Reclaiming Realism: From Documentary Film in Africa to African Documentary Film

FAIN: FEL-267414-20

Rachel Gabara
University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)

Completion of a book about the history of documentary filmmaking in West and Central Africa, from the French colonial period to the present.

The first book in English to focus on African documentary, “Reclaiming Realism” will explore the aesthetic, sociopolitical, and historical development of nonfiction film in West and Central Africa. For over half a century, French colonial documentary claimed to capture the truth about Africa and Africans. After independence, African filmmakers reclaimed the cinema and their cinematic image by experimenting with documentary content, voice and style. This project will demonstrate the vital importance of documentary first to French colonialism, then to a post-independence reframing of African identities and modes of filmic discourse. A transnational study that highlights the complex interactions between colonial and postcolonial cinemas, “Reclaiming Realism” intervenes in contemporary critical debates about global documentary and the very nature of filmic representations of reality.

Associated Products

“Documentary Dialogues: The Interview in Contemporary African Nonfiction Film” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Documentary Dialogues: The Interview in Contemporary African Nonfiction Film”
Author: Rachel Gabara
Abstract: The interview has long been a documentary staple, used by filmmakers to convey a range of information, from factual details to the emotional state of the person questioned. This paper examines how contemporary sub-Saharan African documentarists have used interviews to shape their films, producing critical visual analyses of African pasts and present-day realities.
Date: 3/17/2021
Conference Name: 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference

“Giving Back Colonial Films” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Giving Back Colonial Films”
Author: Rachel Gabara
Abstract: Between 1906 and 1960, colonial French filmmakers represented Africa and Africans in a seemingly endless flood of uninformed and racist travelogues, expedition narratives, and ethnographic films, images that were captured and extracted for consumption in the metropole. Moreover, given the barriers imposed by the cost of equipment and training and, after 1934, the notorious Laval Decree, Africans were prohibited from filming on their own continent. If only colonial images remain, what should we do with them? A model of restitution based on physical objects does not work for moving images, yet, drawing on my research on both colonial European and postcolonial African cinemas, I will argue that it is just as crucial to return them. Giving them back, differently from objects, does not mean giving them up, since the technology exists to produce high-quality digital copies. It does mean, however, foregoing both income from licensing fees and control over how the images are used. Despite the call for “digital sharing” of colonial photographs and films in Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s 2018 report on restitution to French President Emmanuel Macron, no such project is underway with respect to collections either at the public Centre National du cinéma et de l’image animée or the private Gaumont Pathé Archives. Without formal restitution, France prevents Africans from owning moving images of their history, thus retaining control of our filmic understanding of the colonial period and its consequences.
Date: 1/8/2022
Conference Name: Modern Language Association Convention

"Hunting images: sub-Saharan Africa in early French cinema" (Article)
Title: "Hunting images: sub-Saharan Africa in early French cinema"
Author: Rachel Gabara
Abstract: Scholars of French cinema have paid little attention to early non-fiction films, particularly those shot in colonised spaces. Yet cameramen sponsored by major French cinema companies appeared in North Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century and south of the Sahara as early as 1906, eager to record images of newly conquered lands. This essay examines the first French films shot in West and Central Africa, from panoramas and views to travel to hunting narratives, with a particular focus on the career of self-proclaimed chasseur d’images [‘image-hunter’] Alfred Machin. Early cinema advertised France’s colonies to the metropole as, within a decade, sensationalised ethnography became tightly bound to propaganda for empire.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/26438941.2022.2095725
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: French Screen Studies
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Prizes

Best Journal Article
Date: 4/4/2023
Organization: British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)
Abstract: Winner: Rachel Gabara, ‘Hunting Images: Sub-Saharan African in Early French Cinema’, French Screen Studies (Aug 2022) What the judges had to say: "An enormously readable, rigorous and authoritative article which acts as a vital corrective to a significant gap in scholarship regarding the cinema’s critical role in empire building. It traces the history of French hunting films as precursors to colonial documentaries that responded to and served to promote the nationalist fervour that underpinned the colonial enterprise. In this way the article speaks to documentary studies, decolonial scholarship, French screen studies, early cinema scholarship, film historiography and much else, offering something to take away for anyone with an interest in the cinema."

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