#vautier

Ben Vautier - Je doute, 1971

Ben Vautier (born 1935) L'Art est inutile 1968

Letterpress 28.7 x 49.8 cm

Ben Vautier (born 1935) L'Art c'est un mot (Art is a Word) 1967

Letterpress 50.3 x 38.3 cm

In this blog, I will try to tackle the political potentialities of documentary filmmaking by examining a few examples of documentaries that were censored by the State in different geographical, historical and socio-political contexts. By doing so, I will try to shed light both on the history of censorship in Western and non-Western contexts from the 1950s to the contemporary era, and on subversive movies that came to become huge milestones in the history of the documentary genre. I will also try to tackle the contemporary revaluation of those movies nowadays: the challenges of archiving them and screening them, but also the relevance that they entail for contemporary audiences. 

For this first article, I have chosen to write about the first anticolonial film ever made in France: Afrique 50 by René Vautier. Due to the fact that it was strictly forbidden for the colonised people to film in the French colonies, their struggle was first embodied by a white, educated man - René Vautier - who had access to the resources to make a film. As the film-maker has said, the aim of his film was to “make image and sound available to those to whom the established powers deny them.” This was a revolutionnary gesture in a context where cinema was only used either with a propagandist aim (to praise the “civilising mission” of France in the African colonies), or with an anthropological lens (where Africans were more often than not considered as objects of study for white ethnographers, who sometimes happened to have cameras). 

The history of production of Vautier’s movie is rather fascinating, precisely because it reveals how form and politics are inseparable. Initially commissioned by the Ligue de l’Enseignement to produce an educational film about “how villagers live in French West Africa,” Vautier quickly deviated from his brief. What he encountered on site (forced labor, economic exploitation, and brutal repression) shocked him deeply and made him choose to transform his film in an act of resistance to the colonial state. Afrique 50 is indeed not simply a film about colonial violence, but is itself produced against a system designed to prevent such images from existing. Vautier indeed spent over a year clandestinely filming across several regions, often supported by local activists. The footage was smuggled back to France through multiple clandestine channels and the editing was done in secrecy. Every stage of the film’s existence was shaped by censorship and the necessity to overtake it. 

What emerges from this process is a film that progressively shifts its own language. The first part of the film seems to reproduce familiar colonial imagery, in a  pedagogical/ethnographical tone about the “pittoresque villages in Africa”. Vautier lures the viewer into a position of comfort only to gradually dismantle it. The turning point occurs when the film abandons descriptive simultaneity between image and voice, and instead introduces a rupture: the image shows absence (ruins, traces), while the voice sharply enunciates the violences committed by the colonial power. 

Unsurprisingly, the film was banned upon completion and Vautier was sent to jail when he returned to France. Yet its circulation continued underground, with dozens of copies screened illegally and received awards in international documentary festivals such as the Warsaw documentary Film Festival. Simultaneously suppressed and disseminated, Afrique 50 became a foundational work of militant cinema.