracing black fiber cos-
tumes surmounted with aureoles, who traditionally perform at male initiations
and funerals and are associated with death and rebirth (Figure 10B; cf. d’Esme
1931, pl. 97; Adler 1994, 94–95).
However, in addition to these recurrent tropes, A travers le Cameroun, le
Gabon et le Congo also covers many other customary practices that are less fre-
quently represented and are particularly interesting ethnographically. One of
the most striking is the chiefly mortuary ceremony of a group identified as the
Boubou who are said to be living close to Alindao in the south of Oubangui-
Chari (Figure 1). This involves setting the corpse up on a chair over a fire and,
in effect, smoking it for several days while mourners express their grief
through dance. This sequence is challenging, particularly to modern sensibil-
ities, but in a technical sense it is, like most of the film, well shot, and there
can be little doubt about its authenticity (d’Esme 1931, pl. 37–39).
As with La Croisiere noire, a number of subsidiary films were cut from the
material shot during the d’Esme expedition, the direction of all of which is
attributed in the CNC catalog to Moreau. Most of these subsidiary films con-
cern mineral and other natural resources, but there is at least one film of
ethnographic interest. This is Fetichisme, around six minutes long (Moreau
1928b). It concerns a ceremonial event, seemingly taking place on the outskirts
of Brazzaville, during which a “sorcerer” diagnoses the cause of death of a
young boy by giving poison to two people, one of whom dies and is therefore
deemed responsible for killing the boy through witchcraft. The ceremony has
clearly been set up and the film will seem rather absurd to modern eyes—par-
ticularly the final scene in which the participants flee when a bearded
European missionary approaches—but it is reasonably well shot and, if viewed
critically, has a certain ethnographicness.
Some years later d’Esme went on to direct another expeditionary film, La
grande caravane (d’Esme 1936). This was shot in a very different environment,
namely the desert of northern Niger, and it follows a salt caravan proceeding
from Agades to Bilma (Figure 1). Unlike the films that arose from his Central
African expedition this film does appear in the UNESCO catalog, where it is
dated to 1936. I have not been able to see the film, but in the “appreciation” in
the catalog (very probably written by Jean Rouch) it is described as work that,
although marred by the commentary and music superimposed on the sound-
track, contains many sequences that are “extremely interesting from a socio-
logical, technological and artistic point of view” (Rouch 1967b, 219).
Other African expeditionary films made by French filmmakers around this
time include the provocatively entitled Le vrai visage de l’Afrique: Au pays des
buveurs de sang (Barth 1932). This was shot in 1929–30 and released in various
forms and under various titles in the early 1930s and then again in 1943. Both
the film and the expedition on which it was based were paid for by an aristo-
crat, Baron Napoleon Gourgaud (1881–1944), who had come into a large for-
tune after marrying an American heiress and banker's daughter, Eva Gebhard.
It is often assumed that because Gourgaud led the expedition he also directed
54 P. Henley
the film, but on the actual film he is not given any technical credits. In the
CNC catalog the film is attributed rather to Joseph Barth, the very experienced
cinematographer who had previously worked with Jean Epstein on Finis
Terrae (1929).
This film follows the itinerary of the Gourgaud expedition, first by sea to
South Africa through the Suez Canal, and then northwards overland through
Central Africa though, unusually for a French expedition of the period, it spent
only a limited amount of time in the French colonies. As it proceeds north,
mostly in wheeled vehicles, it encounters various groups, including the Zulu
and San “Bushmen” in South Africa, “Kaffres” in Mozambique, “pygmies” and
Mangbetu in the Belgian Congo, and finally the Maasai in British East Africa.
It is their occasional practice of drinking blood drawn directly from the necks
of their cattle that provides the pretext for the sensationalist subtitle of the
film. There are also many sequences dedicated to impressive features of the
natural environment, while Gourgaud is shown shooting a substantial quantity
of big game in a series of clearly set-up sequences. The film concludes with a
bizarre coda, which consists of a “pilgrimage” via the Congo river out to the
island of St. Helena in the mid-Atlantic, where Gourgaud’s great-grandfather,
Gaspard, had been a companion to Gourgaud’s namesake, the Emperor
Napoleon, in his final years of exile.21
Le vrai visage de l’Afrique is a substantial film, running for just over an hour.
Gourgaud commissioned a prominent Swiss editor, Jean Choux (1887–1946), to
cut it, and in some sources it is Choux who is credited as director of the film.
At the time of its release it attracted considerable attention, and as late as the
1970s it was still being cited by the Encyclopedie Larousse as a leading example
of the films in the documentary film genre released in the year 1932, on par
with such classic works as Las Hurdes/Land Without Bread/La Terre sans pain by
Luıs Bu~ nuel (1933) and Industrial Britain by Robert Flaherty and John
Grierson.22 But although it does indeed include some very well-executed
sequences of dance accompanied by on-location sound recordings—notably
those featuring performances by the Zulu, the “Kaffres” and the Maasai
(Figure 11)—present-day audiences are more likely to see it as little more than
a vainglorious safari film, punctuated by certain highly offensive racist sequen-
ces, particularly one in which two women, one San, the other “Hottentot,” are
presented as if they were zoological specimens.
Very different from all other French expedition films of the interwar period
was Voyage au Congo, running for 115 minutes and therefore the longest of
them all (Gide and Allegret 1927). Produced by Pierre Braunberger (who would
later support the early careers of both Luıs Bu~ nuel and Jean Rouch), this film
follows the journey of the eminent writer, Andre Gide, and his cinematog-
rapher (also sometime lover) Marc Allegret, as they journeyed through French
Equatorial Africa between July 1925 and February 1926. Starting from the
mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic coast, they traveled northwards by
rail, road, canoe and even litter, before eventually reaching the savanna region
around Lake Chad. From here they traveled westwards, returning to the port
of Douala on the coast through French Cameroun (Figure 1).
Figure 11 Le Vrai Visage d’Afrique (Barth 1932). “In Africa, dancing is as important as eating
and drinking”. (A) To xylophone music recorded on location, (B) a group of ‘Kaffres’ (a colonial
term for Nguni-speaking peoples of southern Mozambique) perform a dance for the camera.
Although Marc Allegret did all the shooting and most of the editing—Gide
doing little more than compose the elegant intertitles—Gide’s name neverthe-
less comes first, analphabetically, in the credits at the beginning of the film.
But one should remember that at the time Andre Gide (1869–1951) was already
a major public figure in France, while Allegret (1900–71) was an unknown nov-
ice: putting Gide’s name first would surely have not only promoted the film
but also the younger man’s career. In any case, this secondary accreditation
certainly did not prevent Allegret from building a very successful career as a
filmmaker on the back of this first experience.23
Voyage au Congo is without doubt the masterwork of French ethnographic
cinema in Africa prior to World War II, and yet it has been strangely neglected
in the literature on ethnographic film. It does not feature in the 1967 UNESCO
catalog and, although Jean Rouch mentions it in his essay in the Appendix of
that volume, it is no more than a passing reference (1967a, 378–79). This neg-
lect has probably been in large measure due to the simple fact that this film
has been very difficult to see, though very recently this situation has been rem-
edied by the release of the film in a sparkling, digitally restored version by
Pierre Braunberger’s daughter, Laurence, who now runs Les Films du Jeudi,
the legal successor of the production company that Braunberger pere had ori-
ginally set up.
In line with the conventional expeditionary film format, the progress of the
journey by Gide and Allegret forms the narrative structure of the film. This is
helped along by the elegant and artistically laid-out intertitles of Gide, number-
ing around 150. They not only serve to signpost the various stages of the jour-
ney but also provide some ethnographic information. But in contrast to most
other expeditionary films of the period, at no point do the filmmakers appear
in shot, and there are only very brief glimpses of other Europeans. After the
first ten minutes or so, as the travelers move beyond Bangui, the capital of
Oubangui-Chari, references to the journey itself cease and instead the principal
focus of the film becomes the customary behavior of the various ethnic groups
56 P. Henley
Figure 12 Voyage au Congo (Gide and Allegret 1927) features certain recurrent tropes, such
as (A) the Dapka Banda initiation ceremony and (B) the horsemen of the Reï-Bouba sultanate,
but in other respects it is highly original, particularly in the “ethnofictional” passage about (C,
D) the marriage of a Sara couple.
whom the filmmakers meet. These are listed in an intertitle as the Baya, Sara,
Massa, Moundang and Foulbe.24
Voyage au Congo covers the staple topics of expeditionary films—ceremonies,
subsistence activities and architecture—and many familiar scenes crop up once
again, including the Dakpa Banda initiation ceremony, the Moundang masked
dancers in black fiber costumes, and the horsemen of an Islamic sultanate in
northern Cameroun (Figure 12A,B). Significantly, however, the Sara lip-plates
are not shown, though Gide and Allegret certainly passed through the region
where they were common. The film is also distinctive for its emphasis on
everyday aspects of women’s lives, including a lengthy sequence on the proc-
essing of manioc by women of the Baya ethnic group. This begins in the fields,
as the women dig up the roots, follows them as they take the roots home and
process them in order to produce a flour, before finally showing them making
a sort of sticky paste by mixing this flour with boiling water. This following of
a technical process from beginning to end, now of course a commonplace in
ethnographic film, was highly unusual for the period.
However, by far the most original feature of Voyage au Congo is the fictional-
ized story that comes midway through the film and takes some 25 minutes,
around a quarter of its total duration. This ethnofiction avant la lettre concerns
a young Sara woman, the beautiful Kadde, who by means of an innocent sub-
terfuge attracts the attention of Djimta, a young man of her village. Enchanted
by her beauty, Djimta goes to Kadde’s parents’ homestead where, through an
intermediary, as is customary, he asks for permission to marry Kadde, only to
find that her father is expecting too high a brideprice (Figure 12C). Kadde is
disconsolate and, in a charming scene, is comforted by her sister. However, the
story has a happy ending since Djimta persuades his own father to support
him in making an enhanced brideprice proposal, which is accepted. After a
celebratory dance Djimta and Kadde are shown in close-up, engaged in a good
humored, coquettish conversation, clearly very happy to be in one another’s
company (Figure 12D). This degree of informal intimacy was entirely unprece-
dented in African ethnographic film: indeed, it would only be in Jean Rouch’s
films of the 1950s that such scenes would appear again.
When Allegret began shooting Voyage au Congo, he was only 25 and had no
previous experience in film. Given these circumstances the quality of the cinema-
tography is truly remarkable. However, in the early part of the film, while indi-
vidual shots are always well composed, they tend to consist of one-off shots that
are reminiscent of Lumiere vues in that they are long and wide-angle but, in
being all of the same general kind, do not lend themselves to being assembled
into complex sequences. Allegret clearly had some technical problems too as
quite a number of the shots in the film suffer from vignetting. But as the film pro-
gresses, one can sense him developing his confidence and skills as he goes. The
camerawork becomes more assured, with closer shots interspersed with wide
shots as well as with some changes of angle, thereby allowing for more elaborate
sequences. This reaches its greatest development in the ethnofictional sequence.
In referring briefly to Voyage au Congo in his “Situation et tendances” essay,
Jean Rouch extolls the film for its “naïve and beautiful images” but complains
that “the ethnological and social document often disappears behind
aestheticism” (1967a, 379). Although it is true that the film is charged with
beautiful images, this criticism seems somewhat unfair, given Allegret’s con-
cern with the systematic documentation of everyday processes as well as set-
piece ritual events. If Voyage au Congo can be criticized for allowing aesthetic
considerations to override the faithful representation of social realities, this
would be most justly related, in my view, not to ethnological documentation
as such, but rather to the editing out of all but the most fleeting reference to
the French colonial presence in Central Africa.
In the accounts that he wrote of this journey, Gide denounced in the most
forceful terms the private companies involved in the extraction of forest prod-
ucts (wood, ivory, most of all rubber), on account of their highly exploitative
treatment of African laborers. He also condemned the colonial authorities for
doing so little to stop this abuse. But in the film there is not even the slightest
hint of all this, let alone of what was then the highly controversial issue of the
press-ganging by colonial authorities of African males from as far away as
Oubangui-Chari and Chad to work on the building of the infamous
Congo–Ocean railway running from Brazzaville on the lower Congo to Pointe
Noire on the Atlantic Coast (Figure 1).25
58 P. Henley
Nor does the film reveal the complicity of Gide and Allegret themselves
with the colonial regime. Their journey was in fact an official mission of the
Ministry of Colonies, and they often stayed with French officials. They were on
particularly good terms with Auguste Lamblin, the Governor of Oubangui-
Chari, whose road-building is commended in one of the early intertitles. As
described by Allegret in his personal diary, this complicity also involved oblig-
ing local people, under duress, to provide them with food or to work as their
porters. The film is equally silent, of course, on Allegret’s dalliances with a ser-
ies of local pre-pubescent girls, as is also described in his diaries. But whatever
we might think of these contextual circumstances today, this does not detract
from the unparalleled value of Voyage au Congo in my view as a powerful testi-
mony to the strength and beauty of traditional life in Central Africa back in
the 1920s.26
Contemporaneously with these transregional or even transcontinental exped-
itionary films, a considerable number of others were being made in the inter-
war years based on a tour, actual or metaphorical, around particular colonies
in sub-Saharan Africa. These films offered a sort of inventory of the resources,
both natural and human, of these colonies and were made to be screened at
local events all over metropolitan France, with a view to making the general
public more aware of the colonial project and, above all, to convince them of
its importance. Although the Ministry of the Colonies in Paris actively encour-
aged this genre of filmmaking, it was typically funded by local economic
development agencies within the colonies concerned. Some colonies commis-
sioned these films from production companies such as Gaumont or Pathe,
while others made their own arrangements (Murray Levine 2010, 120–24).
These inventory films were generally much more modest productions than the
transregional or transcontinental expedition films: the cameramen did not have
the grand reputations of Georges Specht or Joseph Barth, and the films them-
selves rarely lasted more than 20 minutes. Structurally they were usually very
simple. In fact, although generally longer, they were not dissimilar in structure
from the earlier reportage films, in that they usually consisted just of an assem-
bly of shots of various features of a given place or activity, with no significant
internal narrative development.
The subject matter of these films mostly related to the modernizing activities
of the colonial regime: ports, railways, roads and forestry projects figured
prominently. But in some colonies films were also made about the cultural life
of various ethnic groups living there. This seems to have been particularly the
case in Cameroun, where a filmmaker by the name of Rene Bugniet was active
in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was a cartographer by profession but had
also been trained to shoot and edit films. Five of his more ethnographic films
are viewable in the digitized collection of the CNC at the BnF. Two of these,
Dans l’extrême nord (Bugniet nd-a) and En pays foulbe (Bugniet 1927) are about
the various groups who inhabit the savanna region around Lake Chad in the
far north of the country. A third, Bamouns et Bamilekes (Bugniet 1930) is about
two groups living in the Western Highlands, close to the Nigerian border
(Figure 13); while the other two films are more comparative: Cases du Cameroun
Figure 13 Cameroun: Bamouns et Bamilekes (Bugniet 1930). (A) A Bamileke chief.

(B) Scarification is a highly developed form of body decoration among Bamileke women.
(Bugniet 1931) compares the highly diverse architectural styles of the colony,
while Danses regionales (Bugniet nd-b) offers a series of highly energetic dances,
apparently performed specifically for the camera, but featuring a remarkable
music track that seems to have been recorded on location, albeit not in synch.
These films may be modest as cinematography, and many modern viewers
will sense a disproportionate interest in women’s bodies. Taken as a whole,
these five films by Rene Bugniet also reproduce, as it were in a miniaturized
version, many of the tropes of the more substantial expeditionary films: the
lip-plates, the fishing nets, the Muslim sultans with their entourage, and so on.
They are nevertheless well shot and, when viewed with an appropriate allow-
ance for the context in which they were made, they may still be of some value
as ethnographic documentation.
A number of inventory films were also made in Madagascar. One early
example is A travers Madagascar (de Goulay 1923). This was directed by a certain
Dick de Goulay,27 and provides a veritable tour d’horizon of Malagasy life by
following some colonial officers, wearing pith helmets and carried in litters, on
a tour of inspection. At 42 minutes it is relatively long for this kind of film and
covers a wide variety of topics at breakneck speed: very rapidly it shows vari-
ous ethnic groups, a range of architectural forms, impressive local scenery, eco-
nomic activities, a glimpse of a mosque, dances, crafts, sports (wrestling
particularly), hairstyles, children’s games—all covered in a series of brief shots
interspersed with highly decorated intertitles which feature motifs that seem to
be more Central or West African than anything to do with Madagascar.
Three years after the release of La Croisiere noire, Leon Poirier returned to
Madagascar to make Caïn (1930), a major fictional feature film. While there he
also made a documentary similar in some regards to A travers Madagascar,
though very much more sophisticated in both technique and content. At
51 minutes, Instantanes malgaches (Poirier 1929) is not dissimilar in duration, but
it proceeds at a more measured pace: after showing various aspects of the lives
of sundry ethnic groups living in and around the port of Mahajanga—includ-
ing Arabs, Hindu migrants from India, Chinese shopkeepers, as well as the
60 P. Henley
Figure 14 Instantanes malgaches (Poirier 1929). In the closing sequence, the tricolor is raised,
suggesting that the diverse peoples of the island of Madagascar are united under the noble banner
of the French Empire.
indigenous Sakalava population and even a French colonial officer—the focus

of the film moves to the royal village of Manongarivo to witness a ceremony
at which a member of the royal household invokes an ancestor at the site of
his tomb and makes a sacrifice. The film ends with a series of dances in which
the several cultural traditions represented on the island may be detected—only
thinly disguised, it is suggested in an intertitle—beneath a veneer of
Western influence.
Yet although it undoubtedly represents a considerable advance in terms of
film craft, the underlying message of Instantanes malgaches is much the same as
travers Madagascar, and indeed that of La Croisiere noire, namely that
that of A
French colonization is unifying the culturally diverse groups that have been
brought under its control. The final shot of Instantanes malgaches shows the
French tricolor being slowly raised with saluting French officers in pith hel-
mets and a uniformed local brass band, presumably playing the “Marseillaise”
(Figure 14).
Many of these inventory films made in particular colonies were commis-
sioned specifically for screening at the Exposition Coloniale Internationale held
at Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris, between May and November 1931. That
Exposition featured a central building, the Cite des Informations, in which
some 300 films were shown over the course of six months. Further films were
screened at the individual pavilions dedicated to particular colonies or to gen-
eral themes. Although many of these films were about such matters as health
campaigns, the building of roads and railways, or military exploits, there
would undoubtedly also have been many films of ethnographic interest. In
addition to those commissioned specifically for the Exposition, the film pro-
gram also included films made independently, including both fictional feature
films and documentaries. Among the latter were Le vrai visage de l’Afrique and,
of course, La Croisiere noire. There was even a pavilion dedicated specifically to
the Citro€en expeditions at the Exposition; while the person in overall charge of
the film program was none other than Leon Poirier.28
1930S: THE FIRST ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMS BASED ON FIELD RESEARCH
After the flurry of filmmaking activity immediately prior to this Exposition

Coloniale, there appears to have been something of a hiatus in the production
of films on colonial topics (Murray Levine 2010, 132). But though fewer in
number, films based on African expeditions were still being released in this
period. They included two films with particularly contentious titles, Les Fils de
Cham (Muraz 1934a) and Les Dieux de cuivre (Muraz 1934b), both about
30 minutes long. These were made by Gaston Muraz (1887–1955), a military
doctor who played a leading role in the campaign to combat sleeping sickness
in the colonies of Central Africa. He was also something of an amateur photog-
rapher, ethnologist and poet, who first moved to the region in 1919 when he
was posted to Fort-Archambault (today Sarh) in southern Chad. In 1928 he
was promoted and took up a position in the French colony of Oubangui-Chari
immediately to the south, remaining there until 1931.
It was presumably during this twelve-year period that Muraz shot the
material for both films. He appears to have been his own cinematographer,
since no one else is credited with this function in the films. Notwithstanding
the dubious titles and the now intolerable voice-over celebrating the power of
modern medicine to dispel the fears causing “the trembling of thousands of
negroes menaced by a cruel fetishism” (as the opening commentary of Les
Dieux de cuivre puts it), both films contain sequences concerning traditional cul-
tural practices that are of considerable ethnographic interest.
Les Fils de Cham takes its title from the apocryphal legend that Africa was
originally populated by descendants of Noah’s son, known as Ham or Cham,
whom Noah had supposedly cursed because Ham had seen Noah’s private
parts while Noah was drunk. A preliminary title, in elegant Art Deco lettering,
promises “a sensational reportage on … the mysterious land of the Sara,” and
true enough, once again, about a third of the way into the film there is an
uncompromising sequence on the “cruel enigma” of Sara lip-plates. But there
is much else in the film, though presented in a quite jumbled fashion: there are
sequences of a funeral, an initiation ceremony and a ritual battle. There are
various musical performances supported by an extra-diegetic soundtrack, some
of which seems to be local music, while other parts are more jazz-like.
Surprisingly, this superimposed music generally works quite well.
Uncomfortably for modern eyes, though, there is a particular emphasis on wom-
en’s bodies in motion as they dance. Less challenging are various sequences of sub-
sistence activities, including fishing from canoes equipped with large nets (though
not quite as elaborate as those of the Kotoko) and various forms of agricultural
activity (Figure 15A). There are shots of the natural environment, a hunting
sequence, and a variety of manifestations of the colonial presence, including a dis-
tant shot of a line of soldiers in a region said to have some “dissidence.” Although
this film could be severely criticized both on editorial and ideological grounds, it is
reasonably accomplished from a technical point of view and, if one can set aside
the temptation to dismiss it on presentist moral grounds, it can be read as a fasci-
nating account of customary behavior in Central Africa in the 1920s.
62 P. Henley
Figure 15 Films by Gaston Muraz. (A) In Les Fils de Cham (Muraz 1934a), a slit gong in
central Oubangui-Chari provides rhythm for the women working in the fields beyond. (B) In Les
Dieux de cuivre (Muraz 1934b), Kota men on the upper Ogooue river present a
reliquary sculpture.
A similar argument could be made about Muraz’s other film, Les Dieux de
cuivre, which editorially is somewhat less jumbled. It appears to have been
made in the course of an expedition outside Muraz’s immediate area of profes-
sional responsibility, since it was shot in the coastal regions of the French
Congo (today the Republic of Congo), and on the upper Ogooue River, on the
border between the French Congo and Gabon (Figure 1). It is conceivable that
what took Muraz to the French Congo was the highly controversial forced
transfer there of Sara men from Oubangui-Chari in order for them to work on
the Congo–Ocean railway. Certainly the opening sequence of the film shows
Sara laborers in the Mayombe forest, close to the Atlantic coast, at work on the
building of the railway, manually digging their way through a cliff.
There are also a number of other sequences shot in the coastal regions of the
French Congo that are of ethnographic interest. These include a sequence of a
young woman wearing large quantities of metal rings around her legs and
arms as a sign of wealth, and another showing how the scarification of wom-
en’s stomachs has been developed into an elaborate art form. However, the
main body of this film was shot during Muraz’s travels on the tributaries of
the upper Ogooue and concerns the local inhabitants, primarily the Kota and
Fang. Indeed, the title of the film derives from the Kota reliquary sculptures
that were placed on top of basketwork containers enclosing the skulls and
other bones of ancestors, whose presence was thought to have an important
ongoing impact on everyday life. These sculptures were typically covered with
plates of beaten copper, which were then polished. Midway through the film
there comes an extended sequence in which these sculptures are presented to
camera, as well as the dances and other performances associated with them
(Figure 15B). Although it is clear that Muraz himself had little understanding
of the significance of these objects, this sequence can still be appreciated for its
descriptive ethnographic qualities.
Even if some expedition-based films continued to appear, it was in the
course of the 1930s that the first films were made in Africa that were based in
some sense on extended field research. The narrative structure of these films
derived not from the progress of the filmmakers’ journey from one indigenous
group to another, but rather from an analysis of events or situations within
one particular community. The best-known of these research-based works are a
set of four films concerning the Dogon of the Bandiagara Cliffs which were
made by Jean Rouch’s supervisor and mentor, Marcel Griaule (1898–1956).
Until recently a great deal of misinformation about these films circulated in the
literature on ethnographic film, including in the UNESCO catalog. But our
understanding of the circumstances under which these films were made has

greatly increased as a result of the detailed studies of Griaule’s oeuvre by Eric
Jolly, whose work I draw on here (particularly 2001, 2014, 2017).
Between 1929 and 1939 Griaule led five field expeditions to Africa and,
inspired by Marcel Mauss’s injunction to use both film and photography as
tools of ethnographic fieldwork, he arranged for footage to be shot on all but
one of them. However, as Jolly has established, the four films arising from
Griaule’s expeditions that are certainly known to exist were all primarily cut
from rushes shot during the so-called Sahara–Soudan expedition, Griaule’s
third expedition, which took place during January–April 1935. Footage was
also shot on Griaule’s first expedition to Ethiopia in 1928–29, as well as on the
second, the celebrated Dakar–Djibouti expedition of 1929–31, and also on his
final pre-war expedition, the 1938–39 journey from the Bandiagara Cliffs
through French Cameroun to Chad. Only on his fourth expedition, to
Cameroun in 1936–37, does it appear that no filming was done. However,
although Griaule usually started out with ambitious filmmaking plans, none of
the footage from these other expeditions appears to have been sufficiently
good to warrant being edited into films. Apart from two short sequences shot
during the Dakar–Djibouti expedition—one of a Wassalou potter at work in
Bamako, capital of the French Soudan, the other of the sacrifice of a lamb dur-
ing a zar possession ceremony in Gondar, Ethiopia—otherwise all this footage
seems to have been lost (Jolly 2017).
It is surely no coincidence that the Sahara–Soudan expedition was the only
one on which Griaule took a professional filmmaker.29 This was Roger
Mourlan, who was only 22 at the time, though he already had some experience
of working in Africa, having previously accompanied a natural history exped-
ition to Madagascar. Stills taken from the film that he made then had subse-
quently been exhibited at the old Trocadero Ethnography Museum (the
predecessor of the Musee de l’Homme). Mourlan’s father, Albert, was an expe-
rienced filmmaker, and it was presumably from him that Roger had learnt his
craft. As a cinematographer, Roger may not have been in the same league as
Georges Specht or Joseph Barth but his work for Griaule was nonetheless tech-
nically accomplished.30
In the years immediately following the expedition Griaule used the footage
shot by Mourlan to work out the series of drawings of dance movements that
supplement his classic work, Masques dogons (Griaule 1938). He also used cer-
tain passages of this material to support his lectures, both those given in aca-
demic contexts and those that he offered to more general audiences. However,
64 P. Henley
contrary to the information given in many sources, including by Editions

Montparnasse, the company that now distributes these films on DVD, it was
not until 1940 that Griaule produced any free-standing edited films from
this material.
The first two to be cut were Au Pays des Dogons (Griaule 1940a) and Sous les
masques noirs (Griaule 1940b), which were edited and released through a profes-
sional production company, Sirius Films, for the specific purpose of supporting
an exhibition on French colonial Africa at the then recently opened Musee de
l’Homme. This exhibition was due to be inaugurated in November 1939 by
Georges Mandel, the Minister of the Colonies, but probably due to Griaule’s
military commitments at the outbreak of World War II the finalizing of the
films appears to have been delayed until the early months of 1940. In the
interim La Croisiere noire was shown at the exhibition instead. Jolly reports that
the release of the other two films, Technique chez les noirs (Griaule 1942a) and Le
Soudan mysterieux (Griaule 1942b), which were also made in collaboration with
Sirius Films, took place somewhat later, in 1942 (Jolly 2014, 97–98, 111 n.10).31
Au pays des Dogons and Sous les masques noirs are both very short, around ten
minutes, presumably because they were intended to accompany a museum
exhibition rather than to be projected as free-standing films. It was also pre-
sumably to appeal to the museum-going public that they both have extra-die-
getic European music tracks, varying from the light classical to the “jazzy”
(Piault 2000, 115). These have not aged well, and now sound rather ridiculous.
Au pays des Dogons offers a general overview of Dogon life and is ordered,
Jolly has argued, according to a series of categories envisaged by Marcel
Mauss, beginning with the “aesthetic” (children’s games), followed by
“technology” (crafts and subsistence activities) and ending with “religious phe-
nomena” (prediction of the future and animal sacrifice at an ancestral shrine)
(Figure 16A). Although the Dogon had been forcibly subdued by the colonial
army as recently as 1909 and in their largest village, Sangha, the colonial pres-
ence was substantial (with even an American missionary), references to the
outside world are minimal. As in Griaule’s texts, the Dogon are mostly shown
as if they inhabited a “mysterious” and isolated ahistorical universe in which
they lived a simple but dignified life based on collective manual work and reli-
gious belief (Jolly 2014, 84–87, 99).
Sous les masques noirs focuses more specifically on masks, starting with their
making and then showing them in use during a funeral ceremony (Figure
16B). Early in this film Griaule himself appears with his leading Dogon inform-
ants, who are presented anonymously, as if they had no personal history and
certainly no contact with the outside world. But these informants include
Doussu Wologuem, who was not only a Muslim but also a First World War
veteran, a member of the Legion d’honneur and a holder of the Croix de guerre
(ibid., 86).
Both films open with rolling titles offering a panegyric to the “colonizing
genius of the French” and, in particular, to Georges Mandel, the govern-
ment minister who was due to open the exhibition at which the films
would be shown. Although there is some doubt as to whether Griaule
Figure 16 Marcel Griaule films the Dogon. (A) Au pays des Dogons (Griaule 1940a): “Here
is a sanctuary dedicated to an ancestor particularly favoured by the supernatural powers”.
(B) Sous les masques noires (Griaule 1940b): “Finally, on the day of the funeral ceremony, the
masks can present themselves in public – [here are] the Hares.”
himself was responsible for these rolling titles, he certainly wrote the com-
mentaries for both films, which are performed in a mannered, declamatory
voice by a professional announcer. Even while praising certain aspects of
traditional Dogon life these commentary tracks are punctuated with condes-
cendingly ironic comment at the Dogons’ expense. It has been suggested
that this can be put down to the fact that Griaule made these films for
popular consumption and that he was obliged to compromise by the pro-
duction company, Sirius Films. However, while that may be true, there is
also a certain continuity between the ironic condescension expressed in
Griaule’s films and that which one finds in his posthumous instructional
handbook, Methode de l’ethnographie (Griaule 1957).
As far as the images are concerned, Griaule’s two later films are little more
than slightly longer and partially re-ordered versions of the first two: Technique
chez les noirs, at 15 minutes, covers much the same ground as Au pays des
Dogons, whereas Le Soudan mysterieux, running to 13 minutes, bears a similar
relationship to Sous les masques noirs. In other respects however there are some
significant differences. Most notably, the preliminary rolling titles praising
Georges Mandel and extolling colonial endeavor are absent. Nor is there any
reference to the Dogon themselves by name in either film: instead they are
referred to simply as les Noirs (“the Blacks”), as if they were generic Africans,
or alternatively as “les Soudanais” (i.e., generic “people from the Sudan”).
Another difference is that Roger Mourlan’s name is absent from the list of
credits. The reason for these differences calls for further investigation.32
In a much-cited interview Griaule once claimed that everything shown in his
films was entirely authentic and that nothing had been set up, since the Dogon
themselves would never have allowed it (Leprohon 1945, 185–86). This how-
ever was manifestly untrue, and in several different respects. First, given that
they were made for non-specialist audiences, certain sequences that it was
feared might offend public taste were omitted. These included the slitting of
66 P. Henley
the throat of a young bull as a totemic sacrifice, which Griaule himself

regarded as one of the most interesting scenes. The sacrifice of a dog, which
was also filmed by Mourlan, was similarly omitted.
Other limitations on the authenticity of the films concern rather the material
that was included. The designs that are shown being executed in Au pays des
Dogons in what is said to be an ancestral sanctuary were in fact being painted
onto the wall of one of the bungalows built by forced labor specifically for
Griaule’s expedition. Similarly the various masked dances that appear in Sous
les masques noirs, which are very competently covered in a mixture of mid-
shots and close-ups by Mourlan, were clearly performed not for a general
Dogon audience, as the commentary claims, but rather for the benefit of the
camera (Figure 16). Most significantly of all, the “funeral” that is shown in
Sous les masques noirs was not a genuine funeral but merely a performance
paid for by Griaule. This at least explains why the young girls who participate
in this “ritual” are roaring with laughter. There is no evidence in the film of
any corpse either (Jolly 2014, 32, 98; 2017).
Griaule’s works appear to have been the only films made in Africa by an
anthropologist de metier prior to the 1940s. However, there were at least two
other bodies of film material made in the 1930s that were informed to some
degree by field research and an ethnographic sensibility. One of these is the
material that was shot between December 1929 and June 1930 by the cinema-
tographer Frederic Gadmer, who had been assigned by the Archives de la
Planete to follow a Catholic missionary, Fr. Francis Aupiais, as he traveled
around Dahomey. This was the only time when a Kahn cinematographer shot
material south of the Sahara.33
By this time Fr. Aupiais had lived in Dahomey for over twenty years and
was deeply committed to reconciling what he considered to be the highly
moral quality of vodoun ceremonial life with the Christian message. Earlier,
during his periodic visits to Paris, he had attended classes at the Institute of
Ethnology and had met Marcel Mauss and Lucien Levy-Bruhl there. In 1928 he
came into contact with Albert Kahn, who offered to pay for Gadmer to work
with him on condition that the material they produced concerning vodoun
would be deposited in the Archives. As part of the deal it was agreed that
Gadmer would also shoot material on the work of Aupiais’s mission in
Dahomey, which the mission would then be able to edit and use for its
own purposes.
In total, Gadmer shot some six hours of footage in Dahomey, two thirds of
which were dedicated to matters relating to vodoun. To Aupiais’s particular
regret, however, no provision was made for recording sound. Moreover, as
with the great majority of footage in the Kahn archive, this material was
intended to document the ceremonies in an objective fashion rather than pro-
vide material from which later to cut a documentary, as that term would be
understood today. Thus, although the images are almost always beautifully
composed and executed, in general the material has been shot in accordance
with the most uncompromising of documentation principles, that is, in long
wide-angle or at most mid-shots from a tripod, with relatively few pans, or
changes of framing or position, and most often at a certain distance from

the subjects.
Despite these limitations, this footage today represents an invaluable record
of the practice of vodoun in its heyday, and since 1996 the Musee Albert-Kahn,
now the custodian of the Archives de la Planete collection, has been working
with partners in Benin to make it available to the current generation of
Beninois. At the time that it was made however this footage landed two of the
main parties in serious trouble. In Dahomey, T^ ongôdô, a leading priest of the
vodoun cult, and one of Aupiais’s principal collaborators, was removed from
office by his peers for having revealed too much. Meanwhile in France,
although the footage was received enthusiastically by Albert Kahn as well as
by Levy-Bruhl and other Parisian intellectuals to whom Aupiais showed it,
and even by the Pope’s representative in Paris, the senior figures of Aupiais’s
own missionary order felt that it gave far too positive an impression of vodoun
and thereby undermined their work in Africa. Not only did they prohibit
Aupiais from showing the material in public, but for many years they did not
even allow him to return to Dahomey.
The other film from the 1930s that appears to have involved some element
of prior field research bears the curious title, Sso: rite indigene des Etons et des
Manguisas (Bertaut and Bugniet 1935). According to the CNC catalog it was both
shot and released in 1935. The subject of the film is the eponymous sso, a
highly elaborate male initiation ceremony practised by the Eton and Manguisa,
two closely-related ethnic groups that form part of the broader Bantu-speaking
cultural grouping, the Beti, who inhabit the tropical forests of south and central
Cameroun.34 The name of the ceremony refers to a particular species of ante-
lope that is invoked at various points, which was reputed never to sleep, and
which was much prized by hunters (Quinn 1980, 293, 300).
Although it languishes in relative obscurity Sso is a very much more sub-
stantial film than any produced by Marcel Griaule. Not only is it much longer,
running for 56 minutes, but it is also more sophisticated in terms of its film
grammar. The film is not in the UNESCO catalog, and it is entirely possible
that Jean Rouch may not have even been aware of its existence. But in some
ways it anticipates Rouch’s own approach to ethnographic film much more
closely than do the films of Rouch’s mentor.
The director of Sso was Maurice Bertaut, who at the time was a senior func-
tionary of the Haut Commissariat, the colonial authority that governed
Cameroun. Originally from the island of La Reunion, Bertaut had studied at

the Ecole coloniale in Paris and had arrived in Cameroun in the late 1920s.
While carrying out his duties, he appears to have conducted some form of field
research, since in 1935, the same year as the release of the film, he was
awarded a doctorate by the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris on the
basis of a thesis dealing with the customary law of the Bulu, another ethnic
group forming part of the same broad Beti cultural grouping as the Eton and
the Manguisa (Bertaut 1935). The cinematographer on Sso was Rene Bugniet,
the filmmaking cartographer who had previously made a considerable number
of inventory films in Cameroun, as described above.
68 P. Henley
Figure 17 Sso (Bertaut and Bugniet 1935). (A) At various points in the sso ceremony, the
initiands undergo elaborate forms of body decoration. (B) The bark walls of the shelter where they
live in seclusion in the forest are also carefully decorated.
The narrative of the main body of Sso simply follows the various stages of
the ceremony as it unfolds over the course of several months. Phases during
which young men are put through severe physical tests, including struggling
through underground tunnels and being stung by ants, alternate with phases
of collective hunting in the forest as well as dancing in the main plaza of the
village. However, the film begins with a sort of fictionalized prolog relating to
the fact that these ceremonies were usually sponsored by a senior man in expi-
ation for some moral misdemeanor. In this case, it is the elderly Bilima who
has apparently committed some infraction, as his young son is gravely ill and
does not respond to the ministrations of a “sorcerer.” When the son finally
dies the “sorcerer” tells Bilima that this misfortune has befallen him because
he has not done penance for injuring his brother in a fight some years before-
hand. There is then a flash-back, as Bilima remembers the occasion. At this
point, Bilima resolves to sponsor a sso ceremony and the film reverts to a more
conventionally realist documentary mode.
The ceremony itself involves an impressive number of initiands: at one
point, there appear to be around eighty of them. There are also many remark-
able scenes of dancing, drumming, body painting and tests of endurance in the
bush (Figure 17). Bugniet’s cinematography is remarkably good, and the use of
local xylophone music to enhance the soundtrack contrasts very favorably with
the European music of Griaule’s Dogon films. The film begins with a pre-title
sequence, then highly unusual, which is structured around some stylish Art-
Deco titles. The commentary, spoken by Bertaut in a low-key, informative
manner, is relatively free of the ironic condescension that is a feature of the
commentaries that Griaule wrote for his films about the Dogon.
Bertaut and Bugniet’s film stands as a valuable and now irreplaceable testi-
mony to the elaborate nature of the ideas, aesthetics and performances that once
made up the sso ceremony, all of which have since been entirely abandoned.
Inevitably, given the colonial context of the production, there are one or two false
notes that are redolent of the ethos of the period, though the only serious blemish
of the film comes right at its very end. Here in the final shot three young women
are shown in a line. Two of them, endowed with shapely busts, are cutely smil-
ing, while the third, in the middle, is turned away so as to offer the audience the
rear view of her body. Over this saccharine scene, which is reminiscent of similar
scenes in Bugniet’s inventory films, the commentary offers the pious hope that
these smiles will efface any unpleasant memory of the terrible earlier scenes
showing the young men’s tests of endurance. The final shot consists of a scarified
stomach with the title “Fin” superimposed on it.
But apart from this discordant ending Sso is a film that is remarkably pro-
gressive for its time, both technically and editorially, and it surely deserves a
more prominent place that it has so far been accorded in the history of French
ethnographic film in Africa.
AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR: THE ORIGINALITY OF JEAN ROUCH
When French ethnographic filmmaking began again in Africa after the Second
World War, the leading examples were three films arising from the so-called
Ogooue–Congo Expedition of 1946. These films were Au pays des pygmees,
Pirogues sur l’Ogooue and Danses congolaises, all of which were directed by
Jacques Dupont and released in 1947 (Dupont 1947a, 1947b, 1947c). This exped-
ition was sponsored by the Society of Explorers and supported financially by
the Liotard fund, which was itself underwritten by the French President’s
office. The films were technically accomplished both in terms of the cinematog-
raphy, which was by Edmond Sechan (1919–2002), who would later become a
major figure of French cinema, and in terms of the sound-recording, carried
out amongst others by the distinguished ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget
(1916–2017). But from a more general editorial point of view, these three films
represented no more than a continuation of the interwar expeditionary genre.
When Jean Rouch first started making films in the immediate postwar
period, his work conformed to the expedition format too. Indeed, his very first
film, Au pays des mages noirs (Rouch, Ponty and Sauvy 1947), which he shot in
1946 during the course of an expedition with two wartime colleagues from its
source to the mouth of the Niger, was in effect a subsidiary venture of the
Ogooue–Congo expedition, and was also supported by the Liotard fund
(Mottier 2017). But over the next decade Rouch would progressively distance
himself from this genre of filmmaking and would develop a new approach
that sought to combine academic research in particular locations, or about par-
ticular subject matters, with the narrative devices of cinema.
When Rouch returned to West Africa in 1948, it was to begin his doctoral
field research amongst the Songhay of Niger, and the first film he made was
still in the expeditionary format. Les Magiciens de Wanzerbe (Rouch 1949a) opens
with a classic trope of the genre: the expedition approaches the village of
Wanzerbe, Rouch’s guide is confused by the unfriendly response of the villag-
ers, and people in the market hide their faces from the camera. Through
befriending the children Rouch is gradually able to shoot more freely, and the
latter part of the film consists of substantial scenes of an ethnographic charac-
ter. But in the course of making his next film, this time chronicling an
70 P. Henley
expedition to Hombori, a Songhay village lying on the other side of the

Nigerien border in what is now Mali (Figure 1), Rouch appears to have under-
gone something of a prise de conscience: he realized that up until that point he
had been shooting opportunistically rather than conceptualizing a film before-
hand on the basis of his ethnographic research. Seemingly disillusioned with
the Hombori expedition footage, he never cut it into a film. Indeed, it was lost
for many years, and was only recuperated by chance from a skip outside the
Musee de l’Homme some years after Rouch’s death in 2004 (Rouch 2008,
114–16; de Pastre 2017, 189, 191).
The other film that Rouch shot while in Hombori, La Circoncision (Rouch
1949b), represented a first step in the direction of a film structured by some-
thing other than a journey. In this case the structure of the film arose entirely
from the structure of the ceremony that forms the central subject-matter of this
film. But in his next one, Initiation a la danse des possedees (Rouch 1949c), shot in
early 1949 and the last to be made during the period of his doctoral research,
Rouch went a little further. Although this film too is primarily structured by
the initiation ceremony that is its central event, it is framed as a whole by the
coming and going by canoe of the principal musician—in effect, a classic narra-
tive device that “tops and tails” the story.
This strategy of enhancing the structure of the central event of a film with an
external narrative device would be one that Rouch would develop even more
during the course of his next visit to Africa in 1950–51, which he made in con-
junction with Roger Rosfelder, a fellow doctoral student of Marcel Griaule. Of
the various films that they made during the course of this expedition, it is argu-
ably Bataille sur le grand fleuve (Rouch 1952) that offers the most interesting
insight into Rouch’s developing skills as a filmmaker. This concerns a hippopot-
amus hunt on the river Niger that took place over several months. Rouch edited
the film with the assistance of Renee Lichtig (1921–2007), who in time would
become a famous editor, though she was then still young and relatively
unknown. As Rouch liked to relate, Lichtig persuaded him to accept an adjust-
ment to the real order of events of the hunt in order to make the narrative flow
more efficiently (Villain 1991, 34).
But there is another feature of this film about which, to the best of my know-
ledge, Rouch did not speak, at least not publicly, namely that the three key
plot points in the narrative are not actually shown; they are merely alluded to
in the voice-over commentary. These three plot points are, first, the injunction
against quarreling that is delivered by the water spirit Harakoy Dikko during
the possession ceremony near the beginning of the film; secondly, the quarrel
between the hunters that broke this taboo, which supposedly occurred midway
through the hunt; and finally, the turning of the hunters’ clothing inside out
for the return journey on account of their shame at not having captured the
alpha male hippopotamus, the “Bearded One.”
These three plot points give the film its coherence, topping and tailing the
film by relating the hunters’ failure to the warning issued by Harakoy Diko, and
at the same time providing an edifying denouement. It is possible of course that
this narrative structure was entirely legitimated by the ethnographic reality:
perhaps Harakoy Diko did indeed issue the injunction, perhaps the hunters did
quarrel, and perhaps when they failed to kill the Bearded One, they attributed
this retrospectively to their lack of respect for Harakoy Diko and therefore
turned their clothes inside out through shame. But whether or not it was ethno-
graphically legitimated, the fact is that these key plot points are not there in the
film record, they have been entirely superimposed through the voice-over.
By the end of the 1950–51 expedition Rouch had moved a long way from the
expedition film format and the simplistic notion, expressed in an opening title
card of Les Magiciens de Wanzerbe, that the cine-camera should be used as if it
were a pencil, to provide a literal sketch of the world. After completing the
conventional ethnographic films that they shot in Niger, Rouch and Rosfelder
traveled south to the British colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana; Figure 1),
accompanied by three Nigerien companions, Damoure Zika, Lam Ibrahim Dia
and Douma Besso. Here they shot material for a film about these Nigeriens’
adventures as migrants discovering a new urban world. It was an expedition-
ary film structured by a journey, but with the difference that the journey was
now that of the subjects rather than of the filmmakers. Moreover it was an
entirely fictional adventure, with the Nigeriens improvising their performances
as the expedition unfolded. Unfortunately, this film was never completed
because, due to technical problems to do with the lens on Rouch’s camera,
most of the footage proved to be out of focus.35
But notwithstanding this set-back the stage was now set for Les Ma^ıtres fous
(Rouch 1955) and Jaguar (Rouch 1968), the two works that Rouch would shoot
during his next expedition, in 1953–54, and which would establish his world-
wide reputation as an ethnographic filmmaker of unprecedented ability and
imagination in the annals of French ethnographic film in Africa.36
Acknowledgements
This article is based on research done during a Major Research Fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust in the
years 2014–18 (MRF-2012-121). I am very grateful both to the Trust for this support, as well as to B eatrice de Pastre
of the Centre national du cinema, and Valerie Perl
es, then of the Mus ee Albert-Kahn, for facilitating my access to the
elle Hauzeur,
collections of early ethnographic film held by their respective institutions. I also thank Jo€ Eric Jolly and
Laurent Pelle for their very helpful advice and suggestions, Peter Blore of the University of Manchester Graphics
Support Workshop for the excellent map (Figure 1), and Olivia Henley for her careful revision of the text. An earlier
and considerably less developed version of this article, without figures, was published in French in the Journal des
Africanistes (Henley 2017).
NOTES
1. Films are referred to here by the name of the director and the year of production
and/or release, as per the Harvard referencing system, but they have been italicized
in this article so as to distinguish them from textual references, e.g., (Castelnau 1923)
as opposed to (Rouch 1967a). English translations of French film titles are given in
the Filmography, below. Portraits of most of the filmmakers discussed here may be
found in the French version of Wikipedia.
2. For a more extended discussion of the concept of “ethnographicness,” see my recent
history of ethnographic film (Henley 2020a, 13–18).
72 P. Henley
3. See https://www.silenttimemachine.net/films/africadiscussion/africa/.
4. The CNC archives can be accessed via http://www.cnc-aff.fr/internet_cnc.; while
the Gaumont-Pathe Archives can be accessed by establishing an account via http://
www.gaumontpathearchives.com.
5. The Pathe-Revue films are accessible via the Gaumont-Pathe Archive, while a
selection of Pathe-Baby films is available on the Princeton University website at
rbsc.princeton.edu/pathebaby/. A somewhat different and in general technically
superior selection of Pathe-Baby films is available on a private website at https://
www.youtube.com/user/StephendelRoser.
6. These paragraphs on the Archives de la Planete draw on Castro (2008) and Werner
(2015), as well as on my own visits to the Musee Albert-Kahn.
7. At present the museum is closed for renovation; it will not open again until early
2021. While some 30,000 photographs are available online in the interim, sadly the
films are not. See http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr.
8. A sample of Regnault and Comte’s material (albeit with the superimposition of an
erroneous voice-over in Italian and a Chopin nocturne) is available on the Web at
www.youtube.com/embed/IvTRx8UGEV8. See Bloom (1994, and 2010, 19–24) and
Rony (1996, 21–73) for more extensive discussions of Regnault’s work.
9. See the online Lumiere catalog at https://catalog-lumiere.com.; also the more
authoritative hardcopy catalog edited by Aubert and Seguin (1996), especially pp.
34–41, 72–79 and 394–98.
10. A Pathe-Revue package released in 1927 features a segment showing the same caïd
and his group hunting with falcons (Anonymous 1927).
11. A search on the Web has produced very little further information about Lejards. A
cinematographer of the same surname was making films for Pathe in the French
colonies in Indochina in the mid-1920s and a photograph of him doing so appeared
in a French cinema magazine in 1933. Also, a “J. Lejards” is identified in the GPA
catalog as having been the operator of a newsreel film made in Andorra in 1930.
See https://www.silenttimemachine.net/film-makers/lejards-j/.
12. The classic source on Dogon masks is Griaule (1938), whilst Dieterlen (1989) offers
an updating of both information and ethnographic understanding.
13. In these paragraphs about Alfred Machin I draw freely on a brief biography by
Francis Lacassin (2001); see also Convents (1986, 122–31). I am very grateful to Jo€elle
Hauzeur for drawing my attention to these works.
14. Pathe were not the only ones recycling Machin’s footage about the Shilluk. The
opening shot of En Afrique also turns up in Dziga Vertov’s 1926 Soviet film, The
Sixth Part of the World, where it features in an early sequence attacking European
colonialism (Figure 6A).
15. I have no direct evidence, but the cinematic qualities of this film suggest that it may
have been directed by Leon Poirier, a major feature film director who made at least
two extended visits to Madagascar in the 1920s and shot a number of other films
there, including L’Amour malgache (1925), La Croisiere noire (1926) and Instantanes
malgaches (1929), all discussed in this article, as well as the major fictional feature
film, Caïn (1930). Though he does not mention any filmmaking, Poirier describes
the fati-dra ceremony in his autobiography (1953, 206).
16. In fact these may not have been the first films of ethnographic interest to be shot in
Central Africa. Convents (1986, 124) alludes to a film listed in the Pathe catalog of
1907 under the title Vues de l’Afrique: Au Congo. The catalog description of its
content refers to peanut harvesting, a camel caravan, fishing with nets, and the
construction of houses. The GPA also contains a number of other films shot in the
French Congo supposedly before the First World War, but the dating of these
is suspect.
17. Although the two terms “expeditionary film” and “travelog” are often used
interchangeably in academic discussions of early nonfiction filmmaking, I would
argue that there is a useful distinction to be drawn between them: I suggest that
the term “expeditionary film” should be applied to films that have been made as
a by-product, as it were, of journeys that have other objectives or motivations,
while the term “travelog” should be reserved for films made for commercial
purposes and that themselves form the principal business of the journey in
question. On this basis, one can draw a distinction—though one that is not
always entirely clear—between the expedition-based films made by French
filmmakers in Africa in the interwar period and the travelogs made in Africa
during this same period by North American filmmakers in the mold of Osa and
Martin Johnson. The latter may have gathered up a few animals en route for
later deposition in a zoo, but their primary purpose was to make films that
would secure a healthy return at the box-office.
18. Despite the celebrity of the film it remains difficult to see. However, a 35 mm copy
is viewable in the main CNC archive at Bois d’Arcy.
19. With the prefix Andantino, this film later became the first part of a two-part work,
Amours exotiques. The other part, Allegro—l’Eve africaine, draws on material shot
amongst various groups across the continent and has been described as a “sort of
catalog of love rites in Black Africa” (Gauthier, Sauvaget and Gauthier 2015).
20. According to his successor, Leon Poirier, Paul Castelnau was not retained as the
cinematographer for La Croisiere noire because in the view of Georges-Marie Haardt,
one of the leaders of both expeditions, the footage that Castelnau shot for the first
expedition did not capture a sense of the desert (Poirier 1953, 63).
21. Of the various French expeditionary films considered in this article, this is the one
that comes closest to the American safari-based travelog, since it is not clear what
purpose the expedition had other than the making of the film itself. See note
17, above.
22. See http://www.larousse.fr/archives/grande-encyclopedie/page/4339.
23. In describing the background to the making of this film I draw freely on Daniel
Durosay’s introduction to the second edition of Marc Allegret’s diaries (Durosay
1993). On the specific matter of the directorial credits, see p. 53.
24. Foulbe is another name for the pastoralist group also known in French as the Peul
and in English as the Fula or Fulani, whose territory extends right across the
southern Sahara region, from Chad to Senegal.
25. Gide published two memoirs relating to the journey, Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le
Retour du Tchad (1928), and it was in the first of these texts that he denounced
conditions in the French colonies, although he did not criticize the colonial project
as such, and certainly did not call for it to end. The publication of Voyage au Congo
provoked a scandal in metropolitan France and appears to have led to some
improvements in the conditions of the Africans working for the extractive
enterprises; see Durosay (1993, 27–28).
26. Allegret’s diaries were not intended for publication, and were first published only in
1987, some fourteen years after his death. On his sexual relationships with local girls,
see Allegret (1993, 130–38 and passim; also Durosay 1993), particularly pp. 38–40.
27. Whatever its limitations, A travers Madagascar appears to have circulated widely:
Murray Levine (2010, 116) reproduces a 1923 poster relating to a regional
screening of colonial films in France, in which it figures prominently.
74 P. Henley
28. The Exposition as a whole has been the subject of a number of excellent studies,
including that by Peter Bloom (2008, 125–35). But to the best of my knowledge a
detailed study specifically of the film program has yet to be done.
29. Various sources suggest that Luıs Bu~ nuel considered joining the Dakar–Djibouti
expedition but in the event preferred instead to use some money won on a lottery
to make Land Without Bread in Las Hurdes (Massonet 1997, 109).
30. For further details on the Mourlans, father and son, see Jolly (2014, 109, 116 n.97;
also 2017).
31. Jolly also reports (2014, 111 n.11) that in the CV that Griaule prepared for his
elevation to a Chair at the Sorbonne in 1943 there is an allusion to a fifth film,
Voyage au pays noir. However, Jolly adds that he has not come across any other
evidence for the existence of this film.
32. Although more research is required, it seems very likely that these differences can
be put down in part to broader political changes that had occurred in the interim
between the release dates of the two sets of films. By 1942, when the two later films
were released, Paris was under the German Occupation and Mandel had been
imprisoned (and two years later he would be murdered by a Vichy militia). It is
little wonder then that the panygeric to Mandel that opened the 1940 films had
been removed. I suspect that Roger Mourlan’s name had also been removed for
political reasons: although I do not know what his own political views were, his
father Albert had been active in making films with left-wing councils around the
periphery of Paris, the so-called ceinture rouge, throughout the 1930s. As for the
decision not to name the Dogon, but to present them as generic “Blacks” or
“Sudanese,” I suspect that this can be attributed to differences in the anticipated
audiences. Whereas the 1940 films were made specifically to support an exhibition
at the Musee de l’Homme, the 1942 films were aimed at more general audiences.
The production company may have deemed that such audiences would have had
less interest in discriminating between one African group and another.
33. In these paragraphs on the Aupiais–Gadmer project, I draw freely on the work of
Martine Balard, particularly the relevant chapter of her book on Aupiais (1999,
187–219) as well as a more recent article (Balard 2007); see also Beausoleil (1996).
34. The precise delineation of ethnic boundaries in Cameroun is an arena of
considerable controversy into which a non-specialist fears to tread. Here I follow
the recent formulation of Antoine Socpa (2016, 20–21).
35. I am grateful to Andrea Paganini of the Fondation Jean Rouch for alerting me to
this aborted project. On his recommendation these faulty rushes have been digitized
and are now available in the CNC archive at the BnF under the title “Gold
Coast 1951.”
36. This journal has published numerous other analyses of Jean Rouch's oeuvre: see
2(3–4): 223–331, 7(3):273–75, 16(4):393–406, 19(2):123–43, 20(1):57–73, 20(5):365–86,
25(3): 231–41, 26(2):109–31, 31(4–5):426–44. See too my monograph on Rouch’s work
(Henley 2009), now substantially revised and translated into French, and currently
in production with Presses universitaires de Rennes (Henley 2020b).
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Bloom, Peter J. 2008. French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Castro, Teresa. 2008. "Les Archives de la Planète et les rythmes de l’Histoire 1895."Mille huit cents
quatre-vingts-quinze, 54:56–81. http://1895.revues.org/2752
Convents, Guido. 1986. Préhistoire du cinéma en Afrique, 1897–1918. À la recherche des images oubliées.
Brussels, Belgium: Éditions OCIC.
d’Esme, Jean. 1931. Afrique équatoriale: images du Cameroun et de l’Afrique équatoriale française
(Oubangui-Chari, Tchad, Congo, Gabon), with photographs by René Moreau. Brussels, Belgium:
Éditions Duchartre.
de Pastre, Béatrice (ed.). 2017. Jean Rouch, l’Homme-Cinéma. Découvrir les films de Jean Rouch. Paris,
France: Centre national du cinéma (CNC), Somogy Éditions, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).
Dieterlen, Germaine. 1989. "Mythologie, histoire et masques." Journal des africanistes 59 (1–2):7–38.
Durosay, Daniel. 1993. "Introduction." In Marc Allegret, Carnets du Congo: Voyage avec André Gide,
11–57. Paris, France: CNRS Éditions.
Fontaine, Hugues. 2013. "Le cinéma, rédempteur du réel." Un train en Afrique. http://www.
africantrain.org/le-cinema-redempteur-du-reel
Gauthier, Guy, Daniel Sauvaget and Marie-Thérèse Gauthier. 2015. Le documentaire, un autre cinéma.
Histoire et création. 5th ed. Paris, France: Armand Colin.
Gide, André. 1927. Voyage au Congo. Carnets de route. Paris, France: Gallimard.
Gide, André. 1928. Le Retour du Tchad. Suite du Voyage au Congo. Carnets de route. Paris, France:
Gallimard.
Griaule, Marcel. 1938. Masques dogons. (Travaux et Mémoires de l’Institut d’ethnologie, 23). Paris,
France: Musée de l’Homme.
Griaule, Marcel. 1957. Méthode de l’ethnographie. Paris, France: Presses universitaires de France.
Henley, Paul. 2009. The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Henley, Paul. 2017. "Avant Jean Rouch: Le cinéma 'ethnographique' française tourné en Afrique
subsaharienne." Journal des africanistes 87 (1–2):34–62.
Henley, Paul. 2020a. Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film. Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press.
Henley, Paul. 2020b. L’Aventure du réel: Jean Rouch et la pratique du cinéma ethnographique, trans. by
Joëlle Hauzeur. Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes.
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des africanistes 71 (1):149–90.
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Bérose (Vol. 4 in the series, Missions, enquêtes et terrains–Années 1930). Encyclopédie en ligne
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ethnographiques en Afrique subsaharienne (1928–1939). http://naissanceethnologie.fr/
Lacassin, Francis. 2001. Alfred Machin, de la jungle à l’écran. Paris, France: Dreamland.
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1159120.
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Duke University Press.
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Mille et une nuits.
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Visual Anthropology 28 (5):438–50. doi: 10.1080/08949468.2015.1086215.
FILMOGRAPHY
Note: Many of the dates given in this filmography are no more than tentative. Films are mostly ordered by first
public release date, when known. However, in many cases, it is not clear whether the dates indicated in the sources
are release dates or production dates. Many early films were released in different forms over a number of years, in
which case a range of possible dates is given. In the specific case of films produced for the Pathé-Revue (from 1919)
or as part of the Pathé-Baby collection (from 1922), the earliest date given is usually the surmised year when the
original material was shot. All films are silent and in black-and-white unless otherwise indicated. Running times are
no more than approximate. The English translations of titles were made by the author.
Key: nd = no date; alt: = alternative title; Prod. = production company; Dist. = distributor (when additional to
production company); mins. = minutes; View: indicates where a film may now be viewed.
Institutions: CFE = Comité du film ethnographique, Musée de l’Homme; CNC = Centre national du cinéma; Bois
d’Arcy = films only viewable at the principal CNC film deposit, close to Versailles; BnF = digital copies of CNC films
that may be viewed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris; CNRS = Centre national de la recherche
scientifique.
Anonymous. 1897. Baignade de Soudanais (Sudanese Bathing). Prod: Pathé Frères; < 1min. Accessed
November 07, 2019. http://filmographie.fondation-jeromeseydoux-pathe.com/28711-baignade-
de-soudanais.
Anonymous. 1908a. Potiers tunisiens (Tunisian Potters). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 2 mins.
Accessed November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYGTONwCwHk&list=
PL1bvzNCWN1uD6-0QLL9ZpvdeY_XaKBHbA&index=27.
Anonymous. 1908b. Promenade au Soudan (A Walk in the French Sudan). Prod: Pathé Frères; 5
mins. View: CNC (Bois d’Arcy).
Anonymous. 1909–24. Une réception chez un Caïd, dans le sud Algérien (A Feast at a Caid’s
Settlement in the Algerian South); alt: Une fête au désert algérien chez le Bach-Agha, Une réception
au désert algérien, etc. Original production date uncertain, possibly 1909. Pathé-Baby
version, 1923; 3 mins. Accessed November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=
RKMxDttSpRg&list=PLBBA8F25EA3C27418&index=4. Pathé-Revue version, 1924; 3 mins.,
colorized. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Anonymous. 1911. Petits métiers tunisiens: Les marchands de la rue (Small Trades in Tunisia: Street
Vendors). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 2 mins. Accessed November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=_w7q08KHB5U&list=PL1bvzNCWN1uD6-0QLL9ZpvdeY_XaKBHbA& index=26
Anonymous. 1914. Comme vivent et meurent les Arabes (How the Arabs Live and Die). Prod: Éclair;
5½ mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Anonymous. 1916. La vie au harem (Life in the Harem). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 2 mins. Accessed
November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OubYGRzL1Tw.
Anonymous. 1918. Sous le ciel de Tunisie (Beneath the Tunisian Sky). Prod: Compagnie Universelle
Cinématographique. Dist: Les Films André Ghilbert; 5½ mins. View: CNC (BnF) and Gaumont-
Pathé Archives.
Anonymous. 1919a. Séfrou et les laveuses de laine (Séfrou and the Washers of Wool). Prod: Éclair; 6
mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Anonymous. 1919b. Commerçants et artisans marocains (Moroccan Tradesmen and Artisans). Prod:
Éclair; 5½ mins. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Anonymous. 1920a. Les Aïssaouas (The Aissawas). Prod: Gaumont Enseignement; 9 mins. View:
Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Anonymous. 1920b. Petits métiers du Sud marocain (Small Trades in the Moroccan South). Prod:
Compagnie Universelle Cinématographique; 8 mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Anonymous. 1920c. Les grands marchés du Congo belge (The Great Markets of the Belgian Congo).
Prod: Éclair; 7½ mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Anonymous. 1920d. Chez les Watuzzis (Among the Watuzzis). Prod: Éclair; 7½ mins. View: CNC
(BnF).
Anonymous. 1921. Dans le Sud-Oranais (In the South of Oran Province). Prod. Éclair. Dist: Service
Cinématographique du Gouvernement Général d’Algérie; 7 mins. View: CNC (BnF) and
Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Anonymous. 1922. Le couscous—Aliment des Arabes (Couscous–Food of the Arabs). Prod: Pathé-
Baby; 2 mins. Accessed November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
vJrcxppL6oQ&list=PL1bvzNCWN1uD6-0QLL9ZpvdeY_XaKBHbA&index=29
Anonymous. 1923. Kalidja, la danseuse tunisienne (Kalidja, the Tunisian Dancer). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 2
mins. Accessed November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1GqiEzySrk&list=
PL1bvzNCWN1uD6-0QLL9ZpvdeY_XaKBHbA&index=27
Anonymous. 1924a. Au Maroc: Types et costumes (In Morocco: Physical Types and Costumes). Prod:
Pathé; 7½ mins. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Anonymous. 1924b. La première traversée rapide du désert (329 heures) (The First Rapid Crossing of
the Desert (329 hours)). Film produced during the Gradis-Estienne expedition across the Sahara,
sponsored by the Renault company. No further details available.
Anonymous. 1926. Les Mystères du continent noir (The Mysteries of the Black Continent). Film
produced during the Gradis-Delingette expedition from Oran to Capetown, sponsored by the
Renault company. No further details available.
Anonymous. 1927. Une chasse au faucon dans le sud Algérien (Hunting with Falcons in the Algerian
South). Prod: Pathé-Review; 2 mins., colorized. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Anonymous. 1929. Le pèlerinage des Aïssaouas (The Pilgrimage of the Aissawas). Prod: Pathé. Dist:
Pathé-Revue; 4 mins. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Anonymous. nd (a). Meknès. Prod: Pathé-Baby Enseignement; 3½ mins. Accessed November 07, 2019.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuHxjNNm948&list=PL1bvzNCWN1uD6-0QLL9ZpvdeY_Xa
KBHbA&index=34.
Anonymous. nd (b). Les mosaïstes marocains (Moroccan Mosaicists). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 1½ mins.
Accessed November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7bRgb9orXw&list=
PL1bvzNCWN1uD6-0QLL9ZpvdeY_XaKBHbA&index=13
78 P. Henley
Anonymous. nd (c). Les femmes arabes (Arab Women). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 1½ mins. Accessed
November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47ZXqTfH_RQ&list=
Anonymous. nd (d). Afrique: Touaregs et méharistes (Africa: Tuaregs and Camel-riders). Prod:
Gaumont Actualité; 6 mins. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives. This material also appears in Les
Touareg, also not dated. Prod: Pathé-Baby; 2½ mins. Accessed November 07, 2019. https://
www.youtube.com/ watch?v = dEeYAaO7rGo.
Anonymous. nd (e). Fati-Dra ou Le Serment de l’Amitié (Fati-Dra or the Oath of Friendship); alt.
Cérémonie à Madagascar (Ceremony in Madagascar). Prod: Pathé; 10 mins. View: Gaumont-Pathé
Archives.
Alexandre, R. 1912. La grande prière musulmane (The Great Muslim Prayer). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 2
mins. Accessed December 14, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BQeRZ-wNm4.
Alexandre, R. 1916. Les Aïssaouas: Pèlerinage au tombeau de Sidi-Boumédine (The Aissawas:
Pilgrimage to the Tomb of Sidi-Boumédine). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 1½ mins. Accessed November
07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH1vXUm8AXY&list=PL1bvzNCWN1uD6-
0QLL9ZpvdeY_XaKBHbA&index=6.
Barth, Joseph R. 1932. Le vrai visage de l’Afrique: Chez les buveurs de sang (The True Face of Africa:
With the Drinkers of Blood); alt: Au pays des buveurs du sang (In the Land of the Drinkers of
Blood). Sometimes attributed to the expedition leader, Napoléon Gourgaud, sometimes to the
editor, Jean Choux. Prod: J. de Cavaignac; 55 mins., sound. View: CNC (BnF).
Benoît-Lévy, Jean. 1929. Nefta, la perle du Djérid (Nefta, Pearl of the Djerid). Prod: L’Édition
Française Cinématographique; 16½ mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Bertaut, Maurice, and René Bugniet. 1935. Sso: rite indigène des Etons et des Manguisas (Sso: an
Indigenous Ritual of the Etons and Manguisas). Prod: Le Haut Commissariat de la République
française au Cameroun; 56 mins., sound. View: CNC (BnF).
Bugniet, René. 1927. En pays Foulbé (In Foulbé Country). Prod: Agence économique des territoires
africains; 23½ mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Bugniet, René. 1930. Cameroun: Bamouns et Bamilékés (Bamouns and Bamilékés). Prod: Le Haut
Commissariat de la République française au Cameroun; 10½ mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Bugniet, René. 1931. Cameroun: Cases du Cameroun (Cameroun Houses). Prod: Agence économique
des territoires africains; 14 mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Bugniet, René. nd (a). Dans l’extrême-nord (In the Far North). Prod: Le Haut Commissariat de la
République française au Cameroun; 21 mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Bugniet, René. nd (b). Danses régionales (Regional Dances). Prod: Le Haut Commissariat de la
République française au Cameroun; 12 mins. Sound. View: CNC (BnF). View: CNC (BnF).
Buñuel, Luís. 1933. Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan/Land Without Bread/La Terre sans pain, with music by
Darius Milhaud and Johannes Brahms. Paris; b & w, 27 mins.
Castelnau, Paul. 1923. La Traversée du Sahara en autochenilles (The Crossing of the Sahara in
Caterpillar-Track Vehicles). Prod: Société anonyme André Citroën. No further details available.
Castelnau, Paul. 1924. Le Continent mystérieux (The Mysterious Continent). 12-part series edited
from the material shot for La Traversée du Sahara en autochenilles. No further details available.
d’Esme, Jean. 1936. La grande caravane (The Great Caravan). Prod: Gaumont; 40 mins., sound. View:
CNC (BnF).
de Goulay, Dick. 1923. À travers Madagascar (Across Madagascar); 42 mins. No further information
available.
de Heusch, Luc. 1955. Rwanda: tableaux d’une féodalité pastorale (Rwanda: Pictures of Pastoral
Feudalism). Prod: Institut pour la Recherche en Afrique centrale; 45 mins.. color, sound.
Dupont, Jacques. 1947a. Au pays des pygmées (In the Land of the Pygmies). Prod: Société
d'application cinématographique; 25 mins., sound. View: CNC (Bois d’Arcy).
Dupont, Jacques. 1947b. Pirogues sur l’Ogooué (Canoes on the Ogooué). Prod: Société d'application
cinématographique; 27 mins., sound. View: CNC (Bois d’Arcy).
Dupont, Jacques. 1947c. Danses congolaises (Congolese Dances). Prod: Société d'application
cinématographique; 12 mins., sound. View: CNC (Bois d’Arcy).
Epstein, Jean. 1929. Finis Terrae. (End of the Earth) Prod: Societe Gen
arale de Films; 67 mins.
Feyder, Jacques. 1921. L’Atlantide. Prod: Thalman et Cie. 163 mins.
Flaherty, Robert, and John Grierson. 1931. Industrial Britain. London, UK: Empire Marketing Board
Film Unit; sound, 21 mins.
Gide, André, and Marc Allégret. 1927. Voyage au Congo: scènes de la vie indigène en Afrique équitoriale
(Journey to the Congo: Scenes of Native Life in Equatorial Africa). Prod: Éditions Braunberger;
115 mins. Restored 2018 version, prod: Les Films du Panthéon; dist: Les Films du Jeudi.
Griaule, Marcel. 1940a. Au pays des Dogons (In the Land of the Dogons). Prod: Société des Films
Sirius; 11 mins., sound. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives, also CNC (Bois d’Arcy). Dist: Éditions
Montparnasse in the DVD collection, Jean Rouch: une aventure africaine (2010).
Griaule, Marcel. 1940b. Sous les masques noirs (Beneath the Black Masks). Prod: Société des Films
Sirius. 9 mins., sound. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives, also CNC (Bois d’Arcy). Dist: Éditions
Montparnasse in the DVD collection, Jean Rouch: une aventure africaine (2010).
Griaule, Marcel. 1942a. Technique chez les Noirs (Technical Activities of the Blacks). Prod: Société
des Films Sirius; 15 mins., sound. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Griaule, Marcel. 1942b. Le Soudan mystérieux (Mysterious French Sudan). Prod: Société des Films
Sirius; 13 mins., sound. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Lejards, J. 1913. Les danses Habe (Fulani Dances). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7
i6P8eBbwIE&index=32&list=PL1bvzNCWN1uD6-0QLL9ZpvdeY_XaKBHbA.
Lejards, J. 1915. Danses soudanaises (Dances of the French Sudan). Prod: Pathé-Baby, both approx. 2
mins. Accessed November 07, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIog02nQ0uE&list=
Machin, Alfred. 1910a. Les Chillouks, tribu de l’Afrique Centrale (The Shilluk, a Tribe of Central
Africa). Prod: Pathé Frères; 5½ mins.
Machin, Alfred. 1910b. Moeurs et coutumes des Chillouks (Practices and Customs of the Shilluk).
Prod: Pathé Frères; 7 mins.
Machin, Alfred. 1910c. En Afrique central–Fachoda (In Central Africa–Fashoda); alt.: Fashoda–Soudan
égyptien. Prod: Pathé; 4 mins. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Machin, Alfred. 1910d. Moeurs et coutumes des Sakalaves (Practices and Customs of the Sakalava).
Prod: Pathé; 6½ mins.
Machin, Alfred. 1910e. Une briqueterie Sakalave à Ankavandra en Afrique orientale française (A Sakalava
Brickworks at Ankavandra in French East Africa). Prod: Pathé; 4½ mins.
Machin, Alfred. 1922a. En Afrique: Au Bahr El Gazal (In Africa: at Bahr el Gazal). Prod: Pathé Revue
Rural; 2½ mins. View: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.
Machin, Alfred. 1922b. Une fête chez les Chillouks au Bahr El Ghazal (A Celebration amongst the
Shilluk at Bahr El Ghazal). Prod: Pathé-Baby; 1 min. Accessed November 07, 2019. YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY8NvV_2ZeU
Martel, Charles. 1909–10. L’Abyssinie au temps de Ménélik (Abyssinia in the Time of Menelik). Prod:
Films Le Lion; 24 mins. View: CNC (BnF).
Moreau, René. 1923. Tlemcen et ses environs (Tlemcen and Its Surroundings). Prod: Les Films René
Moreau. Duration unknown. Dist: André Ghilbert. View: CNC (BnF).
Moreau, René. 1928a. À travers le Cameroun, le Gabon et le Congo (Through Cameroon, Gabon and
the Congo). Prod: Les Films de Jean d’Esme; 50 mins. View: CNC (Bois d’Arcy).
Moreau, René. 1928b. Fétichisme (Fetishism). Prod: Les Films de Jean d’Esme; 6 mins. View: CNC
(BnF).
Moreau, René. 1932. Peaux noires (Black Skins). Prod: Films Osso; 90 mins., sound.
Muraz, Gaston. 1934a. Les Fils de Cham (The Sons of Cham). Prod: Éditions Musicales
Cinématographiques; 30 mins., sound. View: CNC (BnF).
Muraz, Gaston. 1934b. Les Dieux de cuivre (The Copper Gods). Prod: Éditions Musicales
Cinématographiques; 29 mins., sound. View: CNC (BnF).
Poirier, Léon. 1925. Zazavavindrano ou l’Amour malgache (Zazavavindrano or Malagasy Love). Prod:
unknown; 12 mins. View: Musée Albert-Kahn.
Poirier, Léon. 1926. La Croisière noire (The Black Crossing). Prod: Société anonyme André Citroën;
52 mins., sound.
Poirier, Léon. 1929. Instantanés malgaches (Malagasy Snapshots); 51 mins. No further information
available. View: CNC (BnF).
Poirier, Léon. 1930. Caïn, aventures des mers exotiques (Rama, the Cannibal Girl). Compagnie
Universelle Cinematographique. 91 mins., sound.
80 P. Henley
Promio, Alexandre. 1896. Prière du muezzin (The Muezzin’s Prayer). Prod: Lumière; < 1 min.
Catalogue no. 197.
Promio, Alexandre. 1897. Un enterrement (A Burial). Prod: Lumière; < 1 min. Catalogue no. 369.
Promio, Alexandre. 1903a. Défilé des chameaux avec les bassours (Procession of Camels with
Bassours). Prod: Lumière; < 1 min. Catalogue no. 1372.
Promio, Alexandre. 1903b. Biskra: une noce indigène (Biskra: A Local Wedding). Prod: Lumière; <
1 min. Catalogue no. 1387
Rouch, Jean. 1949a. Les Magiciens de Wanzerbé (The Magicians of Wanzerbé). Prod: CNRS/CFE; 33
mins., sound. Dist: Éditions Montparnasse in the DVD collection, Jean Rouch: une aventure
africaine (2010).
Rouch, Jean. 1949b. La Circoncision (Circumcision). Prod: Sécretariat d’État à la Coopération; 14
mins., color, sound. Dist: Éditions Montparnasse in the DVD collection, Jean Rouch: une aventure
africaine (2010).
Rouch, Jean. 1949c. Initiation à la danse des possédées (Initiation to the Dance of Possessed Women).
Prod: CNRS/CFE; 22 mins., color, sound. Dist: Éditions Montparnasse in the DVD collection,
Jean Rouch: une aventure africaine (2010).
Rouch, Jean. 1951. Gold Coast 1951. Unedited rushes. View: CNC (BnF).
Rouch, Jean. 1952. Bataille sur le grand fleuve (Battle on the Great River). Prod: CNRS/IFAN/CFE;
35 mins., color, sound. Éditions Montparnasse in the DVD collection, Jean Rouch: une aventure
africaine (2010).
Rouch, Jean. 1955. Les Maîtres fous (The Crazed Masters). Prod: Les Films de la Pléiade; 29 mins.,
color, sound. Dist: Éditions Montparnasse in the DVD collection, Jean Rouch (2005).
Rouch, Jean. 1968. Jaguar. Prod: Les Films de la Pléiade; 89 mins., color, sound. Dist: Éditions
Montparnasse in the DVD collection, Jean Rouch (2005).
Rouch, Jean, Pierre Ponty and Jean Sauvy. 1947. Au pays des mages noirs (In the Land of the Black
Wizards). Prod: Actualités françaises; 13 mins., color, sound. Dist: Éditions Montparnasse in the
DVD collection, Jean Rouch: une aventure africaine (2010).
Rouch, Jean, and Germaine Dieterlen. 1980. Le Dama d’Ambara (The Dama for Ambara). Prod:
CNRS/CFE; 62 mins., color, sound. Dist: Éditions Montparnasse in the DVD collection, Jean
Rouch: une aventure africaine (2010)
Vertov, Dziga (a.k.a. David or Denis Kaufman). 1926. The Sixth Part of the World. Moscow, Russia:
Sovkino; 73 mins., b & w. Dist: Austrian Film Museum, DVD no. 53.

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Visual Anthropology

ISSN: 0894-9468 (Print) 1545-5920 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvan20

From Vues to Ethnofiction: French Ethnographic

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2020.1696126

Published online: 11 Feb 2020.

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From Vues to Ethnofiction: French

Such is the prominence of Jean Rouch (1917–2004) in the history of French

Figure 1 Locations of French ethnographic film-making in Africa, 1897–1951. (Courtesy of Peter

at the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. But although there is an

1895–1920S: VUES, AND FILMS OF REPORTAGE

The French tradition of ethnographic filmmaking is often traced back to the

Figure 2 Chronophotographic images taken by Felix-Louis Regnault and Charles Comte in

Figure 5 Une reception chez un Caïd (Anonymous 1909–1924) is a well-executed example of

de Menelik (Martel 1909–10). This film runs for 24 minutes—exceptionally long

1920S–1930S: EXPEDITIONARY FILMS AND COLONIAL INVENTORY FILMS

a greater awareness on the part of State agencies of the potential propaganda

the filmmakers record various phenomena of ethnographic interest, some of

In response to these films sponsored by the Citro€en company, Renault, its

Figure 10 A travers le Cameroun, le Gabon et le Congo (Moreau 1928b). (A) Kotoko

Figure 13 Cameroun: Bamouns et Bamilekes (Bugniet 1930). (A) A Bamileke chief.

indigenous Sakalava population and even a French colonial officer—the focus

1930S: THE FIRST ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMS BASED ON FIELD RESEARCH

After the flurry of filmmaking activity immediately prior to this Exposition

contrary to the information given in many sources, including by Editions

the throat of a young bull as a totemic sacrifice, which Griaule himself

changes of framing or position, and most often at a certain distance from

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR: THE ORIGINALITY OF JEAN ROUCH

expedition to Hombori, a Songhay village lying on the other side of the

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