Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France 9781628928723

Citation preview

For Bernard Mayes

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Acknowledgments

Many people have helped with this project at various stages. All of them deserve my thanks. Bernard Mayes, to whom this book is dedicated, sparked my interest in documentary film, thus beginning a long journey. He continues to be a source of inspiration. Paul Forrest, Hugues LeChevrel, Mary Kay Sizemore and Tim Ivy taught me everything I know about scripting, shooting, and editing. Abderrahmane Sissako liked the result. Many archivists in France facilitated access to documents and films: Michelle Aubert, Eric Le Roy, and Daniel Courbet at the Archives françaises du film, Christiane Husson and Eric Perrot at the Ministère de l’Agriculture, Yves Gaulupeau at the Musée National de l’Education, Jean-Denys Devauges at the Musée national de la voiture et du tourisme, Monsieur le Capitaine de Vaisseau Jannot at the Établissement cinématographique et photographique des armées, the staff at the Centre des archives d’outremer, the Musée des arts africains et océaniens, the Gaumont-Pathé Archives, and the Centre national de documentation pédagogique. Véronique Mourlan and Lilliane Jolivet kindly gave permission to reproduce images from their ancestors’ films. The Mary Isabel Sibley foundation funded my postdoctoral research. Alice Conklin, Herman Lebovics, Deborah Hurtt, Harry Gamble, David Rubin, Marva Barnett, A. James Arnold, Claire Lyu, and John Lyons have provided careful reading and advice. In France, Christophe Prochasson and Christian Baudelot have been true mentors. Other scholars at the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences sociales have been very helpful, including Benoît de l’Estoile, Gérard Noiriel, Gilles Pécout, Pierre Laborie, Jacques Revel, François Weil, Marc Ferro, Marc Piault, André Burguière, Eric Fassin, and Hervé Le Bras. Thanks, also, to Raymond Borde and Henri Bousquet. Through a Professors as Writers grant, University of Virginia’s Teaching Resource Center put me in touch with my wonderful editor, Jane Barnes. She not only “got it,” but got through every page with sharp eyes and good humor. Thanks to David Barker and the whole team at Continuum. Janet Horne and Roland Simon have provided more support and encouragement than they will ever know.

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My team—Jim and Bess Murray, Alexandra Duckworth, Celia Belton, Wendy Caldwell, Paulette Morhange, and Guy Bastidon—created space for this to happen. Sophia kept me laughing. Without Stephen, none of this would have been possible.

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List of Illustrations

Figure 2.1 Sun-drenched images of Burgundian rural life permeate the Ministry of Education’s “film to the glory of the school,” Jeannette Bourgogne (Jean Gourget, 1938). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 3.1 A map in La bonne méthode (The Correct Method, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 1926) shows France, “a great agricultural country,” with small harvests per acre as compared to those of Belgium and Germany. Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Liliane Jolivet.

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Figure 3.2 In Jean Benoit-Lévy’s La bonne méthode (The Correct Method, 1926) the goddess Ceres appears to Magloire in a dream and takes him for a ride in her “chariot of agricultural progress.” Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Liliane Jolivet.

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Figure 3.3 In La révolte des betteraves (The Revolt of the Beets, Albert Mourlan, 1925), the hungry beets revolt and march on the farmer’s house, demanding fertilizer. Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Véronique Mourlan.

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Figure 3.4 In La tuberculose menace tout le monde (Tuberculosis Threatens Everyone, Robert Lortac, 1917), Death, a walking skeleton, knocks down unhealthy city dwellers (Coupeau the drunkard, Jenny who works too hard, Fernand the partier) in the “Massacre Game” at the fair. Courtesy Gaumont-Pathé archives. 47 Figure 3.5 “If I had only known!” A distraught mother who has not followed the proper rules for infant care, shown in La future maman (The Future Mommy, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 1925). Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Liliane Jolivet.

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Figure 4.1 A street scene in Hanoi, shown in Un coup d’œil sur l’Indochine française (French Indochina at a Glance, Pathé Revue, 1930). Courtesy Gaumont-Pathé archives. 67

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Figure 4.2 “From the center of France, rays spread out in all directions. [. . .] a visible magnetic current pulses from the center out towards the edges. Suddenly, one of the rays touches the dark circle (North Africa): it blows apart, pierced from the North, expands and fades to a shot of real life in North Africa.” Scene from the treatment for a film on French colonization of North Africa, one of the private proposals sent to the Haut comité méditerranéen. (J. de Shelley, 1937). AN, F60 711. 80 Figure 4.3 A French doctor indicates the prescribed treatment for sleeping sickness by painting symbols in white letters on the patient’s chest. This image appears in La maladie du sommeil (Sleeping Sickness, 1929) and Le réveil d’une race (The Awakening of a Race, Alfred Chaumel, 1930). Courtesy Gaumont-Pathé archives. 84 Figure 4.4 Mohamed, the protagonist of Conte de la mille et deuxième nuit (Tale of the One-Thousand and Second Night, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 1929), before he gets sick. Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Liliane Jolivet and Véronique Mourlan.

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Figure 5.1 “Driving this machine is a sport,” boasts the narrator of Au service de la terre (In the Service of the Earth, J.C. Bernard, 1933). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 5.2 A fleet of tractors—“The Army of Peace”—appears on the horizon in J.C. Bernard’s Au service de la terre (In the Service of the Earth, 1933). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 5.3 “The city of Carcassonne [. . .] does not have, and does not want to have, the beauty of a dead thing” in Aude, belle inconnue (Aude, Beautiful Stranger, J.K. Raymond-Millet, 1937). Courtesy Archives françaises du film. 109 Figure 5.4 “Age-old tradition” mixes with “industrial progress” in J.C. Bernard’s Le Rouergue (1937). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 5.5 In Roquefort, workers engage in “mysterious and subtle cheesemaking,” a practice that blends nature, tradition, and mechanization. Le Rouergue (J.C. Bernard, 1937). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 6.1 A poster advertising the Cinéma colonial du Petit Journal in French (Summer 1923). CAOM, AGEFOM 845/2262.

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Figure 6.2 Close-ups of human details in René Bugniet’s Cameroun: Bamouns et Bamilékés (Cameroon: Bamuns and Bamilekes, ca. 1930). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 6.3 The trope of rayonnement was often depicted as rays of light emanating from France across the world, as it is here in La France est un empire (France is an Empire, Jean d’Agraives, 1939). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 6.4 A French teacher instructs an African student on how to make an African mask in La France est un empire (France is an Empire, Jean d’Agraives, 1939). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 6.5 “France is our fatherland”—the last image of La France est un empire (France is an Empire, Jean d’Agraives, 1939). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

In 1901, Charles Pathé wrote prophetically that cinema would be “the theater, the newspaper, and the school of tomorrow.”1 By the 1920s, the theater, the newspaper, and the school each had its reflection in one of three major cinematic forms: the entertainment film, the newsreel, and the documentary. It was during the interwar years that film would undergo a revolutionary transformation; no longer a novelty entertainment, it would become the powerful force of mass culture and communication that we know it to be today. With the huge increase in film audiences during this period, cinema would come to play an extraordinary role in shaping public taste and opinion.2 If film has, as Antoine De Baecque has written, shaped “the mental universe of the twentieth century,” it was during the interwar years that the shaping process began.3 At the end of the nineteenth century, cinema was part of a culture that increasingly demanded representations of the real.4 But as film grew more and more popular, its very realism attracted a certain suspicion. Its appeal to mass audiences was at once powerful and dangerous. Conversations about its potential to encourage violence, delinquency, or immoral sexual behavior are strikingly reminiscent of twenty-first century discussions of the effects of video games on young people. In the 1920s, some observers thought that the only antidote to the nefarious effects of commercial cinema was film itself—a different kind of film that would tell the truth. In a matter of years, this truthtelling cinema already had its own name: documentary film. Its advocates saw it as a potentially revolutionary medium because it could reach mass audiences with true stories. With the right people behind the camera, these true stories could serve as agents of popular education, moral regeneration, and the correction of social evils. After the First World War, enthusiasm for the social applications of documentary film captivated filmmakers from the Soviet Union to the United States. In the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov used his background in

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newsreel compilation to create the documentary magazine entitled Kino-Pravda (Film Truth).5 He exploited the medium’s visionary power to portray the birth of a new society. His work inspired other Soviet filmmakers such as Esfir Shub, Victor Turin, and Alexander Medvedkin.6 Their careers and contributions to the development of the medium are well documented, as are the experiments in the use of documentary film to promote fascist values in 1930s Germany and Italy. The work of Leni Riefenstahl stands out here as legendary.7 So, also, is the rise in Great Britain of John Grierson, who is often credited as the inventor of the term “documentary” in English, and who also put its truth telling at the service of social advocacy, beginning with the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit.8 Most film historians would have us believe that despite Auguste and Louis Lumière’s invention of the cinématographe, the overall contribution of France to the development of documentary film was negligible prior to the Second World War. With a few exceptions, French documentaries of the interwar period are dismissed as not “good” enough esthetically, not polemical enough to merit the label “Griersonian,” and not politically sophisticated enough to interest a modern viewer.9 In his book on Vichy documentaries, Screening Reality, Steve Wharton manages to dismiss interwar documentaries in one sentence, summing up their role as that of a “lyrical chronicler.”10 Guy Gauthier finds the documentaries of the period facile, boring, and full of platitudes; they merit no substantive coverage in his 2002 survey book, Un siècle de documentaires français.11 He criticizes their conformism, as does Thomas August, who briefly mentions the “healthy conservatism” of colonial documentaries prior to 1939 in his book, The Selling of the Empire.12 After acknowledging France as one of the countries in which “documentary proper” originated, Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane exclude it from their 2005 survey, A New History of Documentary Film, presumably because it is not social enough in the Griersonian sense.13 One of the arguments of this book is that the ordinary educational documentaries produced in France during the interwar years are in fact of great interest. To an astonishing degree, these interwar films, scattered around in diverse locations, are virtually ignored.14 Within the cool walls of the French national film archives, a military fortress west of Paris, canister upon canister of documentaries line the shelves. These reels might not provide the palpitations an audience might have felt in the steamy presence of L’Atlantide, but they have a stirring effect all their own. As the first few words of the self-assured “voice of God” narration

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Introduction

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ring out—that very declamatory style that avant-garde documentarists after the war despised—the viewer experiences the strange sensation of being directly addressed by the voice of the 1920s or 1930s French state. Jean-Michel Frodon’s characterization of cinema as a “national projection” can be taken almost literally.15 Suddenly, what might have appeared to be a dreary litany of the progress of electrification of the French countryside snaps into focus as an early example of the mobilization of film in the service of shaping public opinion. And that is precisely what French documentary filmmakers were trying to do in the interwar years. It was a watershed moment for France. The First World War had ravaged the nation, destroyed nearly five million acres of farmland, killed 1.4 million Frenchmen and wounded three million more. A series of unstable and ineffectual governments failed to respond effectively to a depression that arrived later but lasted longer in France than elsewhere. A brief flowering of left-wing optimism accompanied the election of the Popular Front government in 1936 that was short-lived and left most of its promises unfulfilled. After a short war, 1940 would herald a voluntary plunge into right-wing dictatorship, collaboration with Germany, and four years of German occupation. Alongside these political and economic events, France experienced an important social transformation as well. It was no longer the rural nation it had once been; a decades-long rural exodus led to the tipping point in 1931, when the urban population surpassed the rural population.16 The year 1931 would also see an International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, a symbolic marker of the apogee of French colonial domination, where the “greater France” of 100 million people that stretched from French Polynesia through the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia was on display. Herman Lebovics characterizes the social transformations of the early twentieth century as a cultural “rite of passage” for a young republic, newly consolidated politically, that struggled to define its social and cultural dimensions.17 The endeavor to define True France, which for Lebovics was primarily a conservative one, had two principal strands: first, debates about perceived tensions between modernization and tradition; and second, the question of social and cultural diversity, or, more simply put, who was and who should be considered French. These debates will seem familiar to contemporary readers with an interest in France. In the 2007 French presidential election, the age-worn concept of national identity was dusted off, burnished to a warm luster, and brought out as a fresh new theme in the campaigns of all the leading candidates. To some, it seemed vaguely quaint and anachronistic in this

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post-national age of European unification to hear candidates reach into the archive of myths about France and Frenchness to dress up their platforms. For left-wing observers, it was a nightmare to see an issue associated with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme right National Front party slide surreptitiously into the center. This was an ironic triumph for a politician who had defeated the Socialist candidate in the first round of the 2002 election, sending an electric shock of fear through the nation. Although he fared miserably in 2007, Le Pen’s central issue—defining the Frenchness of France—had become coveted terrain for which all the candidates, even the Socialist Ségolène Royal, had to scramble.18 After his victory, Nicolas Sarkozy enshrined the concept in his administration, which included a new Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development. Although it would be unwise, as Herrick Chapman reminds us, to apply contemporary concepts of identity politics to historical investigation, it is nonetheless intriguing to observe that in times of crisis, the identity of France continues to resurface as a topic of debate across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.19 But have attempts to define national identity always been conservatively inflected? Has the idea of a single, centralized Frenchness to which others must assimilate been the dominant cultural model from the early Third Republic, as Eugen Weber would suggest? If so, how can one explain the origins of such laws as the Appellation d’origine contrôlée that value local specificity and bolster much of the late twentieth-century French tourist industry? How did the French provinces and the colonies figure into the equation of who was more or less French? Can we learn anything about contemporary responses to questions of integration and assimilation, about French concepts of alterity and difference, from cultural projects, whether successful or not, earlier in the century? These are some of the questions that started me on this investigation of “true” stories told in early film. Documentary film is a particularly useful historical source because of its “claim to the real”—the assertion of the filmmaker that he is making a good-faith attempt to create true statements about the real world. As Bill Nichols has argued, documentary film is a kind of “rhetorical fiction,” in which “the world as we see it through a documentary window is heightened, telescoped, dramatized, reconstructed, fetishized, miniaturized, or otherwise modified”20 in the service of a rhetorical structure, usually an argument.21 However, as a genre, documentary film continues to command respect as a vehicle of information and education, because of a cultural code that defines it as the opposite of fiction.22 Documentaries,

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as both Nichols and Alan Renov have pointed out, claim to speak about the world outside the frame (the one in which we live, past or present), whereas fiction alludes to a world (one in which we may imagine living).23 They peddle truths, winning the trust of their audiences through a relationship with other nonfictional systems Nichols calls “discourses of sobriety” (science, economics, politics, foreign policy, education, religion).24 Because of this relationship, documentary film can provide the historian with crucial insights into the kinds of “true” stories being told in the guise of “education” at a particular historical moment, as well as into the kinds of audiences who were expected to believe them. Stated even more simply, in the words of Marc Ferro, “the film is History.”25 This book brings to light documentary films and film outreach programs developed in France during the interwar years that provide a valuable window onto crucial national debates of the period. In the years following the First World War and throughout the period, many governmental agencies and private organizations in France viewed documentary film as a socially “useful” art form and invested in film projects they thought would help deliver their messages to the public. At the core of this study are films and programs that sought to shore up the image of a faltering nation by pulling the French regions and the colonies into a broader national narrative. No longer dismissed as cultural backwaters in need of reform, these rural areas of metropolitan and overseas France were now seen as important sources of national regeneration. Both public and private organizations sought to use film to educate rural peoples about the French nation and to educate city dwellers about the importance of the regions and the colonies to that nation. They firmly believed that film could bridge the cultural divide between urban and rural France, as well as between métropole and colony. They believed that images could shape perceptions of group belonging, and that they could help the diverse peoples of France to recognize themselves and each other—whether Breton, Senegalese, or “Indochinese”—as uniquely French.26 The films they made tell a story about the role film played in the negotiation of a new symbolic relationship between center and periphery within the framework of the French nation. In short, it is a story of reframing the nation. In telling this story, I have attempted to bridge several traditional methodological divides. The first is one of divergent models of national identity. Some scholars, following the lead of Eugen Weber, favor a model of a centralized “modern” national identity gradually moving outward to replace “traditional” regional cultures over the nineteenth and twentieth

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centuries. Others argue for more autonomy on the periphery in negotiating and responding to the modern republican state.27 While many of my film sources attempt to portray a unified and centralized view of the nation, this book parses the complex negotiations with colony and region that were integral to such a portrayal. Rather than suggesting that these categories should be seen in opposition to one another, I will argue that there was an effort in the interwar period to dissolve dichotomies between nation and region, nation and colony, traditional and modern, authentic and progressive. A portrait emerges of these categories as “fluid ideological construction[s],” constantly in process and given different meanings in different contexts.28 These labels were used, as Herrick Chapman writes, “as much for their rhetorical charge as for their descriptive accuracy.”29 The second divide I attempt to break down is that between rural and colonial studies, which have typically been quite separate fields of inquiry for contemporary scholars. Historians of colonial France have made considerable efforts in recent years to study colonial history not as a separate field, but within the broader context of French history, research that has helped to situate colonial ideology within French republicanism as well as to broaden our understanding of the “culture of colonialism.”30 This scholarship has not, by and large, led to much comparative work on the regions and the colonies, despite the natural link between the two in the early twentieth century as “traditional societies” became objects of study by the developing sciences of ethnology and folklore.31 Nor have these links been reflected in the field of visual culture, which has attracted considerable attention from historians of empire, and, to a lesser extent, historians of rural and regional France.32 This book attends to ideological and representational links between visual artifacts circulating in the “center” (Paris or urban France) and those specifically designed for distribution in rural regions or the colonies.33 Reading the rural and colonial stories in parallel reveals the extent to which understandings of rural and colonial France informed and shaped one another. A final methodological divide I have attempted to bridge is that between film history and social/cultural history. Social and cultural historians, as Robert Sklar has argued, treat moviegoing as primarily “the social interaction of persons within a theater space” and neglect the esthetic, ideological, and psychological dimensions of the movies themselves.34 Film historians, on the other hand, have tended to pay little attention to the lived experiences of the viewing public.35 In working with a broad range of film and non-film sources, I have attempted to take a more comprehensive approach, integrating close film analysis with

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a broader narrative of social and cultural history as well of production goals and audience reception.36 This is, I believe, what Marc Ferro meant when he described an approach to film history in which “criticism is not limited to the film, but integrates it into the world that surrounds it, with which it necessarily communicates.”37 The producers of documentary films, like the state officials involved in financing or approving them, were keenly interested in their audiences.38 Films produced for French farmers were very different from the ones that put those farmers on display for urban audiences. The same is true of the colonies. I treat films not only as vehicles for discourse, but also as material objects that are subject to “consumption” in specific settings, mining them for information about their ideological content and their cultural context.39 The films in this book are distinctly unremarkable. They are not the works of well-known artists who had relationships with modernists working in other media, such as Jean Epstein, Jean Painlevé, Jean Vigo, or Fernand Léger.40 Rather, they are the ordinary films that occupied the place for the documentary on cinema programs of the time.41 They are the lackluster films that one journalist praised ecstatically because if you arrived late to the movies, you would only have missed the documentary.42 People rarely remembered them by title. And yet, they were ubiquitous. They circulated widely in cinemas, but also far beyond traditional movie houses, to village squares, cafés, town halls, and schoolhouses in parts of the country that had no other access to cinema. Like Romy Golan, who looks beyond the narrative of high modernism towards more “average,” “middle-of-the-road” sources for her study of interwar art and politics, I find these standard, uncontroversial films to be good indicators of the safe waters of consensus.43 Most of them were either funded by various organisms of the French state or at least subject to state censorship, and they therefore represented attempts to inform and influence a broad general audience without raising eyebrows. Their rhetoric did not change significantly as governments shifted from Left to Right. They fell into categories and repeated common tropes, arguments, and themes. In this uncontroversial center, Golan finds “the ideological context of the times.” Jack Ellis has advanced a similar explanation for the success of Grierson in Britain, arguing that Grierson’s work “stay[ed] within what the two major political parties, Conservative and Labour, might agree on.”44 This conformism may explain why scholars have tended to dismiss them. I argue that from “conformist” films, recurring patterns of representation emerge, and that these patterns

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show ideas that were broadly shared among commissioning agencies, filmmakers, and audiences. Two central stories emerge from the “average” documentaries produced for consumption in interwar France. The first is one of an ongoing debate over the importance of tradition and progress in the postwar nation. The second is one of a struggle to define the place of diverse cultures within that nation. These issues were intertwined, and both played a key role in refiguring the national imagination after the cataclysm. These questions often center on the figures of the provinces or the colonies, both potential reserves of “traditional” values. Unlike Herman Lebovics, I do not propose that images of rural and colonial France were drawn upon primarily by conservatives to shore up a reactionary vision of True France. Rather, the argument in this book is closer to that of Shanny Peer’s in France on Display or Romy Golan’s in Art and Politics in France between the Wars, articulating a vision of the French nation in documentary film that drew heavily on images of tradition in harmony with modernization and progress. This France, which was promoted by governments on both the Left and the Right, relies for its strength on a broad collection of diverse regional and colonial cultures living together under the same flag. Rural and colonial France emerge as vital elements of the postwar nation. Rather than threatening progress, tradition emerges as its necessary ally, and France enhances its national image by portraying itself as a nation that values tradition. Documentary cinema was the ideal handmaiden to this project in the interwar years, as it was both preservationist and progressivist. Born into a world of tension between the study of traditional societies and their transformation by the external forces of “progress,” it could both collect and disseminate information. It could just as well bring notions of “civilization” to “primitive” peoples who had never left their valleys as bring back from those valleys precious archives of societies on the brink of disappearance. Its preservationist role was foremost, for example, when Marcel Griaule made his pathbreaking ethnographic films of the Dogon people in the Bandiagara cliffs (Au pays des Dogon/In the Land of the Dogon and Sous les masques noirs/Under the Black Masks, 1931/1935). Its progressive role was more evident, for example, in an agricultural training film aimed at encouraging modern methods of raising silkworms in France. These roles blur as the films circulate in different places, however. The Griaule films, financed by the Ministry of Colonies, were later distributed in France to rally the metropolitan masses to the colonial cause.45 The silkworm film showed up in the collection of the

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Compagnie marocaine cinématographique et commerciale in Dakar, which lent films to schools all along the West African coast, to teach colonized subjects about France. Both a recorder of tradition and a vector of change, the cinema embodied in its very nature the blended vision of France its practitioners set out to convey. To provide background for the chapters that follow, this book opens with a chapter on “truth peddling” that provides a historical overview of the French contribution to the development of documentary film during the interwar years. Its particular focus is to fill in previous gaps in the scholarly record and to demonstrate the widespread distribution of documentary throughout France and the empire. Following this general overview, four sections analyze documentary film initiatives funded by the state to represent rural or colonial France for a particular audience. These sections examine four elements of a multidirectional flow of images: from Paris to the provinces and back, and from Paris to the colonies and back. Although the goals of each film program were distinct, taken together, they reveal the contours of a new national narrative in which France is a rational, inclusive republic that values regional specificity while remaining committed to universal values and a modernist economic and social vision. The first of these four sections, “The Revolt of the Beets,” centers on films that were sent out into provincial France by the Ministry of Agriculture. This program was designed to combat rural outmigration by teaching farmers modernized agricultural practices; by persuading them that rural life was preferable to urban life; and by providing a form of entertainment in the villages that would reduce the boredom of long winter evenings. The beets revolt, in one film, because they see the happy beets in the next field, fertilized with potash, and they rise up against their ignorant owner to demand the same treatment. The next-door neighbor exemplifies the potential of the French countryside to integrate modern inventiveness while remaining committed to country life. Begun in the early 1920s, this program taught farmers that their individual choices gave them an important role in the national story of France. An extensive survey of audience responses provides invaluable information on the overall effectiveness of the program. Chapter 4, “Making the Fiction of the Empire a Reality,” examines film outreach to the French colonies in the light of the earlier chapter on the French provinces. This chapter demonstrates the extent to which officials in colonial France shared concerns of the film advocates in the French countryside. They imagined their audiences in similar

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ways, as thinking subjects with their own cultures, histories, and local particularities. They too feared commercial cinema and rural outmigration. As was the case in metropolitan France, governments in the French empire used film to convince colonized peoples that their story was part of the French national story. The programs sought to promote loyalty to France by “making the fiction of the empire a reality.” Audiences should realize that it was in their interest to remain “French,” which meant being committed to a traditional lifestyle while adopting medical, agricultural, and economic improvements advocated by the French state. Surveys conducted by administrators indicate the keen interest they took in the responses of their audiences. The question of representations of rural and colonial France for urban dwellers is taken up in Chapters 5 and 6. “Mysterious and Subtle Cheesemaking” examines films promoting the French regions, particularly at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris that marked the coming of age of documentary film on the national scene. The making of Roquefort cheese deep in the caves of the Rouergue is presented in one film as a “mysterious and subtle” process that blends local tradition with modern technologies. The people of the Rouergue have learned to “modernize within their traditions.” These films conveyed an understanding of the French provinces as spaces that were authentic yet progressive, and vital to the future of the nation. In “Carcasses of Manioc-Eaters,” I take up the frequent appearances of the French colonies in documentary films aimed at metropolitan audiences in cinemas, at colonial exhibitions, or at non-commercial film screenings. In a film entitled Cameroun, création française (Cameroon, A French Creation, 1937), the narrator expounds upon the transformation of Africans by the French from “carcasses of manioc-eaters” into “fine brothers of men.” My analysis of this kind of state-funded colonial film demonstrates the rhetoric used to make disparate cultures and societies appear to be diverse, yet unified and vital parts of French national identity. Their sheer numbers are essential to France’s national strength. Instruments such as public opinion polls, film reviews, student writings, and reflections of the colonial message in other media provide strong indications that these films had an influence on the French public’s commitment to the empire during this period. The discovery by the Vichy government of documentary film as a powerful propaganda tool provides a sobering epilogue to this story. “Recycling Rural Images,” the concluding chapter, suggests that the flowering of documentary film under Vichy, which has been studied by

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Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Steve Wharton, and others, would not have been possible without the existing institutions and films that had contributed to widespread positive images and stereotypes of rural life and colonized peoples under the Third Republic. Many of these images were still extant in state film collections as the Vichy government developed its cultural program after the fall of France, and some were simply folded into the catalogues of Vichy propaganda. This observation helps to support the hypothesis, argued by many historians, that the Vichy program was widely accepted by the French public in part because many of the tropes of its propaganda already seemed quite familiar, having been invented and widely disseminated under the Third Republic. Interwar documentary films and film programs, in this analysis, played an unintentional role in preparing public opinion for the arrival of Vichy. It is ironic that documentary film, which was (and is) taken so seriously because of its claim to speak about the real world, almost inevitably spoke instead about an ideal one. This ideal world was better than the real one. It was a world in which cow byres were not knee-deep in manure, no one died of sleeping sickness, beets were happy with the fertilizer they craved, babies of all colors grew fat and healthy, and everyone had electric lights. Happy youngsters stayed home, silos groaned with the harvest, and schoolrooms across the globe hummed with chants of “deux et deux font quatre, quatre et quatre huit . . .” It was also a world in which France made sense. North and West Africans, East Asians, Polynesian islanders, Bretons, Corsicans, and Parisians stood shoulder to shoulder in a common cause, ready to come to one another’s aid in time of trouble. This, of course, was perhaps the greatest fiction of all.

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Chapter 2

Truth Peddling: Documentary Film in Interwar France

Cinema appeared at the moment when the best thinking was turned towards a world society and a universal culture. The cinema made it possible to disseminate the ideas and spiritual preoccupations of men throughout the world. —Dr. Alvin Johnson, preface to Jean Benoit-Lévy, Les grandes missions du cinéma (1945) 1

In traditional accounts of documentary film history, the period following the First World War witnessed the emergence of documentary film as a fully-fledged genre, separate from fiction film. Key to the new understanding of the genre was the recognition that documentary film had a unique relationship to the “real” that gave it the power to motivate, inspire, and persuade its viewing public. This recognition, combined with the flocking of mass audiences to the cinema in general during the interwar years, contributed to an international flowering of new forms of documentary film during this period. In particular, it contributed to the development of “advocacy cinema,” film aimed at presenting a particular argument to a mass audience and thus at changing their attitudes or behaviors in a certain way. The credit for the development of advocacy cinema, in most historical narratives, usually rests with the Soviet Union— and particularly Dziga Vertov—and Great Britain, with the work of John Grierson. Most film historians credit Grierson with the institutionalization of advocacy cinema, beginning at the Empire Marketing Board.2 Grierson and his colleagues in what became the British documentary film movement were primarily Socialists interested in documentary film as a tool for social change. “I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist,” Grierson writes. “It is capable of direct description, simple analysis and commanding conclusion, and may, by its tempo’d and imagistic

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powers, be made easily persuasive.”3 It was the goal of the filmmaker, he thought, to use this persuasive power to create a better society.4 While Grierson’s career is well documented, the French contribution to the development of advocacy cinema, which was early and sustained, remains largely uncharted territory.5 As this chapter will demonstrate, not only had individuals in France experimented with the genre prior to the First World War, but French interest in film’s impact on its audiences was also so intense that the French government made a significant investment in this kind of film after the war. In France as elsewhere, documentary films began to fill a regular niche on commercial film programs during the interwar years. In France specifically, the involvement of government agencies was such that not only did state-funded films appear on commercial programs, but entire publicly funded film networks were set up to distribute advocacy films far beyond the confines of commercial cinemas. This explosion of public interest and investment in the educational possibilities of documentary film created new venues for public access to cinema, changing patterns of leisure, and new networks for the flow of ideas. This chapter aims to fill a gap in the historical record by providing an overview of French contributions to the development of advocacy cinema, with particular emphasis on the role played by government agencies in this development. Because of the fluid nature of the film world, the chapter does include some private actors who were also influential in the emergence of this new genre. The extent of government promotion of documentary film provides a foundation for my argument, in the following chapters, that French governments across the political spectrum attempted to use advocacy cinema to reshape a broad national understanding of French identity. The existence of such long-standing government programs at the end of the interwar years would in turn facilitate the Vichy government’s immediate and enthusiastic interest in using documentary film to promote the reactionary ideals of the National Revolution.

Nonfictional Film in France—A Prehistory Prior to the First World War, nonfiction film was not primarily viewed, in France or elsewhere, as a tool to shape the behaviors and attitudes of large groups of people. Rather, most early nonfiction films were presented either for their novelty value or in experimental applications for specialized audiences. France’s Lumière brothers began to exploit

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the possibilities of their transportable film camera/projector/printer, the cinématographe, as early as June 1895, by filming the arrival of attendees—among them, the astronomer Janssen—at a convention in Lyon. They projected the images the next day at the meeting.6 After the first public demonstration of the invention in December of that year, they sent cameramen all over the world to shoot films on location and project them to ever-widening audiences.7 They buttressed their success by publicizing not only the screenings, but also the shooting sessions, so that people who had seen the cameramen shooting would attend the screenings in hopes of seeing themselves on film.8 The Lumière model for commercial screenings set the standard for film production all over the world for the next ten years, with film programs that included many nonfiction short subjects. Experiments with scientific applications of film, which were not destined for commercial audiences, began soon after the unveiling of the cinématographe. “Ethnographic” and zoological subjects were of early interest. An Edison cameraman filmed an “Egyptian encampment” at Coney Island in 1896 and Pueblo dances as early as 1898.9 In the same year, the zoologist Alfred Cord Haddon led an expedition from Cambridge to the South Pacific and took a Lumière camera with him to record his observations.10 Moki Land, a series of films financed by the Bureau of American Ethnology, recorded various aspects of the lives of American Indians in 1901. In France, by 1898, Dr. Eugène-Louis Doyen was already using films of his own surgical operations for the purposes of training medical students.11 Individual teachers in other disciplines began experimenting with the integration of film into their lessons; M. Brucker, professor of natural history at the Lycée Hoche, in Versailles, began using film in his classes in 1911. In 1913, other Parisian lycées followed suit, including Condorcet, Janson-de-Sailly, Louis-le-Grand, Voltaire, Fénelon, and Jules Ferry. Another pioneer, Edouard Petit, used film in his Parisian after-school program.12 While most of these early applications of nonfiction film were either aimed at novelty-based entertainment for commercial audiences or education for specialized, non-commercial audiences, a few practitioners in France began to experiment with the use of film in educational outreach to a much broader audience. In these experiments, we can see the archeological traces of what would become a much wider interest in advocacy cinema after the First World War. Cinema, with its advantages of easy reproducibility and its potential to reach a wide audience, drew the attention of progressive Catholics in France soon after its earliest

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public performance. As early as 1896, the first Catholic missionaries used cinema in their activities.13 In 1903, Guillaume-Michel Coissac, who was a pillar of what would become a fully-fledged educational film movement during the interwar period, founded a magazine entitled Le Fascinateur. The publication was dedicated to the use of cinema in Catholic education. The influential publishing house, La Maison de la Bonne Presse, edited films on religious subjects.14 The first non-religious publications on educational cinema arrived in France from Britain, with, for example, Charles Urban’s treatise, The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State (1907).15 The Ministry of Agriculture was the first among governmental organizations in France to take a serious interest in educational cinema. In 1912, with the appearance of non-flammable film and small, reliable film projectors that could be operated by non-specialists, studies of the educational film question and its potential uses in agricultural education began at the Ministry.16 It would take a decade, however, and the watershed of the First World War, for the French government to throw its support behind documentary film as a revolutionary new medium with tremendous power to influence public opinion.

Factors Contributing to French Government Interest A growing interest in audiences The transition from experiments by a few pioneers to substantial French government investment in advocacy cinema during the interwar years can be largely explained by the growth of international interest in the impact of film on its audience. This, in turn, was the result of an explosion in filmgoing as a cultural practice after the First World War. Not only in France, but also in Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States, during the interwar period, audiences began to attend the movies en masse. The number of commercial cinemas in France more than doubled between the wars, reaching nearly 4,000 by 1938. The percentage of leisure time spent on film viewing rose to 38 percent in 1939. The new interest in these audiences translated both into fear of the harm film might do and into enthusiasm for its potential benefits. Studies of spectatorship began before the First World War and flourished from the 1920s on.17 Many of these early audience studies sought to quantify the perceived nefarious effects of motion pictures on the

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public, and particularly on children. In the United States, the Payne Fund studies, published in 1933, focused primarily on effects on children such as fatigue, eye strain, juvenile delinquency, crime, and general moral deterioration.18 A second broad category of audience studies that began to appear in the late 1920s aimed to identify the potential positive effects that films could have, particularly in the domain of education. Central questions studied in this group were films’ influence on information retention, attitude modification, and general performance in the classroom.19 While the United States was a leader in this area, interest in educational cinema spread internationally thanks in part to the International Institute of Educational Cinema (IICE), founded in Italy in 1928 under the auspices of the League of Nations. The IICE was a strong promoter of the circulation of educational cinema among nations to further mutual understanding and knowledge.20 The debate about the positive versus the negative effects of the movies generally followed the dichotomy between fiction and documentary: fiction films were responsible for violence and immorality, whereas documentary films were ideal vehicles for the promotion of positive social values.21 In France, defenders of nonfiction film’s potential for positive social impact were vocal and persuasive long before the flood of published studies on film audiences. The First World War was an important catalyst in transforming what had been the purview of a few pathbreakers into a series of important film programs that would have both governmental and private support and would bring documentary film to the attention of a diverse and numerous audience.

The emergence of documentary as a genre In addition to this international interest in audiences, the French government’s interwar interest in the social value of film may be attributed to the emergence of documentary film as an identifiable genre. Despite the existence of a tremendous international corpus of nonfictional films, on the eve of the First World War the noun “documentary” as a description for this category still did not exist in French or English. The documentary did not appear as a separate category on commercial film programs. Although its invention is generally attributed to the British filmmaker John Grierson, the term emerged in France well before Grierson’s appropriation of it in English in 1926.22 The adjective documentaire appeared in the Pathé film catalogue from 1896–1906, and the

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noun form, le documentaire, referring to a film, first appeared in Ciné-Journal on March 1, 1915.23 Over the decade of the 1920s, a genre called le documentaire that was distinct from fiction film clearly emerged in France. By 1921, the noun form was commonly used in the trade journal Le Cinéopse, and the term le film documentaire gradually gave way to le documentaire in the popular press over the course of the 1920s.24 By the end of the decade, widely distributed cinema magazines such as Mon Ciné and Ciné-Miroir introduced special sections entitled “Les plus beaux documentaires de la semaine.” Linguistic acceptance of the documentary as a separate genre paralleled a rebirth of interest in documentary film worldwide. Some of this interest channeled into forms that had existed prior to the First World War: young filmmakers had some commercial success, for example, with new approaches to subjects such as ethnography, medicine, and natural history. Robert Flaherty’s pioneering Nanook of the North (1922) was a pathbreaking ethnographic film that gained wide distribution, and his Moana and Man of Aran in 1926 and 1934 respectively, gained him an international reputation for ethnographic documentaries with popular appeal.25 It was in part due to the success of Flaherty’s work that a niche for documentaries began to appear on commercial film programs in the 1920s. While they were rarely the featured attraction on film programs— Nanook of the North and Moana, for example, were exceptional in this regard—they became a staple of the “complete program” that audiences came to expect. They were so ubiquitous that a correspondent for CinéSpectacles, the trade journal for the film industry in Southern France and North Africa, could quip, in 1928: [Documentaries] prepare the atmosphere for the comic. For those of us who don’t rise from the table until 9 o’clock—which is common in our region—it is pleasant to arrive at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the documentary. If you disturb a neighbor, he will not rant and rave (as he would if you interrupted him while he is savoring the grace of a comedy) and you can take your seat without feeling surrounded by the silent animosity that greets the latecomer. Of course, it’s better to arrive on time, but because that is not possible, let us choose a compromise accessible to all, thanks to this unpretentious little film.26 This wry comment, while taking advantage of an opportunity to make fun of Southern French attitudes towards time, derides the documentary

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as expendable while acknowledging it as a constant element of film programs. The correspondent concludes his piece on a more serious note: If, however, [the documentary] is produced by a young man who has a strong background in modern technology, it can even interest the avant-garde. To make machines and objects at play, to show them from new angles, that is the role of the documentary. Therefore, the documentary of the future will be pure cinema.27 By the time this journalist was writing, in 1928, the French government was already deeply involved in harnessing the power of this new form of “pure cinema.”

A powerful new medium The interest on the part of the French government in using this new genre in state programs can further be explained by a prevalent belief that the documentary was a special genre that could hold particular sway over its audiences because it so faithfully recorded the truth, or the real. Film in this view, and documentary film in particular, looks so much like life that it maintains a privileged relationship to the truth and therefore leaves an especially strong impression on the minds of its viewers. “Seeing is almost knowing,” writes Auguste Bessou in a 1920 government report, quoting a well-known text from one of educational cinema’s apostles, Emile Roux-Parassac. The cinematograph has advantages over the image and the story without the disadvantages. It is life. The interest of the spectacle solicits the students’ attention, even those whose imagination is lazy. The memories they retain from an animated image are clearer and persist longer.28 This lofty view of the power of the right kind of cinema united film enthusiasts on both sides of the secular/religious divide. Guillaume-Michel Coissac, the tireless director of Le Fascinateur, wrote that “the public’s taste must be enlightened [. . .]. Cinema must become an instrument of education and instruction, a [form of] recreation that leads to Art, joy, and honesty.”29

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French Government Agencies and Documentary Film: Postwar and 1920s Perhaps the most influential new development in interwar documentary film in France was the emergence of a movement in support of publicly funded advocacy cinema. While some of advocacy cinema’s early proponents were private individuals, it was a series of French government agencies that provided the initiative and the funding for the development of a substantial set of films and programs between the wars. Each of these agencies, while articulating its own particular goals, saw in film the potential for initiating a broad conversation about the French nation that would reach all levels of society. The Ministry of Agriculture, which had been the only agency interested in the subject prior to the war, placed its film experiments on hold when war broke out. However, during the war, the French army took the lead in this area, beginning a significant investment in film that would carry over into the interwar period. The Section Cinématographique de l’Armée (SCA), created in 1915, sent camera operators to the front who provided a constant supply of images of the fighting. Through these films, the French public was able to “live” the war in a way that had never before been possible. The mission of the Section was not limited to the production of actuality footage. It soon became involved in the use of advocacy cinema for broader social aims. Dissolved at the end of the war, the Section was recreated in 1920 and attached to the Service Géographique de l’Armée with a new social and educational mission. Although the Section was poorly funded until 1925, its goals were clearly laid out in the texts of 1920: An organization of this nature can be extremely useful in military and professional education. [. . .] This education [. . .] would prepare men for the life of the Nation, giving them knowledge they could put to use after they return to civil life. Their stay in the barracks will no longer be what many imagine it to be: time lost and wasted in the company of unhealthy habits: but, on the contrary, a modern school marching forward with progress, rich with work; a training school for French youth where the bodies and minds of tomorrow’s men will receive the imprint of strength, character, and work.30

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This quotation clearly shows the national character of the film project. The army, which recruited young men from all social classes and geographical areas, could use film to teach these men about the nation. The report goes on to argue that film could be used in the army not only to teach technical skills (the “Ciné-Tir” devices, for example, used film to help teach firing accuracy) but to make the platoons into citizen training camps—the term was foyers d’apprentissage de la nation, which translates roughly as “centers for learning about the nation.” These arguments finally garnered the Section a solid budget in 1925, and the budget increased steadily throughout the interwar period. The Section purchased cameras and projectors, made films, and maintained a central film library and several regional film centers that loaned films out to different branches of the armed forces. Another important governmental initiative in the use of documentary film in education during the war was the highly publicized cinema expedition to Indochina, launched by the colony’s Governor General, Albert Sarraut, in 1916.31 An important aspect of this expedition was the organization of public film screenings in French Indochina designed to inform the local populations about French history, the French nation, and the broad goals of France’s civilizing mission. Films were also sent back to France to inform inhabitants of the métropole that their nation encompassed a vast overseas empire. It was partly due to the high-profile success of these initiatives that the Ministry of Education became interested in using educational film in the schools and thus, with the Ministry of Agriculture, became one of the two major governmental players in interwar educational film. The Ministry of Education was no stranger to the benefits of visual media in education. Since 1895, it had been developing a collection of glass magic lantern slides in its lending library, the Musée Pédagogique.32 The film program, which was also coordinated by the Musée Pédagogique, was in some ways a continuation of this slide program. In 1916, Paul Painlevé, who served as Minister of Education under Aristide Briand, created a special commission to study the possibilities of using film in public schools. Painlevé, a mathematics professor at the Sorbonne and the École Polytechnique and who had been a member of parliament since 1910, wrote: The cinema is useful in education because it simplifies subjects and takes shortcuts, at a time when curricula are so overloaded that we must move extremely fast. The child’s imagination, his attention,

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are much better focused by the visual lesson given by the animated image, than by an oral lesson. The two must collaborate. The subjects that film-enhanced teaching can illuminate with its bright light are practically endless!33 Like the SCA and the Indochina film programs, the goal of the Bessou commission was expressed in terms of the urgent need for a new national conversation. Composed mainly of school administrators, but also of one senator (Herriot), three deputies (Honorat, Verlot, and Vincent), and a filmmaker (Jean Benoit-Lévy), the commission was to study the possibilities of using cinema to help French schools accomplish the moral and intellectual reconstruction of the country after the end of the war.34 In 1920, the Bessou commission finally delivered its report on educational cinema. The report reflects a renewal of interest in secular moral education favored by many teachers and politicians on the Left, including Paul Painlevé, the instigator of the commission.35 Moral education, which had been part of Third Republic school teaching since the outset—Jules Ferry, who was Franc-Maçon and atheist, believed that schools should teach “essential notions of human morality” that had heretofore been left to the church—had all but disappeared from school curricula by the First World War.36 Ironically, as “duties towards God” that formed the basis for it were formally expunged from school curricula in 1923, university professors and school administrators made urgent calls in the pedagogical press for a renewal of the school’s role in encouraging morality. They saw secular moral education as a necessary response to France’s moral crisis, defined as the disappearance of old values such as the love of work, personal dignity, and the cult of the family.37 This view was not necessarily limited to those on the political Right, but was also expressed by independent Republicans and Socialists.38 Auguste Bessou’s 1920 report on educational film expresses a broadly defined faith in the social value of film as an agent of moral regeneration for the nation: Pushing back horizons, suppressing barriers, [cinema] shows the diversity of the universe, reveals and renders nearly tangible the most distant things, revives bygone eras, shows truths more beautiful than the most beautiful of legends. Not only does it nourish the mind with useful knowledge, it also snatches it away from vulgarity and baseness and raises it towards the ideal. [. . .] It develops the esthetic sense, and through beauty, leads towards morality.39

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This preoccupation with a secular version of morality based on esthetic appreciation and patriotism not only reflects the regeneration of interest in moral education in the schools mentioned above, but it also mirrors the broader debates about film and morality discussed earlier. As were their colleagues internationally, members of the commission were suspicious of the dangerous influence that cinema could have on young minds. [During the first meeting of the commission], Mr. Herriot vigorously denounced the criminal suggestion contained in certain film scenes. The thieving and murders that unfolded on the screen haunted [. . .] the imaginations of children and adolescents who reproduced the exact gestures of the thieves and murderers in their games.40 The commission’s response to Herriot was to envision a program in which the state would collaborate with the private sector to make a different sort of film available to children and adolescents, one that would elevate their minds towards moral virtues. It might appear strange that to these reformers, an essential element of bringing moral instruction back into the schools was an increased emphasis on observational learning. Adrien Bruneau, the inspector of art instruction in professional schools who became the director of the municipal film library in Paris (rue de Fleurus), makes this link explicit. [Cinema] encourages discovery and love of truth, the surest of all moral values. Reducing speech, and consequently the possibility for error, it teaches the child to speak only of what he has seen and understood. [. . .] Making truth the foundation of education is of capital importance for the future citizen of a democracy that can only survive via the practice of all virtues. [. . .] Cinema becomes the natural and indispensable auxiliary of the leçon de choses.41 In this view, the leçon de choses, or object lesson, becomes a fundamental element in the search for truth, presented here as a moral virtue. The leçon de choses, based on direct observation by the child, was a key element of primary school education since the beginning of the Third Republic and took on particular importance in the debates over educational reform during the interwar years. Reformers criticized the French schools as being too narrowly focused on instruction, which they understood as a concentration on academic subjects and rote learning.

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Proponents of éducation were interested in an approach to teaching and learning that took a more balanced view of the child’s development, including not only intellectual subjects, but also extracurricular activities and experiential learning. The concept of éducation gained such strong support during the interwar years that the Ministry of Education changed its name from the Minstère de l’Instruction Publique to the Minstère de l’Éducation in 1934.42 Cinema was a natural auxiliary to experiential learning, providing an essential visual aid when direct observation was not possible. As M. A. Dubet, a primary school teacher, writes, “The great principle of modern pedagogy [. . .] is based on using the child’s senses. The film gives the impression of life [. . .] The child sees the subject of his lesson; he understands easily and his memory is not overcrowded with words, empty of meaning, but with living observations.”43 It is significant that the earlier quotation about the leçon de choses provides as its fundamental argument the need to train the “future citizen of a democracy.” As was the case in other government ministries, film advocates at the Ministry of Education framed their arguments in terms of the construction of the nation. This progression, cinema→ observational learning→patriotism, while it may appear tenuous, was not so in the minds of these film enthusiasts, who laid it out explicitly: The commission [. . .] convinced of the power of the cinematograph, and desiring [. . .] to extend its application into education, invites the Chambre syndicale de la Cinématographie to make all possible efforts to replace films that might have harmful effects on a child’s imagination and on the popular imagination in general with films that exalt noble sentiments such as patriotism.44 Patriotism reappears here, as in so many of the arguments underpinning advocacy film programs, as a kind of unassailable value that would allow the programs’ proponents to push their projects through. The arguments laid out in the Bessou report, the first official document to recognize cinema as a legitimate form of national instruction, were convincing enough to produce concrete results. That same year, the Ministry of Education approved a budget of 500,000F for the creation of a film section at the Musée Pédagogique, and the Ministry of Agriculture followed suit in 1923. Both institutions began purchasing and producing educational films for their collections. For its own productions, the Musée worked with a commercial producer, often Pathé. The Musée would specify the subject and provide the film company with a subsidy

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that partially defrayed the production costs. The negative remained the property of the film company, which then offered the Musée positive copies of the film at a below-market price.45 By 1931, the Musée had 2,600 films in its collection,46 and the central film library at the Ministry of Agriculture had over 4,500.47 The Ministry of Education established some specific guidelines for the use of its films in the classroom. These guidelines reflected both the recognition that documentary film had tremendous power and needed to be controlled, and the ideal of circulating an idea of the French nation throughout French schools and after-school programs. Of primary importance was the idea that film should not replace the teacher’s lesson, but should merely complement it, serving as a kind of extension of the blackboard.48 Films used in the classroom must be accompanied by commentary from the teacher: they were illustrations for the teacher’s lessons, not lessons in themselves. Even after the arrival of sound, some defenders of classroom film said that only silent film was appropriate in the classroom, to allow for the teacher to speak.49 In primary schools, according to the plans in the Bessou report, films would be most useful in subjects such as geography, natural history (other than local, which should be observed directly), French, leçons de choses, and civics. Other potential subjects at higher levels were anatomy, physiology, zoology, geology, botany, chemistry, geography, contemporary history, technology, and professional training. It was geography, however, that dominated the film program. A special section of the Bessou report was specifically devoted to geography, considered to be the subject most radically enhanced by the film medium. The collection at the Musée Pédagogique was strongest in geography and natural history. By 1930, virtually every region and city in France, and most of the overseas territories and colonies, were the subject of one or more formulaic films that resembled a series of postcard-like shots of the principal sights, raw materials, economic activity, and inhabitants. Natural history films were a close second, sometimes incorporating techniques such as microcinematography or slow motion to capture the rhythms of nature.50 The Musée Pédagogique also collected films on sports, physical education, professional training, hygiene, and a few scientific films. In some instances, the Ministry of Education financed and produced films that would give it complete control over their message. This was the case in the production of Jeannette Bourgogne, a docudrama adapted from a treatment written by Léon Dubreuil, inspector of the academy of Côte-d’Or, and directed by the young filmmaker Jean Gourget.51 The

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Revue du Cinema Éducateur called it “a film to the glory of the school, an act of faith in public education.” The Burgundian film committee, along with private and municipal contributions, provided additional funding for the project.52 It is a fictionalized account of a young woman who grows up to become a schoolteacher and discovers true happiness when she moves to the countryside to work in the local school (Figure 2.1). The argument of the film, which takes place entirely in the French countryside, is that all inhabitants of France, including those in outlying areas, can benefit from republican schools to learn about their place in the nation. Its naïve treatment of rural subjects and the benefits of secular education are typical of the sincere but mediocre style of agricultural propaganda films that will be discussed more fully in the next chapter. In addition to building their own film collections, the Ministries of Agriculture and Education used their budgets to support the purchase of projection equipment for schools and villages. Rural primary schools

Figure 2.1 Sun-drenched images of Burgundian rural life permeate the Ministry of Education’s “film to the glory of the school,” Jeannette Bourgogne (Jean Gourget, 1938). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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were the principal focus of the Ministry of Education’s subsidies; they could apply for up to two-thirds of the cost of the projection equipment. The balance was typically picked up by the municipality or by private associations such as the Société des amis de l’école or the Sou des écoles. Urban primary schools and other types of establishment (middle schools, high schools, higher primary schools) could also apply for subsidies, but the Ministry usually funded only one-third of the cost for these institutions. By 1931, 8,500 schools throughout France (roughly 12 percent of the total) were equipped with projection equipment,53 a number that rose to 10,000 or 12,000 by 1939.54 The role of the Ministry of Agriculture in disseminating film to rural areas of France is analyzed more fully in Chapter 3. As soon as word spread about the availability of free film loans, demand quickly outstripped supply. The Musée Pédagogique was swamped; their loans jumped from 54 in 1920 to 3,541 in 1921 and 11,000 in 1922, and they were able to respond to less than half of the requests. By 1926, they were lending 300 films per day, and even by reducing the number of films shipped to one per customer, the museum still reported a film shortage.55 A similar situation developed at the Ministry of Agriculture’s centralized film library. In response to this demand, a series of regional film libraries were created that served specified geographic regions. The ministries created some of these libraries to house their own collections and serve as relay points for their film programs, so that the films would not have to travel all the way back to Paris between showings. Some were local and regional cinémathèques that developed a relationship with the governmental ministries over time and came to house the governmental collections as well as their own. By 1932, the Musée Pédagogique was in relationship with 47 of these cinémathèques all over metropolitan France and Algeria. The programs at the Ministries of Agriculture and Education created an additional market for documentary film outside of commercial film circuits. With the opening of this market came new independent production companies specialized in the creation of films. One of the best-known examples is the Édition française cinématographique, founded by Jean Benoit-Lévy after the war. Benoit-Lévy was appointed to the Bessou commission on educational cinema in 1916. He was a great admirer of Robert Flaherty’s documentaries, particularly because of the latter’s ability to remain independent and to create films according to his own vision. Following a different path from Flaherty, however,

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Benoit-Lévy devoted his career to working with public and private organizations to create films that would convey a customized message. Although he worked constantly to convey the messages of others, Benoit-Lévy believed passionately that cinema had a powerful social mission. His faith in the project was explicit: “One must believe ardently to convince,” he wrote; “it takes a profound faith in an idea to make it accessible to others.” Of his films, he adds, “these works of faith, in the service of strong, generous, or simply human ideas, bring us closer to the great educational mission of cinema.”56 Jean Benoit-Lévy’s company made over 300 films from 1921 to 1940. While he is best known for his hygiene films, principally directed at the prevention and treatment of the “three great social scourges”—syphilis, alcoholism, and tuberculosis— his collection was vast and varied.57 Many of these films ended up in the collections of the Ministries of Education and Agriculture. Agriculture and Education, while leaders in the field, were not the only French government agencies interested in harnessing the power of documentary film to disseminate a new conversation about the regeneration of the French nation. Over the course of the 1920s, a wide variety of organizations joined in this campaign. The Ministry of Public Health worked on public health films with national associations such as the Comité national de défense contre la tuberculose, the Société française de prophylaxie sanitaire et morale (working to combat venereal disease), and the Comité “Hygiène et eau” (working for cleaner water). It established a film library in 1929, housed at the headquarters of the Comité national de défense contre la tuberculose.58 The Ministry of Technical Education, which had organized an initial conference on educational film in 1922, founded a film library in 1926 to house its professional training films that circulated through the networks set up by the Ministries of Agriculture and Education.59 Spurred by the excitement generated at the 1922 conference, the private organization l’Art à l’École, which was one of its co-organizers, worked with city councilor Léon Riotor towards the creation of a municipal film library in Paris, which opened in 1925 and still operates today. The Ministry of Colonies also took part in documentary film production and distribution through its public relations bureaus, the Agences économiques des colonies. These agencies, founded after the First World War, were responsible for fostering commercial liaisons between overseas business interests and metropolitan ones. The use of “methodical propaganda to make the colonies’ resources known in France and

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to encourage the development of trade with the Metropole,” was an important part of their mission to promote the colonial enterprise in France and abroad.60 Cinema was important to their activities from the beginning. The general governments of each territory regularly commissioned informational documentaries on the colonies, and the Parisian offices of the colonial agencies kept copies of these films to be lent to the public free of charge. Although smaller in scale than the film libraries at other ministries, these agencies nonetheless played an important role in disseminating information about the French empire in metropolitan France and abroad, a role that is examined in more detail in Chapter 6. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also jumped on the film bandwagon to achieve its public relations goals in the 1920s. At the end of the First World War, like the Ministry of Colonies, it created a special bureau devoted to promotion of the French national image and its economic interests abroad. This bureau, created out of a reorganization of the “French propaganda” office, had a new name, the Service des oeuvres françaises à l’étranger (SOFE).61 The SOFE’s film activities were multifaceted.62 It promoted French cinema abroad, for example, by encouraging foreign companies to distribute films from Pathé or Gaumont. It also tried to influence what kinds of French films should be shown abroad—by pressuring French diplomats to prevent screenings of films that would damage the national image63—as well as participating actively in film censorship at home.64 The SOFE also supplied documentary films from commercial companies or from the public film collections to French officials or private organizations abroad, for the purposes of “propaganda.” They generally tried to send films that were apolitical while nonetheless presenting France in a favorable light.65 All of these public agencies were interested in using film to promote new conversations about the French nation in the aftermath of the First World War. Taken together, they reveal a concerted and extensive investment on the part of the French government in this new medium, and particularly, in advocacy cinema. The government agencies were particularly successful in the production of new films and in the creation of distribution networks that could allow these films to be seen. Their goal of reaching a broad audience in regions of France and the colonies would not, however, have been as successful without the assistance of nongovernmental organizations that were also active in film promotion in 1920s France. While the goals of these organizations were not necessarily the same as those of government agencies, they overlapped to some extent. Their logistical support in the circulation and management of

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government-subsidized films gained them recognition and eventually, public subsidies. They also, therefore, came to play a role in the spread of a new national conversation through film in the postwar period.

Nongovernmental assistance to public agencies: 1920s During the decade of the 1920s, a host of regional film initiatives, which at first received no governmental funding, became ardent defenders of non-commercial cinema, facilitating its spread throughout urban and rural France. These initiatives came to be known as the Offices régionaux du cinéma éducateur laïque.66 The principal factor motivating the creation of these Offices was défense laïque: the desire to use cinema as a weapon in the battle for secular schools. Tensions between the church and state in matters of education had lessened considerably because of the unifying effects of the war; the clergy emerged from the war with a much more favorable image, having fought and died for France, and the French government re-established ties with the Vatican in 1921.67 Defenders of secular education, convinced that this climate of rapprochement would bring back more religious schools, launched their campaign with renewed vigor, even calling for more attention to secular moral education, which had been on the decline in French schools since the turn of the century.68 In this campaign, their goals thus overlapped with those of the Ministry of Education outlined above. Their interest in cinema was in part spurred by La Bonne Presse, which by 1920 had managed to organize a film lending library and an extensive network of Catholic film screenings.69 The first and most active of the Offices was founded in Lyon by Gustave Cauvin and Senator Joseph Brenier in 1924. Brenier had been a vocal defender of educational cinema in the National Assembly since 1916.70 In 1921, Cauvin, a Socialist, raised private funds to start a school cinema program in Lyon, which garnered city funding the following year and eventually blossomed into a vast nationwide network of nonprofit film distribution.71 As Cauvin wrote in 1928, “The goal in the early stages was simple: [. . .] we wanted to use the attraction of cinema to tear children away from the streets and entertain them, and in so doing, complete their knowledge and perfect their education.”72 They also wanted to tear the children away from the “adversaries of the public schools” (i.e. Catholic dioceses) who were also using cinema.73 The film journal

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Le Cinéopse referred to Cauvin ironically as the “indefatigable apostle” of educational cinema. Cauvin wrote in 1928: We are not systematically against religion, but we do not believe it should be used to subjugate the laborer. We remember what freedom of conscience meant when the enemies of secularism were in power; we know only too well that, in the villages where these men are still in control, they oblige the schoolteacher to go to Mass in order to listen to the vicar declare that the lay school is the school of crime. The cinema is a formidable means of emancipation; it is as powerful and as effective as the book, and often the latter is not even read; in contrast, crowds will flock to see the living animated image!74 While Brenier led the battle for educational film funding at the national level, Cauvin worked at the grassroots level.75 Rural audiences were of particular concern. The combat for secular education was relatively far advanced in “republican, industrial cities,” he wrote, but it was in the rural areas that “our comrades’ task is difficult and they have the right to count on us.”76 His office kept a special reserve of funds to help out rural schoolteachers in “endangered” areas in which the local mayor or priest was hostile to the public school.77 In the wake of Lyon’s success, Cauvin and Brenier gained attention and sponsorship from the Ministry of Education, and they helped to establish regional film offices all over France.78 The offices numbered sixteen by 1937, including one in Ajaccio and one in Algiers.79 Independent in their operations, the offices increased the circulation of film in their regions considerably; in 1929, they collectively held 7,818 films and made 97,017 loans,80 thus largely surpassing the Musée Pédagogique with 43,800 loans81 and the Cinémathèque centrale agricole with about 10,000. Like the Lyon office, most of these organizations lent primarily to borrowers in small towns and villages where commercial cinema could not survive. These nonprofit film networks played an important role in distributing fiction film as well as documentaries to rural areas of France where there were no commercial cinemas. Le cinéma éducateur, in Cauvin’s view, must include entertainment films as well as informational ones. Exploiting the entertainment value of the programs, he wrote, was a natural way to lure students into the schools, both during and after school hours. In fact, Raymond Borde argues that fiction film was the only kind the Offices were interested in; but contemporary journals suggest that nonfiction

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film was always an important part of the mission.82 The offices always sent out a complete programme for their sessions, including a “recreational film,” as well as other elements such as a newsreel, a short comic, and one or two documentary shorts, often from one of the ministries’ collections. Educational documentaries outnumbered fiction films in the Lyon collection by at least two to one.83 Catholic organizers involved in the network of La Bonne Presse took note of these educational film initiatives that were specifically targeted at republican schools and attempted to step up their resistance. In 1920, M. l’abbé Claudey, director of the St-Médard patronage in Paris, founded Le Bon Film to acquire commercial films, censor their “scabrous elements,” and then lend them, in their cleaned-up format, to a group of nonprofit Catholic cinemas called Les Bons Cinémas.84 Some hostile local priests forbade schoolchildren to attend film showings at the school, threatening to withhold Communion or to impose even more dire punishments.85 By 1926, over 3,000 Catholic film programs existed throughout France.86 However, they never managed to reach the mass audiences of which they dreamed.87 The regional offices involved in défense laïque had two to three times the number of programs. The arrival of sound cinema in 1930, however, posed new challenges to practitioners on both sides of this divide.88

Public and Private Involvement in Documentary Film: 1930s By 1930, when John Grierson’s influential career in advocacy cinema was just beginning in Britain, the French government had been seriously invested in the genre for a decade. The years 1929–31 marked a turning point in the progress of educational cinema in France. Public and private initiatives overlapped and intertwined, in both philosophical and pragmatic terms. These three years witnessed a crescendo of activity: in November 1929, Catholics held a national congress on educational cinema. In 1930, the Ministry of Agriculture conducted a nationwide survey on the effectiveness of its film program. The year 1930 also saw the creation of a French section of the International Institute of Educational Cinema (IIEC). In 1931, a national conference on educational cinema was held in Paris. These four events marked a period in which the achievements of educational cinema were being proclaimed but its results were also being evaluated. The French section of the IIEC

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encouraged film promoters from both sides of the Catholic/secular fence to climb aboard a bandwagon of pacifism and internationalism. Its director, Luciano de Feo, had been lobbying for the cause of educational cinema as a universal and international, and not a national one. The IIEC was created to “foster and increase cultural relations among peoples by new media particularly accessible to the intelligence of the majority of men.”89 Chanoîne Reymond, the director of the Catholic film committee, worked alongside Marcel Martin, secretary of the national federation of the Offices régionaux du cinéma éducateur laïque. Guillaume-Michel Coissac, who initially directed the Catholic-supported film review Le Fascinateur, moved on to become the director of the more nonpartisan trade journal Le Cinéopse, which supported educational film of all persuasions. After this crescendo, although interest in educational cinema continued to grow, institutional support for it began to wane. The arrival of sound was a major reason. The 10,000 projectors that had been purchased by 1930 were all silent. Because very few small villages had the funds to make the transition, these projectors contributed to the survival of silent cinema in France through the decade of the 1930s. Raymond Borde and Charles Perrin see this as a great benefit to the survival of silent cinema. It must be admitted, however, that since silent films were no longer being produced, the collections became gradually more out of date, and the gulf between rural and urban audiences only widened. In his speech to the Ligue française de l’enseignement in 1935, Joseph Brenier admits this as a problem with the program: After many discussions, teachers and educators across the world now agree that we must adopt sound cinema [. . .] in all the recreational sessions, even for children, or they will be deserted. Silent film cannot withstand the comparison with commercial or religious cinemas, which have deliberately adopted sound.90 Gustave Cauvin’s 1935 report on the activity of the regional film office in Lyon signaled the arrival of sound cinema as a major problem for the offices. “For five years now, no silent films have been produced,” he writes. “The offices are obliged to live off their stocks. [. . .] Our subscribers are having more and more difficulty [. . .] even in the countryside.” He reported serious competition from traveling cinemas, as well as from over 60 religious cinemas in the area that were equipped for sound.91 Only eight of the office’s subscribers were able to project sound films,

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and Cauvin strongly encouraged them to make the switch to remain competitive.92 Advocates of educational cinema lamented the fact that the institutional interest in educational film did not lead to more significant commitments that would have allowed programs to make the transition. As early as 1929, Jean Benoit-Lévy, himself a prolific director of both documentary and fiction films, complained that “everyone talks a lot about educational film, but it does not actually exist anywhere [. . .]. Without a clearly defined plan, it represents a regrettable waste of effort.”93 Seven years later, Coissac wrote a disparaging article in Le Cinéopse about how much had been said and how little had been done. Wondering whether the Popular Front would change all that, he wrote, “Is the era of speeches, reports, fantastic plans, mouthwatering promise, and creations that disappear as soon as they are conceived, finally over? So much the better if the new era brings results; too bad if, as in the past, we have only bitter disappointments.”94 The arrival of the Popular Front in the spring of 1936 did appear to herald a new day for educational cinema. Léon Blum’s government was full of plans to liberalize the film industry. Their many goals included a broad program for “cleaning up” French cinema by creating a production environment in which the state would play a more active role in order to ensure more films that were favorable to the interests of the Left.95 Growing concerns about the rise of fascist regimes fueled this interest, particularly in nations such as Germany and Italy that were well known for their success in film propaganda. Heightened interest in educational cinema accompanied these general initiatives to reorganize the French film industry. The Présidence du Conseil created a bureau of cinema on June 27, 1936, with the express purpose of reviving educational film in the schools. The bureau, which included members from the public and private sectors, would also study related questions such as whether to abolish censorship, whether to nationalize Gaumont and Pathé, and how to suggest “amicably” to newsreel producers that they show fewer “religious, military, and fascist manifestations” and devote more time to “interesting shots such as social programs, municipal achievements, etc.” 96 The head of the new bureau was Yves Chataigneau.97 A few months later, in November 1936, the Ministry of Education founded a documentary film commission to study how the Ministry could help defray the rising costs of documentary film production and finance more educational documentaries for schools.98 The new education

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minister, Jean Zay, completely conquered by the idea of educational film, managed to write nearly 400,000F into the 1938 budget to further the financing of new projection equipment. Because the Popular Front government was so short-lived, however, none of these grand plans had time to come to fruition.99 The centralized office that Benoit-Lévy had been calling for since 1929 never materialized. While much of the funding for program expansion may have dried up after 1930, the regional film initiatives continued to flourish. In 1935, Union française des offices du cinéma éducateur laïque (UFOCEL) established an official journal, the Revue du Cinéma Éducateur, to promote their cause.100 Joseph Brenier, President of the Ligue française de l’enseignement, in his speech to the national meeting on June 8, 1935, reminded the members that in ten years, 28 regional film offices and 40 departmental film depots had been created, including one in Ajaccio and one in Algiers, all working with the Musée Pédagogique. He estimated at 100,000 per year the number of screenings that the network organized throughout France, for schoolchildren and the general public.101 Despite the fact that many of its screenings were still silent, Cauvin’s Lyon office reported 11,200 screenings in 1937 and 11,425 in 1938, and he continued to receive enthusiastic letters from subscribers.102 Three mobile cinemas continued to function out of the office to bring film programs to small towns that did not have the funds for their own projector. Because of the success of the network in the Lyon region, many associations were using it to circulate their public service messages.103 Some of the school programs were actually making money. At a school in the Drôme, the profits from the educational cinema were used to create a summer camp on the Riviera for underprivileged children of the town. In Vaulx-en-Velin, the revenue funded milk for school lunches. In Saint-Pierre-de-Vaise, the primary school was able to pay for the installation of a shower in the school from their film profits.104 By the eve of the Second World War, documentary film was a topic of interest across many levels of government. The regional film offices had proven to be vigorous nongovernmental partners, and by 1939 they managed a large part of the various ministerial film collections and received annual subsidies, albeit smaller each year, from the Ministry of Education.105 The Ministry of Agriculture’s film program continued to see budgets and results throughout the 1930s. New film experiments continued to emerge. The French Navy, for example, began a film program in 1936, for the purposes of entertainment and instruction of the troops. By 1939, every French battleship had a sound cinema on board,

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and film libraries were organized in the ports to allow films to circulate.106 Expansion of educational film into the French empire, as will be seen in Chapter 4, continued through the decade of the 1930s.

Conclusion It is clear that the French contribution to the history of documentary film began long before the Second World War. The French government played an early and innovative role in the development of the medium. It exercised this role through various programs that encouraged the production and circulation of various forms of advocacy cinema, and private and regional actors came to support it in this role. The result of these public and private efforts was that documentary film came to play a far greater role in the circulation of ideas throughout France and the French empire than has previously been acknowledged. New niches for documentary film appeared in commercial cinemas, which were concentrated in and around centers of population. Non-commercial film programs created additional spaces for documentary film to flourish, primarily in rural areas. The expansion of both types of film venues caused changes in patterns of leisure, as filmgoing became a more widespread activity, not only in urban France but in rural France and also in the colonies. For the first time in its history, documentary film was able to reach a broad and diverse audience, and what was said in documentary films must therefore be taken seriously. The following chapters look at four episodes of this story in more detail. In Chapter 3, a governmental ministry sends films out to improve life in rural France. In Chapter 4, another ministry sends films out to educate inhabitants of the French empire. In Chapter 5, images of rural France are projected to visitors to an urban World’s Fair. And in Chapter 6, images of colonial France captivate inhabitants of the Hexagon. These episodes, which intertwine at various points, tell a story of a nation re-imagining itself on screen. This story, which was constructed one frame at a time, spread slowly, one viewer at a time. The following chapters attempt to make sense of what happened in the shimmering spaces of light and dark between those frames and those viewers.

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Chapter 3

The Revolt of the Beets: Educational Film in Rural France*

The cinema is an instrument of cultivation; only, instead of cultivating the product, it cultivates the producer.1 —Ministry of Agriculture, 1930

One Sunday evening in the month of November 1926, in Us, a village of 677 inhabitants about twenty miles outside Paris, the new cinema was bustling with activity. Monsieur Obert, the mayor, was tired. This was his fourth screening of the day, and he ran the projector and gave a short commentary at the beginning of each film on the program. Usually, his programs consisted of one or two short documentaries on any subject from geography to cattle raising, followed by a short comic and the feature presentation. That night, the feature that had drawn such a crowd was La croisière noire (The Black Journey), the chronicle of the famous Citroën voyage across the African continent. First, though, the audience would watch La révolte des betteraves (The Revolt of the Beets)—a cartoon about a farmer whose beets rebel because he neglected to add potash to the soil—and La vie dans un village moderne (Life in a Modern Village)— a short film portraying an ideal village where electric lamps burn brightly, air is clean, and people live happily, far from the dangers of the crowded cities. Monsieur Obert’s film screening was representative of a phenomenon that spread all across France during the difficult years after the First World War. The cinema had come to the country. By 1938, at least a third of the communes rurales in France were equipped for film projection.2 Typically, the setup consisted of a film projector that was brought out every other week for an evening of cinema in a town hall, community center, bar or café. Generally in use for six to eight months each year,

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these non-commercial “cinemas” provided entertainment and education for the inhabitants of thousands of farms and villages across the nation.3 The inclusion of films such as The Revolt of the Beets and Life in a Modern Village on Obert’s program indirectly explains how rural cinema became so widespread in France during the interwar years. These educational films were part of the Ministry of Agriculture’s collection that was distributed free of charge and often managed by the Offices régionaux du cinéma éducateur. The Ministry also played a pivotal role in funding the purchase of film projectors for small villages that had no other access to cinema. While the broader cinéma éducateur movement was aimed at both urban and rural audiences, the Ministry of Agriculture’s film initiative primarily targeted people whose livelihood depended on farming, as well as other inhabitants of France’s smallest towns and villages.4 The films and documents that comprise this program constitute a rich source both for cultural historians and film historians for several important reasons.5 First, they represent attempts by policymakers to bring the inhabitants of rural France into a broader project of national regeneration and renewal. As such, they provide a privileged view of Parisian policymakers’ hopes and aspirations for rural France. Second, responses to the program provide specific detail on who those audiences were and how they felt about being addressed in this way. Third, the extensive statistical information that is available on this program reveals the extent of its reach into the French countryside, allowing for the construction of a solid argument about changing patterns of leisure in French villages. A corollary of this argument is that film audiences were not, as most film historians have assumed, exclusively urban dwellers during the early years of mass film attendance.6 Consequently, analyses of the circulation of ideas and information through film should also take these rural audiences into consideration. A more detailed look at this film program provides valuable insight into the roots of documentary filmmaking in France. This chapter argues that the agricultural film program constitutes a unique cultural response to the “rural exodus” facing interwar France. There were many political and economic arguments in favor of maintaining a large farming population; the theory of the “balanced society” dominated state agricultural policy throughout the interwar years. In this view, an industrial nation can only develop successfully if it maintains a large number of landowning farmers who serve as a buffer against the crises of industrialization.7 Conservative proponents of this theory

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viewed the rural population as a stable force that would counterbalance the dangers of revolution among the urban proletariat, while Socialists defended the small farmer alongside the worker threatened by the perils of capitalism.8 But in both the economic and the political spheres, French farmers faced serious problems. Economically, they were squeezed harder and harder by falling farm prices. Politically, farmers felt underrepresented in Paris. They felt betrayed by government policies aimed at combating “la vie chère” in the cities. Very few deputies were farmers, and they felt as though neither the Left nor the Right fully represented their interests.9 Nonetheless, policymakers continued to seek incentives for farmers to stay on the family farm while improving its productivity and overall living conditions.10 The doctrine of the balanced society that extolled the virtues of the family farm continued, and may have even intensified, through the decade of the 1930s as a response to the Depression.11 These political and economic aspects of the “crises of French agriculture,” as Robert Paxton has written, were linked to a third aspect, a cultural and even an emotional one. Whole segments of rural France were emptying out. Villages were becoming ghost towns. Local bakeries were closing, replaced only by a drop-off point for bread that was baked elsewhere.12 Accompanying this process was a general feeling of sadness that rural life was vanishing, and that no one in Paris cared enough to stop the hemorrhage.13 The disproportionately high losses suffered by farmers and farmland during the war made this inaction seem like even more of an affront.14 In their own somewhat awkward way, the state officials involved in the film program understood this emotional aspect of the exodus and attempted to tap into it. Their films did promote economic changes, such as modern fertilizers and mechanization, but they did so through arguments that were also sentimental. Parisian bureaucrats tried to convince farmers that if only they adopted certain improvements, they would not only be more prosperous and more comfortable but also happier. The films appealed to the farmers’ sense of local pride and tried to connect it to a positive view of their place in the nation. As will become apparent, the Ministry of Agriculture mostly got it wrong. An extensive survey conducted in 1930 provides a rare glimpse into the interests of audiences from this period. Response to the State’s program of “acculturation to the nation” through film was tepid. Farmers and villagers alike remained suspicious of rhetoric funneled to them through centralized channels. The agricultural propaganda had

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limited effects. However, the program’s contribution to the distribution of all kinds of cinema, to areas not served by commercial theaters, made a significant if unintentional contribution to changing life in the French countryside.

The Agricultural Film Initiative: Goals and Intentions The goals of the agricultural film program were always grandiose. The first private screening of agricultural film was in 1920, when the Minister of Agriculture, J.H. Ricard, organized a session in the auditorium of the Agricultural College in Paris.15 During this meeting, he expressed a grand vision of the social impact of agricultural film: If we commit ourselves boldly to this path, and if we produce films that are accessible to everyone who will see them on the screen, in ten years cinema will be celebrated by millions of farmers, men, women, and children who will reap pleasure and benefit from these showings in which the useful and the pleasurable will be harmoniously combined.16 Ricard’s vision was to promote the distribution of film throughout rural France and to encourage the spread of films dealing specifically with agricultural subjects. In 1920, when Ricard advanced his proposal for an agricultural film program, there were no “agricultural films” available in France. Ricard organized a script contest, in which 25 screenwriters participated, and the first agricultural film was produced in the next year.17 It was not until 1923, however, that the necessary funds to launch the program were approved: half a million francs for the first year, in the larger context of the budget for after-school agricultural education funded by the Ministry. In 1924, the Ministry instituted the Permanent Commission for Agricultural Cinema, including representatives from the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, representatives of the Ministry, directors of agricultural schools and regional agricultural services, educational film producers, and members of the press. The commission had three tasks: to build a collection of commercially available films, to underwrite new films according to the Ministry’s specifications, and to subsidize the purchase of film projectors for qualified community groups so that films could actually be shown. These groups included regional agricultural

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services, agricultural schools, and schools and town offices in rural communities. Ricard quickly pushed the plan into action. By 1924, the collection contained 134 different titles, and production rose sharply over the 1920s and more slowly over the next decade.18 By 1939, over 5,000 copies of the Ministry’s films were in circulation.19 The Ministry had subsidized the purchase of 1,842 projectors by 1930,20 2,287 by 1932 and probably more by the end of the decade.21 Typically, the Ministry subsidized about one-third of the cost of the projector, leaving communities to come up with the rest of the money privately or through other government subsidies. The Cinémathèque centrale agricole in Paris coordinated the film collection and circulated the prints through a network of regional offices to save the costs of extensive shipping to and from the capital. The Ministry published a yearly catalogue describing its collections, all of which could be borrowed at no cost to the user. Loan figures from the program show a consistent rise: 725 loans in the first year grew to 11,560 in 1935, with demand always outstripping availability by at least two to one.22 Film loans not only supplied the two to three thousand projectors funded by the Ministry; they were also available to users of the some ten thousand other non-commercial cinemas that were distributed throughout rural France.23 The texts surrounding the promotion of agricultural film contain a discourse of universal humanism that hardly camouflages the economic and nationalist goals of the project. The introduction to the Ministry’s 1931 film catalogue proclaims a universal, internationalist spirit: Agricultural cinema fosters interest in observation and research, a love for the truth, the spirit of initiative and of achievement. Taking us instantly to the most distant lands, it allows us to participate in the life of all peoples, in their work, in their joys, sometimes in their sorrows. It encourages men to know one another better, to love each other more, or at least, to learn to get along.24 This internationalist discourse attempts to align the agricultural film project with the broader movement in educational cinema that was primarily supported by politicians on the center-left and by pacifist and militantly anticlerical schoolteachers. Such lip service to international ideals was necessary because the success of agricultural film depended heavily on its users—the same local mayors, schoolteachers, and directors

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of agricultural services that supported other types of educational film. However, in the same catalogue, the national and ruralist agenda is explicit: Agricultural cinema is an intensive campaign to promote rural careers and the industrial, independent, or commercial professions that are linked to them. [. . .] We need to orient athletic, intelligent, active, selfstarting young people and adults towards agricultural occupations— which, if properly understood, remain the most stable, the healthiest, the most interesting from all points of view. [We need to attract people] who wish, for themselves and their families, a happy life, and who are less and less able to find ways to satisfy their legitimate aspirations in large cities.25 Despite its introduction that promotes universalism and humanism, the content of the Ministry’s collections clearly shows that the primary focus was national and productivist: 60 percent of the films in the collection are specifically devoted to improved farming methods in France, the balance of the collection deals with improving life in the French countryside, and only a handful of titles about farming techniques in the colonies provide any kind of window onto the outside world. Improving farming methods and living conditions to combat rural outmigration were the key elements in a strategy aimed at increasing national productivity while maintaining the basic structure of the family farm. As did the modernized images of French farmers presented at the 1937 Exhibition analyzed by Shanny Peer, the films transformed an old image into a new one: the farmer was no longer a rude, backward paysan, but a modern, professional agriculteur.26 This transformation could be achieved, the narrators claimed, through fertilizer and pesticide use, mechanization, seed selection, improved drainage systems, better hygiene in farm facilities, and cultivation of previously unusable land. The idea of transformation is specifically emphasized by the narrative structure of the films, many of which set up a Manichaean view of the “wrong” and the “right” way to farm, synonymous with the old and new orders.

The Agricultural Films The Ministry commissioned a great majority of the films in its collection from the Édition française cinématographique. This company, founded

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and run by Jean Benoit-Lévy, produced customized advocacy films for public and private organizations. A lifelong friend of the British Socialist filmmaker John Grierson, Benoit-Lévy believed passionately, as did Grierson, that cinema had a social mission. It is likely that he influenced Grierson in the conviction that documentary film—as the antidote to commercial cinema—was the ideal medium for carrying out this mission.27 Benoit-Lévy, however, was far more interested in his audiences than were most filmmakers of the time, as his very mission depended on their reaction. For 25 years, he kept a notebook recording the effect of his films on viewers. When his film La future maman (The Future Mommy) was shown to 2,000 female workers in a factory in Northern France, for example, the factory owner conducted a questionnaire asking the women to record their responses. Benoit-Lévy reproduces the results, including some of the reactions verbatim, in the treatise on cinema he wrote during the Second World War. He describes another audience as “a crowd that, in the light, appears vulgar and brutal in the smoke of the men and the chatter of the women, but reveals in the darkness a collective soul of marvelous subtlety.” It was his faith in the ability of cinema to influence this crowd that informed his life’s work, summarized in the following passage: “Like a magic parchment, the cinema, by the strength of its luminous rays, will radiate into the world ideas of justice, liberty, and fraternity that will allow men to live in a better world, more favorable to the free development of the Mind.”28 One of the films Jean Benoit-Lévy made for the Ministry of Agriculture, La bonne méthode (The Correct Method), provides a representative example of the progressive discourse the Ministry wanted to promote.29 As in many titles in the collection, the argument is presented first in national terms: the film opens with a map of France, “a great agricultural country,” with comparative statistics showing France’s small harvests per acre as compared to those of Belgium and Germany (Figure 3.1). It then takes us to the “coquette commune” of Blémy, in an unspecified region of France, where the hardworking farmers, despite their efforts, have not adopted modern fertilization techniques and suffer from meager harvests. One unfortunate fellow, Gaspard, deserts his land for the city, where the pollution, traffic, and stress soon drive him back to the village. He and his friend Jean take courses at the agricultural school in winter, where they learn important lessons about la bonne méthode. The techniques they learn include adding nitrogen to the soil, founding an agricultural cooperative, and using electricity. Jean’s father, Magloire,

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Figure 3.1 A map in La bonne méthode (The Correct Method, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 1926) shows France, “a great agricultural country,” with small harvests per acre as compared to those of Belgium and Germany. Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Liliane Jolivet.

has a dream in which the goddess Ceres appears, driving a “chariot of agricultural progress,” and she takes him to visit a factory that produces fertilizers and experiments with seed selection (Figure 3.2). Enlightened by the dream, the rejuvenated Magloire and his friends decide to bring agricultural progress to their village. The harvests increase, personal fortunes rise, and “those who had thought they could find their fortune elsewhere return to the village.” Magloire becomes a local hero, and he now drives around in an automobile. Indirectly, his success contributes to the overall prosperity of the French nation, and his role thus appears vital in a broad national project. Moreover, he is happy. One sequence depicts him smiling with his neighbors over a shared glass of wine. The film uses various narrative devices to emphasize its central message that rural life can be improved but should not be abandoned. In the dream sequence, Ceres appears as a cartoon figure drawn over the real footage of the factory, emphasizing the fact that the fantasy of an improved future can become reality. Cartoon sequences emphasize the

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Figure 3.2 In Jean Benoit-Lévy’s La bonne méthode (The Correct Method, 1926) the goddess Ceres appears to Magloire in a dream and takes him for a ride in her “chariot of agricultural progress.” Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Liliane Jolivet.

statistics in the film, such as the different production levels of different countries. Cartoon plants fed with cartoon fertilizer make remarkable progress in their growth. In addition to the use of these drawings to portray change, fast-motion sequences dramatize the unhealthiness of the city. Cars, buses, and pedestrians appear to scuttle around in meaningless and repetitive patterns. One urban sequence is even played backwards, making a further comment on the absurdity and unhealthiness of urban life. While The Correct Method advances a general argument against city life and in favor of agricultural modernization as the correct road to a balanced national economy, some of the Ministry’s films encourage a specific practice or technique. The Revolt of the Beets, for example, targets the use of potash to improve soil quality. In this eight-minute cartoon, two farmers, one short, fat, and smart, and the other tall, thin, and stupid, meet on a road to discuss their beet crop. The slower farmer applies only cow manure to his beets, whereas the smart farmer adds fertilizer. That night, the stupid farmer, after reading in an agricultural

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newsletter the headline: “NO FERTILIZER NO BEETS,” has a nightmare. The beets out in the field develop eyes and ears and one of them climbs out of its hole proclaiming: “I’m hungry!” A delegation of beets starts walking down the road, past a signpost indicating “PROGRESS,” and they visit the neighbor’s field. “Why is everyone so fat here?” the beets ask. “POTASH,” is the response (Figure 3.3). The hungry beets, now indignant at this unfair treatment, organize a march on the farmer’s house; they carry placards that say “POTASH OR DEATH!” The poor farmer, awakened by the image of hungry beets jumping up and down on his chest, quickly orders the proper treatment for his fields and, we are to suppose, he and the beets live happily ever after.30 The film imitates the style of comics of the time, with a clear villain (the bad farmer) and hero (the poor oppressed beets). The beets are genuinely comic characters, with their wacky facial expressions, tufted heads, and interest in the value of collective action. The humor serves to engage the audience while delivering a sobering message: you could be starving your crops if you are not adding the appropriate nutrients to

Figure 3.3 In La révolte des betteraves (The Revolt of the Beets, Albert Mourlan, 1925), the hungry beets revolt and march on the farmer’s house, demanding fertilizer. Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Véronique Mourlan.

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your soil. Like the farmer in the film, you can follow a few simple steps to an improved harvest. As in The Correct Method, this film also emphasizes the power of individual initiative (in this case in the guise of the farmer’s own conscience) to make the necessary changes. While primarily focused on farming techniques, the agricultural film collection also contained a significant number of titles devoted to more general improvements in rural living conditions, including the use of electricity in the home, greater attention to health and hygiene both in the home and on the farm, and “modernized” care of infants aimed at reducing infant mortality. As in the specifically agricultural titles, these films present various choices in terms of a simplified dialectic between right and wrong that is part of a larger national picture. The cartoon La tuberculose menace tout le monde (Tuberculosis Threatens Everyone) provides a representative example of this kind of dialectical structure. Scarcely two minutes long, this short cartoon functions on a simple dichotomy: rural=healthy vs urban=unhealthy. The “unhealthy” lifestyles of the city— Jenny the worker, Coupeau the drunkard, Job the pauper, and Fernand the dandy—are compared to the “healthy” country dwellers. The characters are set up like targets in a shooting gallery at a fair; and Death, a walking skeleton, comes along to play the “Massacre Game” (Figure 3.4). Death easily shoots down the overworked Jenny, drunken Coupeau, hungry Job, and Fernand, who must have a venereal disease. City life is characterized by various forms of excess. The “healthy” sailors, farmers, and sportsmen, however, resist valiantly when Death tries to shoot them. At the end, the good doctor, with his rotund belly, his cigar, and his rumpled tweed suit, comes along to explain the moral of the story: that avoiding tuberculosis involves avoidance of the city and its attendant evils. In presenting Death as the result of the wrong choice, the film brings into play a national question, that of the demographic future of France. This concern, brought on by the carnage of the war, continued to haunt the nation throughout the interwar period, and it appears in many of these films as an argument in favor of good hygiene. These films often rely on the figure of the outside “expert” to deliver their didactic punch, such as the figure of the doctor in the cartoon above. Similar techniques recur in support of other types of hygienic practice. Le bon et le mauvais laitier (The Good and the Bad Dairyman), another film by Jean Benoit-Lévy, contrasts a farm with poor hygiene standards in milk production to a conscientiously run farm with regular animal testing, regular cleaning of the cows and the stables, immediate refrigeration of the milk, and personal hygiene of farm workers.31

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Figure 3.4 In La tuberculose menace tout le monde (Tuberculosis Threatens Everyone, Robert Lortac, 1917), Death, a walking skeleton, knocks down unhealthy city dwellers (Coupeau the drunkard, Jenny who works too hard, Fernand the partier) in the “Massacre Game” at the fair. Courtesy Gaumont-Pathé archives.

The “expert” appears in the figure of the health inspector. When he comes to visit the bad dairyman, “he reproaches him for his brutality, his dirty byre, and his filthy animals.” The good dairyman, upon a visit from the inspector, receives high praise. “The inspector examines the individual files for each animal, which show the milk production, fat content, weight and temperature,” measured daily. Colors reinforce the obvious dichotomy: the good dairyman wears a clean white coat and washes everything down in bleach, whereas the bad farmer wears a rumpled black sweater and wipes his hands on the cows before milking. At the end, the consequences of these actions appear, again in national terms. A baby fed on the good milk prospers, whereas the bad milk brings babies sickness and death. In The Future Mommy, which encourages proper care of newborns, the demographic argument is even more explicit.32 Mabu, an aging midwife in the village, personifies the “old” methods. Young Margot, the spokesperson for the “new” methods, shows that Mabu’s views are preposterous

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and outdated. As yet too young to have children herself, Margot has learned all about infant care from the “experts”: the doctor and the schoolteacher in the village. The film is organized into six lessons. Each lesson begins with a quotation from a doctor on an aspect of infant care. In the opening sequence, a member of the older generation, usually Mabu, begins to do something to the baby that represents the “old ideas.” In one lesson, for example, she goes to kiss the baby. “Oh! Mabu!” exclaims Margot. “You aren’t thinking about germs! You must never kiss a baby!” She goes on to present her “modern” knowledge about subjects such as disease transmission, sterilization, and baby weight monitoring. At the end of the film, Mabu concedes, “My dear girl, you have converted the driveling old fool that I was! Education is wonderful!” As in the previous example, the final buttress of the argument is the demographic and national one. A quotation from Professor Léon Bernard, from the Paris Medical School, reads: “All of the problems France currently faces have one cause alone: the insufficient number of French people. Let us save our children!” (Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5 “If I had only known!” A distraught mother who has not followed the proper rules for infant care, shown in La future maman (The Future Mommy, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 1925). Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Liliane Jolivet.

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The demographic message, framed in terms of the old replaced by the new, is even less subtle in a film entitled Les deux méthodes (The Two Methods).33 This cartoon juxtaposes the lives of two women, one of whom listens to “good advisors,” the other to “a bad advisor,” an old woman. The old woman tells the younger one to “stuff her child like a goose,” feeding her soup and eggs at the age of six months. An intelligent man, saying that “only ostriches can swallow stones and digest them,” tells her that her baby needs only milk. The mother who follows the old method of feeding solid food loses her baby to malnutrition at the end of the film. Yet one more baby is lost to the French nation. In all of these films, the path towards prosperity is presented as a dichotomy between outdated practices and modern science. Rather than simply explaining the new methods, the films emphasize individual choice by showing the consequences of different choices and clearly favoring certain paths over others. Both the choice of following in the footsteps of traditional agriculture and that of leaving the farm for an urban center are rejected in favor of the only viable option: that of modernizing the family farm. Not only could film show the results of different decisions in a more tangible way than before, it could also encourage rural dwellers to understand their world in terms of its role in a broader national narrative. Through the use of special effects such as dream sequences, microcinematography, and slow- and fast-motion techniques, the films suggested that new worlds of possibility existed right on the farm, in the soil directly underfoot. By couching these new possibilities in national terms, they encouraged farmers to resist the impulse to seek their fortune elsewhere, both for their own sake and also for the benefit of France. They thus urged rural viewers to see themselves as vital to the future of the nation.

Responses from Rural Audiences Despite the effort and creativity expended in the use of film, loan statistics began to show that viewer preferences did not precisely match the project goals. Many of the high-budget propaganda films that the Ministry had commissioned never left the shelves, while the most popular films were “exotic” documentaries about the colonies and entertainment films that had very little to do with the mechanics of farming. This observation led the members of the commission, prompted by regional agricultural directors closer to the implementation of the project, to

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question the effectiveness of a program that advocated a centralized and didactic approach to the modernization of French farms.34 In 1929, the National Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture wrote to the permanent commission on agricultural cinema, expressing some of these doubts: We are shoemakers who have never worn the shoes we have made, cooks who have never tasted our own cuisine. It is not possible for us, even with the best will in the world and the liveliest perspicacity, to put ourselves in the place of the viewers for whom these films are destined. We do not have their mentality and we do not know their manner of appreciation. I think, therefore, that it would be useful to open an investigation that might enlighten us in this matter.35 In response to this concern, the commission sent out a survey in 1930, to which over two hundred rural film users responded. The survey asked the following questions: 1. Have the rural populations in your region developed a taste for cinema? 2. How many screenings did you organize for the public during the 1929–30 season? Do you plan on expanding the number? 3. Where are the films shown (town hall, school, etc). 4. How many people attended the sessions, on average (please indicate numbers of men, women, and children). 5. What times of day and what season of the year are best for film screenings? 6. Which programs had the most success, and why? 7. Which programs had the least success, and why? 8. Among the films from the Ministry of Agriculture’s collection, [. . .] which films were the most popular? Why? 9. Which were the least popular? Why? 10. What is the optimum length for an agricultural, scientific, or documentary film? 11. [. . .] Should the films be purely didactic, or should they contain an element of entertainment (plot, special effects, etc.)? 12. Do the viewers understand the cartoons and drawings that are used to explain certain phenomena that cannot be directly illustrated with the camera?

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13. Do special effects such as slow-motion, fast-motion, or microscopic cinematography add to the interest of the film? 14. Are the titles clear? Should they contain extensive information or only the essentials? 15. Should the films be accompanied by verbal commentary? 16. Are there subjects you would like to see included in the collection? 17. Should any of the current films be modified? 18. What type of projection equipment do you use? How many hours is it in service? 19. Is this projector satisfactory? 20. Any other observations about the effectiveness of the agricultural film program?36 The results of this survey sent a clear message about rural spectatorship to the Ministry of Agriculture. While interest in cinema was intense and enthusiastic, drawing anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of the local population on a given day, the content of the Ministry’s offerings was often of little interest to the viewers. The rural schoolteachers who wrote most of the responses to this survey indicated their own enthusiastic support for the project, relishing the opportunity to play the role of cultural mediator not just with schoolchildren, but also with adults. They admitted quite candidly, however, that often the programs sent by the Ministry did not correspond to audience expectations. The overwhelming criticism expressed was that the programs available through the Ministry were not complete: that is, they did not contain a documentary, short comic, feature, and newsreel. Short propaganda cartoons such as The Revolt of the Beets might stand in for the comic, but they could not sustain an entire evening of cinema. Coupled with a feature-length instructional film such as The Future Mommy, instead of a love story or a western, the whole evening might begin to seem quite dull. M. Hasmondon, public school teacher in Saint-Selve, in the Gironde, writes the following: We run the risk not only of not interesting the rural population, but of making them disgusted with cinema—you must (and urgently) give us access to complete programs (newsreels, documentaries, dramas and comedies). The rural dweller must be able to find in the country the same distractions that abound in the city. If we want to keep the farmers on their land, we must act immediately; just like children, they must be educated through entertainment.37

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This criticism was not unfounded, despite continued assertions by the Ministry of its support for the entertainment value of cinema. Ricard wrote, for example, in the industry magazine Le Cinéopse, “The recreational aspect of cinema is one of the reasons I fervently support its distribution in the villages. [. . .] For pity’s sake, [let us not have] purely pedagogical screenings, but a mixed program with ‘severe subjects’ embedded among dramas and comedies.”38 Ricard’s pleas notwithstanding, the Ministry consistently privileged didactic content over entertainment value when it came to building its collection. The only purely recreational films in the collection were 17 comedies from the early 1920s that had been donated by commercial companies that no longer had any use for them.39 These films were in such constant demand that they were in extremely poor condition. Additionally, the Ministry only lent out 700 meters of film at a time, while 2,500 meters were needed for a full evening of cinema.40 Although the catalogue explicitly encouraged users to complete their programs either with loans from other state film collections or with rentals from regional film offices or from commercial distributors, some users found the system either too complicated or too costly.41 This criticism of the program clearly shows that the rural audiences, like their urban counterparts, were more interested in the entertainment value of film than in its educational possibilities. A second criticism of the film project was that the rhetorical elements of the films that encouraged audiences to identify with the “good” characters in the films and ridicule the bad ones seemed to keep missing their mark. Rural audiences regarded these celebrations of their own lifestyles with a mixture of scorn and indifference, showing that François Garçon’s conclusion about Vichy propaganda during the Second World War was also true of agricultural propaganda between the wars: “On the screen,” writes Garçon, “the propaganda/entertainment graft never really took.”42 Sometimes the farmers disliked or ignored the films because the generic view of the “modernized rural” was too technical or too far from their experience to appear desirable. Often, the viewers complained that the films sent to a particular region portrayed methods of cultivating crops that were not even grown in that region. Sometimes the criticism was inverted: if a film showed a technique that was too familiar to the viewers, they would assume the role of experts, criticizing the poor technique of the demonstrator in a task they already knew how to perform.43 The broader message about farmers’ importance to

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the French nation seems to have been lost on most viewers, who were far more interested in specific details of agricultural life. In general, neither the idealization of the rural lifestyle nor the nationalist message satisfied an audience already suspicious of outsiders, poorly represented in Paris, and acutely aware that they were perceived as backward by the rest of the nation.44 Some of the respondents to the survey took great pains to explain to their superiors in Paris how the farmers thought and felt: The rhythm of rural life doesn’t have nearly the same pulsation as the city. [. . .] The farmer likes to think for a long time and in small doses about what he has seen. [. . .] The farmer thinks as slowly as he walks. But he has good sense. We need a real school for professional [filmmakers] who know and love the farmer’s soul, who would not ridicule him but would show him in a realistic or sentimental way the place he has in the Nation.45 This opinion that agricultural cinema is too packed with information is a common one among respondents; suggestions are made to limit the length of informational films as well as the number of subtitles that audiences are required to read. The director of agricultural services in the Yonne adds, “It is precisely this special psychology of the farmer that may present a serious obstacle to the progress we hoped for from the professional documentary film. Films are, for the farmer, artificial, invisible, mysterious. What he recognizes as real is in his field, not on the screen.”46 These criticisms of the film program by rural viewers do not indicate that French farmers had no interest in film. On the contrary, audiences overwhelmingly welcomed the idea of rural cinema. It was merely the Ministry of Agriculture’s representation of rural France that viewers found either objectionable or irrelevant. The permanent commission was wrong in imagining that people who had never been to the movies, if given the opportunity, would be pleased to watch anything at all. Audiences expressed a clear preference for fiction films and feature-length documentaries, particularly those with colonial subjects. Among the “favorites” that are listed by title are films such as Les industries arabes (Arab Industries), L’autruche (The Ostrich), La chasse à la baleine (Whale Hunting), La chasse à l’hippopotame (Hippopotamus Hunting), La chasse au bufle en Indochine (Buffalo Hunting in Indochina), Le caoutchouc en

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Indochine (Rubber in Indochina), and La culture du riz en Espagne (Rice Growing in Spain). In contrast to the prescriptive films about French agriculture mentioned above, which audiences often disliked because they felt the lessons did not apply to them, they found these nonprescriptive films about other countries to be informative and interesting. They also requested newsreels informing them of current events, such as those that were available in commercial cinemas. The criticisms show the extent to which the decision-makers in Paris were out of touch with the audiences they were trying to reach. The existence of this 1930 survey indicates that these decision-makers were aware of the problems with the film program and concerned about its real effectiveness. It indicates, moreover, that they were considering adapting their approach to the project to their viewers’ preferences, rather than relying on the top-down acculturation that had been their initial strategy. One of the strongest recommendations made in the report summarizing survey responses was to increase the number of fictional and recreational films in the collection. Another recommendation was to dispense entirely with the films about advances in scientific research, deemed by most viewers to be incomprehensible and dull, and to produce more films specifically adapted to agricultural practices in different regions.47 In the years that followed, however, the production end of the program slowed as the Depression hit and budgets for extra programs dwindled. The only tangible change in the catalogue’s offerings from 1930 to 1938 was the addition of a series entitled Variétés du Ministère de l’Agriculture. Numbering 47 by 1938, these Variétés were composed of outdated newsreels donated to the program by Éclair-Journal. Loan statistics indicate that they were hugely popular, even though they often arrived in the villages up to a year after the events shown had actually taken place; demand stayed consistently ahead of supply.48 The number of recreational films in the collection did not change between 1930 and 1939. Audience criticisms and budgetary constraints were not the only factors limiting the momentum of the film program after 1930. The arrival of sound film in France in 1930 posed an additional problem. Although the Ministry began to subsidize 16-mm sound projectors, the vast majority of users continued to use silent film throughout the 1930s, because the public collections contained mostly silent films. The continued use of silent film in the 1930s made what had been an impressively modern program appear archaic and outdated.

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Implications of the Film Program The agricultural film initiative constituted a cultural response to the crises of French agriculture that plagued the interwar period. In its encouragement of the modernization of agriculture through the individual initiative of farmers, the film program attempted to resolve the tension between modern methods and traditional structures that characterized French agricultural policy and in a broader sense, French cultural life, between the wars. The films present a harmonious blending of modernization and tradition, extolling the virtues of the peasantry and the healthy nature of the rural lifestyle while promoting updated farming techniques. The modernized vision of rural life improved by technology promoted in the Ministry of Agriculture’s film program paid little attention to regional specificity and ultimately lost the interest of its viewers. The rural exodus continued, and there is little evidence that the films had much impact on the Ministry’s specific goals. Given the ambitious scope and the logistical complexity of the program, it was nonetheless an extremely successful cultural phenomenon, especially in rural areas where no commercial cinemas existed to compete with the state-funded screenings. This program made a substantial contribution to the establishment of an infrastructure for commercial and non-commercial film distribution in rural France. Once in place, this infrastructure allowed the experience of film viewing to be shared by a far greater percentage of France’s population than has previously been acknowledged. Although providing entertainment in the villages was certainly part of the concept from the beginning, this consequence of the program exceeded the state’s original intentions. It was in part due to the success of this program that colonial administrators also turned to documentary film as a potential tool for improving health, hygiene, and public relations in the French colonies.

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Chapter 4

“Making the Fiction of the Empire a Reality”: Educational Film in the French Colonies

The attraction they are proposing must be a satanic seduction; otherwise, why did they choose the dark of night to present it? —Comments by the marabouts in Bandiagara, Mali, before the first projection of a film to them (1908)1

It is important, in order for the fiction of the empire to become reality, that métropole and colonies understand each other better. —Commission of the Haut comité méditerranéen charged with the study of Muslim cinema, March 21, 1939 2

The date is March 18, 1916. The setting is Saïda, a small town in the province of Oranie, in northwestern Algeria. The day is warm and clear. A broad awning juts out from the front of a simple school building, spreading an oblong of shade that measures thirty meters by seven. From the edges of this awning hang a series of tarpaulins that create makeshift walls. They have been covered with layers of stiff paint to enhance their ability to block out the strong Mediterranean sun. At one end of the long, darkened space sits an aging electric film projector, hooked up to a dynamo that is powered by an engine inside the school. At the other, a white sheet pinned to one of the tarpaulins serves as a screen. In between, rows of chairs bustle with activity: Algerian schoolchildren and their parents, French schoolteachers, and local notables are present for the triumphant reopening of the school film program that was put out of commission by a fire two years earlier. On the program, perhaps, is a newsreel showing the progress of the First World War; a colorized

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version of a geography film showing a region of France—the Doubs, the Creuse, or the Auvergne; then a scientific documentary about the steel industry or the French railroad system. A historical French costume drama caps the presentation.3 The screening ends and the audience is enthusiastic, complimenting the teachers on the ingenious home-grown installation and the excellence of the pedagogical mission. The film screenings will be repeated weekly until the end of the school year, despite various technical hiccups such as the demise of the dynamo in May. The word spreads across the Algerian school system. Following Saïda’s example, another program in Chellala gets underway in 1916 and schoolteachers in Frenda, Oran, Mascara, and Sidi-Bel-Abbès begin planning their own programs. Little more is known of the school film program in Saïda that a group of enterprising teachers started in the école indigène in 1912. In the first year, the sessions were held in a commercial cinema, rented for the purpose; twelve screenings were held for an average audience of 800 children. Later, however, because a fire destroyed the cinema, the teachers took the initiative of creating their own screening space under the school veranda. The whole project was financed by private funds obtained from organizations such as the Société de patronage de l’école d’indigènes and the Société de l’Art à l’école.4 The program continued through the academic year of 1916–17, and another set of programs was planned for 1917–18, when it attracted the attention of the Revue Pédagogique, a national publication with close ties to the French Ministry of Public Instruction. The importance of the film program in Saïda is that it shows an early attempt on the part of French civil servants, in this case local schoolteachers, to use documentary film in the larger project of “making the fiction of the empire a reality.” While one part of this project was to inform inhabitants of France that their empire existed, another part was to inform people living under French rule in the colonies that they were part of France. This meant they were part of a great empire. The Saïda film project constitutes an early example of this attempt at nationalist propaganda in overseas France using film. The evidence as to what was actually shown in Saïda is scarce; however, according to an article in the Revue Pédagogique, the primary program focused on documentary films, and the overwhelming majority of these films were devoted to life in France.5 The geographical films primarily depicted the French regions, while the agricultural films showed French farming practices and the historical films were costume dramas set in

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eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. None of the titles mentioned is devoted to any aspect of Algeria. This distribution makes sense on several levels. The first, and most pragmatic, is that the organizers made use of films that were available to them, and the films easily available through French distribution circuits were focused primarily on France. In addition, Algeria was neither a colony nor a protectorate, but was divided into French departments, and its school system was based more closely on metropolitan models than were the schools in other parts of overseas France. Finally, the film distribution in the Saïda program also indicates the extent to which the educational film program was designed to inculcate a French national consciousness into the local populations in Algeria. Teaching French republican values, such as the education of women, was part of this project. The inspector of primary instruction who wrote the report was particularly proud of the outreach to local adult women that the film program provided, through film screenings exclusively reserved for female audiences. For these people, who are forbidden to attend the public cinema, the school is a friendly house, where their children are raised, and where they feel at home. They have discovered, in their otherwise singularly closed existence, a form of entertainment that has opened up to them things, people, a whole civilization that without the school cinema, they never would have glimpsed.6 The teachers in Saïda were pioneers in the use of film in schools in overseas France and early precursors of what would become an institutional interest in educational cinema in Algeria similar to that in metropolitan France. In 1917, the program was still fairly new, and the results did not yet meet the expectations of the schoolteachers who had worked so hard for it, drawing on their “active faith” in modern pedagogical methods. However, the program does demonstrate an attempt to teach Algerian adults and children about their place in the French nation and the values (such as women’s education) that the nation upheld.7 This fundamentally nationalist project would motivate film programs in other parts of the French empire as well. The existing scholarship on the use of educational film in imperial enterprises has consistently overlooked the early and active role the French government played in this area. Generally, the British are credited as the earliest colonial government to take an interest in pedagogical film in their colonies.8 Manthia Diawara even goes so far as to state

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that “unlike the British and the Belgians, [. . .] the French had no policy of producing films that were especially intended for their subjects in Africa. [. . .] France was indifferent to the state of cinema in the colonies.”9 To the contrary, the French took a lively interest in educational film in their colonies and overseas departments.10 By 1927, Algeria would even have an Office régional du cinéma éducateur, based on the French system and financed by the Governor General of Algeria and the city of Algiers. The office was successful and its lending statistics indicate a strong increase in interest in its programs between 1927 and 1932.11 The office was active in providing film programs for schools, hospitals, child care classes, social hygiene courses at the university, and hygiene campaigns in Algiers and other cities in Algeria.12 By 1932, the office had 400 borrowers, primarily in urban areas, and claimed robust audiences.13 Film programs such as that in Saïda, as well as the regional office in Algiers, provide evidence that interest in the positive social value of documentary film during the interwar years was not limited to metropolitan France, but also extended overseas. This interest was based on a growing need to convince colonized people that their status as subjects of the French nation was advantageous to them. It spread to many other areas of the empire over the course of the interwar years. While film programs in Algeria and other parts of the empire were less extensive and more limited in scope than those in France, the interest in these programs on the part of local officials and their metropolitan correspondents provides an intimate view of the outlines of a changing colonial relationship. This changing relationship is articulated through documents and films that posit colonized peoples as real or potential film audiences. Understanding the colonial relationship as an integral part of the history of republican France, rather than as a separate story, has been an important focus of French colonial scholarship for the past fifteen years. Important works by Frederick Cooper, Ann Stoler, and Alice Conklin have opened paths for recent books such as Gary Wilder’s The French Imperial Nation-State and Eric Jenning’s Vichy in the Tropics, as well as for Harry Gamble’s comparative work on education in France and West Africa and on “colonial regionalism” at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.14 The cultural aspects of this relationship have also been of particular interest to scholars in recent years. In the field of visual culture, however, much of the emphasis has been placed on images of colonized peoples and places aimed at promoting

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the empire in the métropole rather than on those that were destined for distribution in the colonies.15 This chapter examines the philosophy and practice of film education in overseas France, including Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, West and Central Africa, French Indochina, and the French Caribbean. It will demonstrate some important parallels with the film education projects in metropolitan France discussed in the previous chapter.16 Officials involved in the projects had similar hopes and aspirations for cinema, and they also shared similar fears. The contours of these hopes and fears shifted in similar ways along parallel time lines. Looking at the colonial projects through this lens, I believe, sheds light on the extent to which changing understandings of metropolitan, and particularly rural, France helped to shape the colonial endeavor. In contrast to the images of empire and imperial subjects produced and distributed in the métropole, which many scholars have argued emphasized the alterity and exoticism of colonized peoples, the films that were sent out to the colonies for local consumption tell a different story. Their story speaks of perceptions of people under French rule as in many ways similar to French people. As French colonial authorities think about using film as a tool of empire, they imagine their audiences not as a blank slate onto which the story of France could be written, but as thinking subjects with a culture and a history of their own. Convincing them that supporting the French empire was beneficial to them would involve framing this as an individual choice, in terms quite similar, it turns out, to rhetorical strategies that were used to convince French farmers, for example, of the benefits of agricultural modernization. Comments about film audiences from the early 1920s indicate a belief on the part of educators and administrators that colonized subjects were fundamentally similar to French people, and particularly to inhabitants of rural areas in France. Film programs for them, therefore, should be based on similar principles to film programs for French audiences. Over the course of the interwar years, however, and particularly around the critical moment of the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition, a perception of film audiences as fundamentally different from French viewers emerged and intensified. New concerns specific to the colonial context informed later decisions about the management of film in the colonies. While early arguments about film focused on its promotion for social purposes, later arguments focused more on censorship and control of cinema, for political reasons. This shift and the tensions it reveals is reflected in the polarized view of documentary—the “good” genre that educates—and commercial fiction film—the “bad” genre that entertains

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but can potentially corrupt. Concerns about commercial cinema and its audiences came to dominate the discourses about documentary film in the colonies over the 1930s. This shift reveals deeper concerns about the French colonial endeavor, the status of colonized subjects, and the role of these subjects in the French nation. This chapter will outline French interest in documentary film in the colonies, following a roughly chronological approach. It first demonstrates, through an analysis of early documentary film programs and assumptions about audiences, that current scholarship crediting the British with the earliest use of film as propaganda in the colonies needs to be revised to include French contributions. This section also demonstrates that early use of instructional film in the colonies was based on assumptions that audiences were fairly similar to target audiences in France for similar programs.17 Over the course of the 1920s, however, commercial cinemas began to develop in the colonies, and changing perceptions of audiences and new concerns about the influence of this new medium emerged. A second section charts this shift. In a third section, official responses to these changing perceptions, with films and proposals that sought to counter the deleterious influence of commercial cinema, reveal deep uncertainties about the ability of the French to control the loyalty of the populations under their rule. The common thread that reaches across the entire period is the deep conviction that documentary film possessed an almost mystical power to create ideas, and that if only it could be properly harnessed, the “fiction of the empire” could become a reality in the minds of both colonizer and colonized.

Educational Film in the British Colonies: A Brief Note Most scholarship on the use of film for colonial education focuses on British colonial Africa.18 Although they also make no mention of France, these studies provide important context for the French story, as the instructional film world was small, and many parallel ideas circulated among different nations. Instructional film was first introduced into British colonial Africa in Nigeria in the early 1920s, in the guise of a study by William Sellers of Africans’ abilities to comprehend film narrative. Sellers used his conclusions about African audiences in the subsequent production of 16 films that were projected in a health campaign aimed at fighting the plague and other diseases in Lagos over the next 13 years.19 A more broadly conceived program operated in East and

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Central Africa from 1935 to 1937 under the name “The Bantu Educational Film Experiment.” This latter program consisted of 35 informational films on agriculture and health, produced specifically for African audiences, that circulated throughout the British colonies. A particularly influential publication on British film education in the colonies was The African and the Cinema. In this report, L. A. Notcutt and G. C. Latham describe the Bantu Film Experiment in East Africa.20 Promoted by the International Missionary Council and co-sponsored by a collaborative association of public and private partners, this program introduced not only films, but film production, to British Africa.21 Using African actors, African production crews, and stories written specifically for African audiences, the program made approximately 35 short films in Kenya, Tanganyika Territory, and Uganda. They were shown in over 90 locations in Tanganyika Territory, Northern Rhodesia, Kenya, Nyasaland, and Uganda.22 Notcutt and Latham advance two primary arguments in favor of their project, both of which are germane to the French experience. The first is that because of the introduction of industries such as mining into colonized countries, and with the resulting population shifts towards industrial centers, the “social fabric of the African tribe” was being undermined by “the pace at which contact with western industrial life [was] moving.”23 Essentially, as J. Merle Davis states in the introduction, the fear was one of the cultural ramifications of uprooting Africans from their villages: “Bantu youth [. . .] tend to live in a world that is quite alien and unintelligible to the elders of their villages. The need for finding some means of bridging this gap and of explaining to the older men and women the new world and new ideas which are so rapidly advancing upon them is a major concern both of Missions and of Governments.”24 Overcoming the growing urban/rural cultural divide was a primary concern to the effort, as was providing some sort of recreation for Africans in the face of “the extreme barrenness of the recreational life of the African.”25 This loss of recreational activities, according to the authors, was in part the fault of the British: British administration has deprived the African of many of his old forms of amusement and something ought to be given him in their place. The cinema is a valuable means to this end. It may help to reconcile the younger Natives to life in the villages, and to check the drift to the towns and industrial centres which is fraught with so much danger to the life of the community.26

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It is, they argue, the responsibility of the administration to provide some new form of entertainment in place of the traditional activities that are disappearing. In reading Notcutt’s account, it quickly becomes clear that another concern was of even more primary importance in this experimental introduction of cinema to rural Africa. This was the fear of the effects of commercial cinema on local populations. Notcutt quotes Edward Thompson writing about India: “Already [commercial films have] left little respect for our (supposed) ways of living in the West. Now they are going to lead the Indian peasant into a new world; and his mind, largely untouched through millenniums, is going to be made over from top to bottom.” This is the bad example that can be countered in Africa, where cinema is still relatively unknown, by positive intervention on the part of governments to produce “constructive” films that will give a good impression of Western society. “There is no limit to the influence for good which this great force could wield,” writes Notcutt. “Censorship is useful and necessary, but at best it is a negative safeguard. The aim should be not merely to keep out undesirable films but to create and ensure a constant supply of good ones.” What is particularly significant about Notcutt’s argument is that it appears to invent the idea of documentary film as a social good that can be used to counter the potential social evils of commercial fiction film. This argument, as we have seen, began to circulate in France in the 1920s. The African and the Cinema was read in France and was of great interest to French authorities in the late 1930s, in part because its principal points were not new to the French.27 Creating a sense of loyalty to the colonizing nation, creating new leisure activities for colonized peoples, and combating the negative influences of commercial cinema through censorship and documentary film promotion—all of these ideas had been the subject of intense discussion in French colonial circles since the early 1920s.

Educational Film in the French Colonies: An Overview Discussion and interest in educational film for the colonies led to some concrete results over the interwar period. State film programs advanced more quickly in France’s overseas departments in Algeria, as well as in the provinces of French Indochina, partly because commercial cinemas expanded most rapidly in these areas. In other parts of the empire, such as the Caribbean islands, West and Central Africa, and Madagascar,

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interest in educational film was often far ahead of its actual implementation. The following overview of the progress of state initiatives in various regions of the French empire will demonstrate this uneven development. While the film program in Saïda, Algeria mentioned earlier in this chapter was a local initiative, the earliest example of a state-sponsored film program by the French government came just a few years later in 1916, with the Mission photo-cinématographique d’Indochine.28 Armed with film cameras as well as projectors, documentary films, and enormous mobile screens, the film mission to Indochina embodied the dual goal of spreading propaganda in Indochina and collecting images to be sent back to France. The expedition traveled across the three provinces of Vietnam, as well as in Cambodia and Laos, collecting film footage that could be used in documentary films promoting French Indochina in metropolitan France. The travelers also set up film screenings along the way in which they projected documentary films about France to the local populations. The films were projected on a large sheet of white cloth suspended from a portable bamboo frame measuring ten meters by four. Sometimes as many as five to ten thousand people attended each screening, which could be viewed from both sides of the screen.29 An “interpreter” with a megaphone explained the images to the audience. The films shown dealt with subjects such as French industry, harbors, schools, aviation, agriculture, art, and daily life in Paris and in the French countryside. During a ten-minute intermission, vendors circulated through the audience selling rice, tea, and fish.30 Over the course of this expedition, the camera operators also filmed sequences showing daily life in Indochinese villages that would be used for informational documentaries about Indochina designed with a French audience in mind. After the war, the Governor General decided to establish a permanent bureau that would be entirely responsible for the colony’s public relations, labeled the Service photo-cinématographique de l’Indochine. In 1924, the service was outsourced to a private company, the Société Indochine-Films. This company took on the dual task of producing films on Indochina for distribution in France, and of distributing propaganda films for the Governor General in towns and villages across the colony.31 Indochina was also the first colony to have an Agence économique, a bureau of the Ministry of Colonies that was responsible for promoting the colony in France. The agency soon became involved in film distribution, and from 1924 to 1927 alone it made 1,500 film loans.32 The Governor General of Indochina again created an in-house

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film service in 1927 that collected and lent films on the colony and also produced documentaries on the colony for export to the Agence économique in Paris.33 The film mission in Indochina was the brainchild of Albert Sarraut, the centrist Republican and leading figure of the Radical Party who served as Governor General of French Indochina from 1911 to 1914 and from 1916 to 1919 and who later became Minister of Colonies and Minister of the Interior several times during the interwar years.34 The new era in French colonialism announced by Sarraut in La mise en valeur des colonies françaises in 1920 depended on a future that would be “solidly built on the confidence, the affectionate respect, the interest, and the gratitude of the human masses whom we protect.”35 In other words, France’s colonial future would depend on winning the “hearts and minds” of people under French rule.36 According to Sarraut, education was a key element of this new push to win hearts and minds, and education via the image was an ideal medium for carrying out this plan.37 Sarraut was not alone in his belief in film as an important tool in the colonial endeavor. The Marshal Lyautey, who had a long and distinguished military career in the French colonies, and who in 1912 had been named to the highest colonial office, that of résident général, in France’s Moroccan protectorate, joined Sarraut in this conviction. Quoted in L’Oeuvre in 1923, he writes: Without a doubt, we may expect positive results from the use of film as an instrument of education for our protégés. Appropriate films will certainly leave in the mind of Moroccan natives lasting traces of the vitality, the strength, and the wealth of France, the perfection of its system of labor and of the products it makes, the beauty of its sites and its products. . . One may hope that this campaign will instill in them a feeling of admiration for France that will strengthen their confidence in us.38 Both men believed that not only should French citizens in France be educated about the colonies, but colonial subjects should also learn about France and its plans for improving their countries. During the interwar years, educational film was better developed in French Indochina than in any other region under French rule. In Vientiane, Laos, for example, a working commercial cinema was set up in 1919, and in a compromise with local authorities, the cinema offered free weekly projections of documentary films for schoolchildren

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in exchange for a rent-free locale for the paying movie theater. Despite ongoing financial difficulties and multiple bankruptcies, this initiative was still ongoing in 1932.39 In the province of Tonkin, cinema was used mainly in higher education; the university in Hanoi owned a film projector and a collection of films that it lent out to local secondary schools and normal schools. Also in Hanoi, commercial cinemas organized free matinees for schoolchildren whenever a documentary film was on the usual program. In Annam, three middle schools (Hué, Vinh, and Quinhon) were equipped for film projection in 1926 and rented documentary and recreational films from the Société Indochine-Films to show to their students; these programs continued to function in 1932.40 The province of Cochinchina had several functioning educational film programs during the 1920s (Bentre, Trudaumot, and Vinhlong, as well as one at the école primaire supérieure for girls and the normal school). Two of these programs were out of service by 1932 because of a lack of funding, but the program in the girls’ school continued to function, with four screenings a week, as did a program in Phu Lam.41 The patronage laïque cochinchinois, a private association that provided extracurricular activities for schoolchildren, which thanks to government subsidies had been extremely active in promoting educational cinema from 1922 to 1927—it purchased 13 film projectors and 840 films and had organized over 6,000 screenings all over Cochinchina—was no longer active in 1932 because it had lost its subsidies.42 The mission of informing local populations about France was foremost on the agenda for educational film in French Indochina. The Annam school programs were all documentary-based. The geography of France and the French empire was of primary importance; examples are Au bois de Vincennes (In the Vincennes Forest), Un coup d’œil sur l’Indochine française (French Indochina at a Glance), En Algérie (In Algeria), Les belles villes de France (France’s Beautiful Cities), and La vallée de la Dordogne (The Dordogne Valley) (Figure 4.1). The rest of the programs were filled out with geographical films on other parts of the world and diverse subjects such as Les petites inventions (Small Inventions) or Les ancêtres de la bicyclette (The Ancestors of the Bicycle).43 The patronage laïque functioned in a similar manner to the offices régionaux in France, encouraging support of the lay schools by organizing entertaining film programs that also included some documentary elements and, in particular, some hygiene films. One thousand of their screenings were specifically devoted to issues of hygiene.44

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Figure 4.1 A street scene in Hanoi, shown in Un coup d’œil sur l’Indochine française (French Indochina at a Glance, Pathé Revue, 1930). Courtesy GaumontPathé archives.

In other parts of the French empire, the interest in educational film programs often outweighed their practical consequences. Nonetheless, some programs were implemented during the interwar years. In French West Africa, a few programs were active in schools during the 1930s, particularly at the Dakar Naval Academy, the William Ponty School, the F.W.A. Medical School, several superior primary schools, and a few regional schools. Films came directly from the state film collections in France and were primarily focused on agriculture (European agricultural methods, French farms and farmers, modernization of agriculture) and hygiene (health clinics, malaria, sleeping sickness, and infant care).45 French documentaries were also shown in the over 30 commercial cinemas that were run by the Compagnie marocaine cinématographique, which otherwise mainly showed American fiction films. Programs in the colonies under French mandate, Togo and Cameroon, as well as in the colony of French Equatorial Africa, were more limited.

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In Togo, one school film program existed, at the regional school of Anecho, by 1932, and a similar program was planned for post-secondary education in Cameroon.46 By 1938, the École supérieure d’administration in Yaounde had three film projectors and a small local film collection consisting mainly of outdated French newsreels purchased from ÉclairJournal, as well as some French documentaries and a collection of silent comics.47 Two schools in French Equatorial Africa had active educational film programs in 1938.48 Educational film in the French islands was just beginning in 1939—La Réunion had just authorized the purchase of a projector, and nothing existed in Guadeloupe—with the exception of Martinique and Madagascar.49 In Martinique, the Lycée Schoelcher purchased a 35-mm silent projector and a collection of films in 1928, and its program continued to function throughout the 1930s. It was expanded with a traveling 16-mm sound projector in 1938 that made the rounds of the island’s schools, and funds were allocated for the expansion of the film collection in 1939.50 In Madagascar, an energetic schoolteacher ran an educational film program beginning in 1929 in the area of Tulear. He traveled 7,000 kilometers per year with a hand-crank Pathé-Enseignement film projector to visit 122 schools at all levels. His two silent programs, which he accompanied by commentary in the local language, consisted of two hygiene films, two documentaries showing France’s participation in the First World War, and one or two comic films.51 These fledgling film programs were all based on goals similar to the ones elucidated for Indochina earlier. First and foremost, educational cinema should promote France as a nation and as a civilizing power by “inform[ing] the native masses of the essential intentions of French colonization.”52 It could be of particular help in hygiene campaigns, which were central to the humanitarian part of the civilizing mission. If film could be used to convince local populations to improve practices such as infant care and disease control, the concrete results achieved should demonstrate that France had the best interest of these populations at heart and was therefore a benevolent presence. There are two explanations for the particular interest in educational cinema in Indochina as compared to other colonies. The first is Sarraut’s influence. From the beginning, Sarraut conceived of the Mission photocinématographique and the permanent service that followed it up as having a dual mission of propaganda abroad and education at home in the colony.53 The second is that Indochina was, with Algeria, the region of overseas France that had the most commercial cinemas.54 Indochina was

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therefore one of the few colonies in which the influence of commercial cinema on the minds of colonized people was a real, and not just a theoretical, cause for concern. It is with this in mind that I now turn to an analysis of shifting perceptions of film audiences in the colonies over the course of the interwar period.

Perceptions of Film Audiences Although the development of film programs in different parts of the empire varied because of budgetary and political circumstances, some common threads link colonial officials’ perceptions of film audiences across different regions of the empire. These common assumptions are closely tied to perceptions of audiences in France at the same time. Initially, colonial officials, like their counterparts at the Ministry of Agriculture, assumed that film had an almost magical power to leave lasting impressions on audience’s minds and therefore could easily convince them of anything the producer desired to say. The Service Photocinématographique in French Indochina, which reported directly to the French Governor General in the colony, provided early written confirmation of this view among colonial administrators. Its 1921 report states the need for propaganda films that would be specifically directed at local populations in the colony, and particularly at young elites, whom the author, Le Galley, characterizes as “future receptacles of propaganda.” These elites, he writes, “whose minds, still ardent and malleable, will better receive impressions [that will remain] when they enter into the ruling classes of their country.”55 Le Galley is very clear in his conception of the documentary medium as material that can be manipulated at will. To describe the propaganda process, he goes as far as to use the expression la poudre aux yeux, which means to dazzle someone, often by false appearances. Even though Le Galley demonstrates a strong belief in the ability of documentary film to convince and persuade audiences, he nonetheless makes it clear that propaganda films must be “camouflaged” and suggests that they might be “inserted insidiously in an ordinary program without being too obvious.”56 He suggests the distribution medium of traveling cinemas, or cinémas ambulants, as providing the perfect vehicle for the needed camouflage, proposing to their audiences an evening of film as a novelty in rural villages, with propaganda films slipped in as part of a larger entertainment program.

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A second early assumption that both metropolitan and colonial officials made was that if presented with a simple dichotomy, audiences would make the obvious correct choice. They structured their films to contrast individuals choosing the wrong path (usually adhering to traditional practices) with those who followed the advice of the central government and then reaped practical benefits in their own lives. This was a strategy also used by the Ministry of Agriculture in France for presenting films about agricultural modernization. As in films such as The Revolt of the Beets or The Correct Method, Le Galley proposes a form of docudrama, in which semi-fictional stories are used to convey the desired documentary truth. Historical subjects are one good source for these docudramas, because they allow historical figures to be “stylized to become legendary” and thus “sympathetic heroes whose merits reflect favorably on the country that produced them.”57 In this process, Le Galley employs rhetorical strategies contrasting the “bad” days of the past with the “good” days of the future that are defined by the new agricultural methods introduced by the French. The goal—convincing local populations that the central government will bring prosperity in the form of modernization—is expressed in terms of individual choice. Le Galley articulates this goal in terms of French intervention (“immixtion”) in Indochina. Goal: To anchor the following ideas in their brains: “Western intervention in our country is as old as the hills—my ancestors benefited from it, and it’s up to me to benefit as fully as I can.”58 In this passage, he clearly believes that when presented with a convincing argument, audiences will choose to support French rule because of the individual benefits they will gain. Le Galley’s 1921 report shows that the proposed expansion of educational film into rural areas in the French colonies flowed naturally from similar attempts to use film for social programs in rural France. The report demonstrates assumptions about film audiences of the immediate postwar years that closely paralleled those held by agricultural and educational administrators in France: what was needed were specially adapted films with simple arguments that would convince audiences of the immediate personal benefits new methods could bring. Furthermore, as in France, colonial officials believed that “propaganda” should be subtly cloaked in the guise of entertainment to avoid the risk of alienating the audience.

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The assumption that colonial audiences should be treated like French audiences, strong in the early 1920s, began to dissipate over the course of the decade as concerns over French rule became more pronounced. Nationalist movements in some areas of overseas France, and particularly in Algeria and French Indochina, were on the rise. In addition, commercial cinemas were introduced into some areas of the empire. These changing circumstances affected official discourse about cinema. While early programs placed a general emphasis on using documentary film to cultivate favorable impressions of the French colonizing presence, by the mid-1920s it became clear that the growing popularity of commercial cinema was a force to be reckoned with. Concerns about the negative social effects of commercial cinema, as we have seen, were also important in France; however, in the colonial context, these fears were heightened due to uneasiness about colonial control. The principal concerns about commercial cinema were twofold. First, in many commercial feature films, European societies appeared to be corrupt. Alcohol, crime, and “loose women” abounded. Officials worried that audiences would lose confidence in the colonial presence if they saw images of Europeans engaging in immoral behavior at home.59 The second concern was that commercial films did not provide sufficient coverage of the military strength of the West, and particularly of the French armed forces. Underscoring this strength was important to dissuade attempts at armed resistance. These concerns began to circulate in internal correspondence in the mid-1920s. In 1924, for example, Paul Marchand, the Governor of Cameroon, vehemently denounces popular (primarily American) cinema in a letter to the Agence économique for Togo and Cameroon: The films presented in public cinemas to European and especially to native audiences [. . .] are deplorably sentimental and monotonous [. . .] It would be desirable, for example, that French films be sent, such as those that came out during the war, that could give the natives an effective demonstration of French strength, and of our international influence; [. . .]; finally, comic films that would be more salutary for native morale than old worn-out films showing a Sioux chief on the warpath [. . .]. Such productions give the native a wretched idea of French civilization.60 The mention of force, while referring specifically to France’s performance in the war, also belies an undercurrent of uneasiness about the

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representation of France in relation to other foreign powers. This feeling would intensify over the next decade. In 1930, the colonial newspaper, Les Annales Coloniales, ran the following editorial, questioning the type of film that should be shown in Algeria: Colonial Cinema: They Are Not Just “Big Children.” We have to provide European education to people whose civilizations were not always regressive nor inferior to ours, far from it; we also have to instill love for metropolitan France. We will not achieve this goal with worn-out films that no one else wants. [. . .] Do we really think that it is the time to awaken among still-rebellious Chleuhs [a pejorative term for Berbers] a taste for risk and triumphal cavalcades? Do we really think that it is useful to parade before certain eyes scenes in which theft and vice are not always punished?61 A few weeks later, in the same column on colonial film, the journalist pursues this plea for more documentary film showing France as a strong nation, ready to respond to a possible uprising: Among peoples in effervescence, [film] will show that the mother country is not limited to a few militiamen and a governor dressed in white [. . .] but that far away exists an immense land where armed soldiers stand ready to come.62 These concerns about commercial cinema took on new urgency among French authorities over the decade of the 1930s, and their interest in the potential value of documentary film heightened as a result. Several new reports on film in the colonies chart these changes. Some initial data are available as of 1929, when several French colonial governments responded briefly to a circular initiated by the International Institute of Educational Cinema (IICE), requesting information about the laws of film censorship in effect in various countries.63 This survey was largely ignored, however, and it was not until 1932 that the question of film in the colonies resurfaced again, because of concerns by the political affairs bureau at the Ministry of Colonies that foreign propaganda unfavorable to the French was filtering into the French colonies via the cinema. In a 1932 report to the Minister

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of Colonies, Gaston Joseph, the director of political affairs for the ministry, writes: The massive importation of foreign films into the colonies can endanger the entire colonial policy of a great people. [. . .] In our time, when propaganda is expanding in all domains, it is cultivated particularly by France’s adversaries [. . .]. Cinema is working against our benevolent actions for the natives and against the defense of our national heritage.64 Joseph continues by specifically highlighting the dangers of Soviet and American cinema, which, he argues, seek to undermine French authority by convincing colonized peoples of the superior qualities of their respective countries: The production of films [. . .] that have the appearance of objectivity, designed to engender admiration for the Soviet paradise, is currently happening in the studios of Moscow [. . .]. A new attack is underway. [. . .] Among those who think our colonial domain too weighty a burden for our shoulders, the Americans are in the first row. They have their eyes fixed on Guyana and the West Indies [. . .]. In the Pacific, they are already engaging in a subtle invasion of our islands.65 To buttress his argument about American propaganda in the French colonies, he refers to a letter from the captain of the vessel Bellatrix about the film situation in Papeete, where nine out of ten cinemas are American, and where locals are given every opportunity to admire the strength and wealth of the United States. In American war films, for example, no mention of France’s role in winning the war is ever mentioned, and Joseph passes on the fears expressed by the local French governor that the Americans have imperial designs on Tahiti. He goes on to argue that the US government is also trying to use film to increase American influence in West Africa, citing a program by the Children’s Museum of Boston to show “the real America,” via US Department of Agriculture and Department of Labor films, to inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. One of these films, entitled The Pulse of the World, depicts the New York telegraph system; Joseph is outraged by this American attempt to suggest that the pulse of the world beats from New York! He then makes the

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cynical observation that “there are no educational films in this collection depicting ‘real America’ that explain and comment, using real-life examples, the law of lynching.” His hyperbolic rhetoric notwithstanding, Joseph succeeded in convincing the Ministry of Colonies of his overall point, that “the problem [of cinema] is clearly a political one and measures must be taken to prevent the evil from spreading and to regain the ground we have lost, in the areas where we are falling behind.”66 Immediately after receiving Joseph’s report, the Ministry compiled a detailed and comprehensive questionnaire about film in the colonies that was sent to the various colonial administrations, with a renewed plea to take this one more seriously than they had the 1929 survey.67 The new questionnaire generated a series of detailed reports on the status of commercial cinemas, film censorship, and public film programs in various regions of overseas France. These reports provide precious information, in particular, on changing perceptions of film audiences and problems that were specific to the colonial context. The questionnaire asks what the laws are governing cinemas in the colonies, what films are being shown, who goes to see them (including specific demographic questions on the distinction between European audiences, indigènes, and assimilés), and how the spectators react. It also asks to distinguish between French and “foreign” films, with a view to determining the underlying goal of the survey, which is taken directly from Joseph’s report: What films of a tendentious nature might be shown that could weaken the prestige of France, either because they are openly anti-French or, if apparently objective, might inspire an unfavorable comparison with our country?68 This question clearly demonstrates that the Ministry of Colonies was now convinced of the possibility that cinema was a political issue, and that “foreign” propaganda might be infiltrating the colonies via the cinema, thus undermining the image of France in the minds of local populations. While the wrong kind of films could convey the image of France, and Europe more broadly, as a decadent and dissolute civilization, the right kind could potentially expose the masses to images of strength that would instill respect (and possibly fear) of France and thus dissuade violence. The 1932 questionnaire indicates an intention on the part of the Ministry of Colonies to take these concerns to heart by exercising tighter control on film distribution, and also by introducing programs of educational cinema to counter these negative influences.

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The new reports on cinema in the colonies that were generated via this questionnaire reveal that audiences were no longer considered to be benevolent subjects whose affection merely needed to be encouraged. Now they were potentially dangerous agents of rebellion.69 This shift is particularly clear in the case of Indochina, which had more working commercial cinemas than any other region of overseas France.70 Indochina also had a fledgling nationalist movement, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, which organized an attack on the French garrison post at Yen Bay in February 1930. This widely publicized uprising, as well as the brutal repression that followed, came as a shock to colonial authorities as well as to public opinion in France. It demonstrated a serious disconnect between the benevolent image of French colonialism promoted by its partisans and the apparent realities on the ground in France’s “showcase colony.”71 The lengthy report on Indochinese film audiences indicates that the subject of film is “of undeniable political interest,” and that censorship was already well organized in the colony by 1932.72 A series of laws from 1921 to 1930 established a censorship board through which every film had to pass to receive a visa of approval either for projection in Indochina or for export to France. Potential distributors engaged in self-censorship, because of the considerable expense required in shipping a film to the colony. As was the case in other parts of the empire, the primary subjects likely to attract attention from the censors were representations of French moral weakness. The report notes this process of self-censorship on moral grounds: Importers carefully avoid introducing into the Colony films that without being particularly harmful to our influence, represent libertine or licentious scenes that the censorship board would have difficulty rejecting but that would give some natives [. . .] an unfortunate opinion of our good taste and our morality.73 Because sex and violence, the initial concerns of the censors, were largely governed by self-censorship, over the course of the 1920s, the board did not often have to ban films.74 However, the 1932 report expresses dissatisfaction with the existing system. First, it finds that morally compromising films still slip through the net. “We have become too complacent about frivolous or perverse scenes that may compromise the virtue of the European woman,” writes one correspondent. The prestige of European culture itself was at stake.75 Another subject of concern

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was satire of European institutions, which “should not be an object of exportation to our colonies,” writes another observer, as the irony would surely be lost on the audience.76 A cause for even greater anxiety, however, were the representations of French military strength in comparison to other powers, just as Joseph had suggested. “Cinemas in Annam constantly show films exalting the [American] army,” writes Gougal, and “with the ‘young Annam’ spirit that grows stronger every day, [a negative] comparison [with France] will be made at some point.” Up until this point, these films had not been censored because the censors thought that most non-European filmgoers did not distinguish among films of different nationalities; however, French authorities now wanted to make this distinction clear. Given the new political climate, they wanted to show that Indochina was part of the French nation in particular, a stronger and more moral nation than other Western powers. In light of these new concerns about colonial control, colonial authorities developed a keen interest in the local populations in their cinemas. In particular, they wanted to know more about local elites who might be in positions of leadership.77 One of their questions was whether local subjects could really understand French film. Advocates of cinema had touted it as the best means of propaganda in the colonies because it could reach illiterate audiences.78 And yet, silent film actually did require reading skills to understand the intertitles, and sound film required knowledge of the French language. In France, the Ministry of Agriculture had faced similar problems with silent film in rural areas. One proposed solution was that an interpreter should be on hand to explain the films to the audience in their language. Naturally, the words spoken by the interpreter must be carefully scripted and controlled by the authorities.79 This method favored the continued use of silent film, despite the introduction of sound in France in 1930.80 Another question these officials asked was whether local audiences would even be interested in French cinema. If not, any sort of official film propaganda campaign would prove difficult. Throughout the empire, action and adventure films, most of which were American sound films, were the most popular. Even if viewers could not understand the dialogue, the plots were primarily visual and self-evident. French cinema, on the whole, was deemed “too subtly psychological” to captivate the attention of these audiences, although an exception must be made for historical films, particularly those that contained characters drawn from myths or legends. 81

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In light of these concerns about commercial cinema and these new perceptions of film audiences in the empire, what was to be done? One concrete measure that was enacted was the Laval Decree, a 1934 law that applied to France’s colonies in Africa. This decree required that the Ministry of Colonies examine scripts and personnel involved in a film production before allowing a film to be shot in the colonies.82 Some scholars, including Jean Rouch and Manthia Diawara, have argued that the result of this decree was to postpone the flourishing of African cinema in Africa.83 While it was rarely used against filmmakers until after the Second World War, the measure does nonetheless furnish an additional piece of evidence that colonial authorities were concerned about the negative influence that cinema could have on the image of France’s imperial prestige. In response to these concerns, as was the case in France, documentary film seemed to be the answer. It would be useful, first of all, to select documentary newsreels that would highlight not only the military power of the protector nation, but also, and especially, our peaceful, industrial strengths, by showing the activities of our large cities and our modern industrial enterprises, large infrastructure projects, hospitals, laboratories, historical monuments, our overseas possessions, in short, everything that gives France its place in the world.84 This careful selection of newsreels, with a view to screening more of those containing views of the Army and Navy, would demonstrate French military strength. Other subjects could be used to illustrate France’s positive influence in the world. While documentaries and newsreels may have seemed an easy response to the problem, administrators had to think carefully about their use. They had realized that audiences would not simply attend the cinema for its novelty value and swallow any propaganda provided. Rather, they began to think of their audiences as sophisticated viewers with their own tastes and preferences. This was the same shift that happened in France around the same time, with a similar result. As was the case in France, authorities had “discovered” that audiences were only marginally interested in dry documentaries and newsreels and became quickly bored. For French cinema to become a fully fledged vehicle for propaganda, it would be necessary to get more of the local people to attend the movies. The 1932 report argues that this could only be done by adapting film

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programs to the tastes and preoccupations of the audiences, and in particular, to appeal to their “artistic sense” and their “emotivity.” If they were to be truly effective, educational films must be couched in the guise of an entertaining plot. “We cannot simply show films that plead the French cause; these films must interest and appeal to the audience to whom they are shown; otherwise we risk provoking the desertion of the cinemas.”85 Given this new attention to audience tastes in the cause of furthering French propaganda, one idea was to produce new films for the target audience. In Indochina, for example, one suggestion was to make films based on Vietnamese theatrical productions, or on the life of Buddha. Another was to import filmed French theater productions such as those of the Comédie française.86 A third suggestion for improving the image of France shown in the movies was to create historical dramas that would fill out the positive depiction of the French nation that could only be suggested in newsreels.87 Scenes of colonial conquest would be welcome, as long as they presented other parts of the empire and not Indochina (no opposition between France and its Indochinese colonies should be shown, so as not to “awaken susceptibilities”). These subjects “would furnish the necessary themes to serve our interests and our propaganda.” Economic concerns prevented the realization of many of these grand plans for colonial cinema. Large-scale French docudramas specifically produced for colonial audiences never saw the light of day. However, the question of educational film in the colonies came to the forefront again between the years 1936 and 1939, with the arrival to power of the Popular Front government. The Front’s new focus on educational cinema translated into a parallel interest in the influence of film in the colonies. Late in 1936, the education service of the Ministry of Colonies generated a comprehensive proposal for organizing imperial propaganda, both in France and in the colonies. This proposal indicates a renewed dedication to the project of using film to create a bidirectional flow of images—to and from the colonies—that would foster a vision of France and the colonies as a great and unified imperial nation. Its author, Albert Charton, inspector general of colonial education, writes, “if the cinema must be an efficient medium for helping French citizens to know their overseas empire, the cinema must also be used to help the natives in our different colonies to know France.”88 Many years had passed since the initial calls for bidirectional film propaganda by Albert Sarraut, shortly after the First World War, and yet the basic principle was

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the same: to use film to convince film audiences in France and in the colonies that they were citizens of a vast imperial nation, a “France of a hundred million inhabitants.” In addition to this renewed interest in film at the Ministry of Colonies, the Prime Minister’s office created a bureau assigned to deal with “Muslim” affairs, entitled the Haut comité méditerranéen. This bureau, which outlived the demise of the Popular Front, set up a commission to study the question of “Muslim cinema.”89 It was to make a coordinated attempt to evaluate the influence of commercial cinema across Muslim countries under French rule and to study the propaganda potential of educational cinema in these areas.90 The reasons for this interest were economic (to encourage French industry to become more invested in the empire), psychological and social (to provide leisure activities for local people), and political (to encourage French subjects to understand France better and to “conserve our national influence” over them by informing them of France’s importance in the world). Most importantly, this effort responded to a concern that Muslim populations under French rule were coming under the influence of other parts of the Muslim world. By 1938, fifteen private projects for developing French cinema in Muslim countries, as well as four governmental proposals, were under study by the commission (Figure 4.2).91 Of particular interest to this commission was a new development in Algeria, where Egyptian cinema was introduced in 1932. Audiences initially had difficulty understanding these films, because Egyptian Arabic was quite different from their dialect, but by 1938 their understanding had improved, and the programs were much more popular. These programs were of concern to French authorities because German or Italian producers often financed them. They were also considered dangerous because they could show that the French had nothing to offer their Muslim colonies that could not be gained from non-Western sources.92 While Algeria had been an early experimentation ground for French documentary cinema, and the programs organized by the Office régional had flourished in the 1920s, the introduction of sound cinema drew the government’s attention towards the idea of creating French films in Arabic. Very little was actually done in this area before the war, but plans for it intensified over the decade, particularly after the international crisis of 1938. Given the difficult economic situation in the 1930s French empire, many of these suggestions for innovation in terms of cinema were never followed. However, a series of programs that already existed in

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Figure 4.2 “From the center of France, rays spread out in all directions. [. . .] a visible magnetic current pulses from the center out towards, the edges. Suddenly, one of the rays touches the dark circle (North Africa): it blows apart, pierced from the North, expands and fades to a shot of real life in North Africa.” Scene from the treatment for a film on French colonization of North Africa, one of the private proposals sent to the Haut comité méditerranéen. (J. de Shelley, 1937). AN, F60 711.

Indochina and in other colonies continued to operate over the course of the 1930s, and institutional efforts to expand and centralize these programs intensified. The next section is devoted to closer analyses of films and film treatments that were targeted at imperial subjects. It will show that the films were in line with the early goal of promoting social programs and “making the fiction of the empire a reality.”

Films An early source of evidence for films that were destined for the empire is a series of film treatments written for Indochina’s Service Photocinématographique in 1921. A treatment entitled La dernière vision de Le

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My (The Last Vision of Le My), for example, is a fictionalized portrait of the administration of Le Myre de Villers, the governor of Cochinchina from 1879 to 1883. The film treatment suggests an illustration of agrarian reforms that would show villagers with small piles of rice before the reforms and much larger piles of rice after the reforms. It would portray Le Myre de Villers consulting with local elites to determine the best route forward for the province. It would flash forward 15, then 30 years to portray the governor as an older man, satisfied with the progress of the people under his rule, whose children no longer go hungry, who no longer bring their crops to market by hand, and whose houses have evolved from huts to wooden structures and finally to solid stone buildings, all thanks to “Le My, protective genius of Nam Ky.”93 The primary structure is dialectical, comparing the “bad” consequences of the old ways of life (poverty, overwork) with the “good” qualities of the new (prosperity, leisure), associated with the French colonizing presence. This presence is closely associated with technological modernization, as in the case of the agricultural films used in France. As in the metropolitan films, this treatment highlights the involvement of local people in choosing the right destiny for themselves. It also contrasts the more prosperous future they have chosen with a past in which they struggled to survive. In another film treatment, a similar dialectical structure illustrates imaginary scenes of the future called “anticipations.” The film, entitled Le protecteur céleste de ma tante Nam (The Celestial Protector of My Aunt Nam), illustrates the “positive results of more extensive intervention by the propagandist country.” It is set in a fictional rural village inhabited by hard-working people who struggle to survive. The inhabitants must travel long distances to find firewood and water, and there is no doctor nearby. One night, a child in the village falls ill, and her mother, Cô-Nam, sets off in the forest in the dark of night to look for a doctor. She encounters terrifying beasts in the “cursed forest,” but she then encounters a benevolent spirit, la Semeuse, who promises to help her. La Semeuse is a sower of seeds, and in French iconography, she became a symbol of France in 1898 when she was given a Phrygian bonnet, meaning liberty, and used as a representation on the new coinage of the Third Republic.94 The choice of this figure can therefore be read as an evocation of the colonizing power, expressed in mythological terms. The Semeuse comforts Cô-Nam and gives her a hypodermic injection that solves all her problems: her child recovers, and an army of gnomes comes to her village to build a hydroelectric dam. With the dam comes

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water, electricity, and phone service. Cô-Nam moves to a comfortable house with electric light and an electric stove. Her children telephone her to let her know they are coming home to visit via the new tram that accesses the village. She now wears jewels because she has an electric machine to unwind the silkworm cocoons that form her principal source of income. The “relative luxury” in which she lives is directly related to the colonizing presence, here presented in the form of a magical force with supernatural powers. This type of film also follows a familiar format to films used by the Ministry of Agriculture in France; it is very similar, for example, to The Correct Method, discussed in Chapter 3, in which Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and ancestor of the Semeuse, appears in a dream sequence and shows Magloire an imagined future full of agricultural modernization and prosperity. Indeed, the author of the treatment even admits that with simple reframing, long sequences of pre-existing films from France could easily be used in this propaganda effort. Recycling and reframing images from films that were successful in France was a budget-trimming technique that was used in other parts of the French empire. A case in point is a short film produced around 1930 by the Agence économique for Cameroon and Togo entitled La maladie du sommeil (Sleeping Sickness).95 Presented by the Haut Commissariat de la République française au Cameroun, the film is composed of images borrowed from one of the most famous colonial documentaries of the interwar period, Alfred Chaumel’s Le réveil d’une race (The Awakening of a Race). Shot in 1929, produced by Les Films Exotiques and edited by Gaumont Franco-Film-Aubert, The Awakening was released in Gaumont cinemas in November 1930 and received considerable attention in the press.96 The figure of Doctor Jamot and his aggressive campaign against sleeping sickness in Cameroon captured people’s imaginations. It was a French initiative that met with real success and saved many lives. The use of images from this film in Sleeping Sickness can be explained by the fact that Chaumel probably shot the footage for Gaumont under contract to the Agence économique, which then owned the images and was thus free to reuse them; this practice was common under the contractual system used by the agencies.97 Sleeping Sickness opens with a title screen announcing it as “a film for basic education made by the mobile hygiene and prophylaxis service.” Although not originally a sound film, the film has a post-synchronized soundtrack that consists of an African narrator telling a story about the village of Douba.

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This is the village of Douba. In the past, it was a large village with many beautiful huts built in the shade of trees, but today, grass and brush have grown up among the huts. Many of these huts are abandoned; the young men have left for richer villages. Only a few families are left in Douba. In Douba, we learn, everyone has either died or is ill with sleeping sickness. The survivors feel sad and discouraged. Then one day, a French doctor arrives and everyone goes to see him to be cured (Figure 4.3). Once he has given the treatments, we see people standing up and walking around. The order is given to cut down and clear brush overhanging watercourses so that the “evil fly” that causes the disease will have no habitat in which to reproduce.

Figure 4.3 A French doctor indicates the prescribed treatment for sleeping sickness by painting symbols in white letters on the patient’s chest. This image appears in La maladie du sommeil (Sleeping Sickness, 1929) and Le réveil d’une race (The Awakening of a Race, Alfred Chaumel, 1930). Courtesy Gaumont-Pathé archives.

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All the flies must be killed as well. The bad brush must be cut. The water must be exposed to the sun. The sun kills the bad worms that become bad flies. Soon the whole village has been cleaned up. As is typical in the agricultural and hygiene films used in France, at the end of the film, everyone in the village is healthy, happy, and on the path to riches. The narrator assures the audience that “with many men and women in good health, Cameroon will have many products to sell and will be able to buy all the machines that will make it a great country.” Because the film is destined for an African audience, the benefits of the program are articulated in terms of the nation of Cameroon rather than of France. However, it is clear that it is the French presence, embodied by the figure of the French doctor, that has brought about the transformation of the village. The underlying national argument is implicit but nonetheless clear: France, which received the protectorate over Cameroon in 1918, will be more successful than the former power, Germany, in helping the African nation rise to its feet and combat the illness that weakens it.98 Sleeping Sickness provides one indication that the opinions of administrators in the colonies in the 1930s did in part inform practical applications of subsequent film programs. Some films were made specifically for colonial audiences. The director of education in French Equatorial Africa, for example, writes that if film propaganda is to be effective in the colony, films shot in Cameroon or French West Africa might be used, but films shot in Algeria or Indochina will be of little use because they would be too “foreign.” Further evidence that this advice was heeded comes from a film made by Jean Benoit-Lévy in 1932 for Algerian audiences, entitled Conte de la mille et deuxième nuit (The Story of the One-Thousand and Second Night). This film features an Algerian protagonist named Mohamed Cheghir (Figure 4.4). Before he gets ill, Mohamed is depicted as agile, fast, and physically attractive. However, a tiny growth, the bobo, which at first appears harmless, ends up taking over his life. It is only with the arrival of a French medical team, who first educate him about venereal disease and encourage him to seek treatment, that he is able to return to his active former life. The film ends with a series of contrasting images designed to help the audience distinguish between a sick child and a well one.99 Again, the colonialist message of France as a transformative healing power for the colonial subject is clear in this film. It is presented in terms that specifically appeal to a local audience in one region of the

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Figure 4.4 Mohamed, the protagonist of Conte de la mille et deuxième nuit (Tale of the One-Thousand and Second Night, Jean Benoit-Lévy, 1929), before he gets sick. Courtesy Archives françaises du film. Reproduced with permission from Liliane Jolivet and Véronique Mourlan.

empire, thus demonstrating that colonial authorities were beginning to recognize the need to produce films that were tailored to different audiences if their propaganda was to succeed.

Conclusion Educational cinema attempts in the French colonies during the interwar years were largely defined by big ideas and equally daunting setbacks. The repeated calls for establishing a centralized educational film network for the colonies, based on 16-mm silent films that would be accompanied by commentary translated into various local languages, never materialized. However, despite the absence of a large-scale governmental initiative to support imperial propaganda through film, the flowering of small-scale projects and programs does indicate a few larger trends. Some colonial authorities were clearly interested in film, and in the

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medium of documentary film in particular, to effect social change and to win the support of the people under French rule. In analyzing these programs, it is important to place them in the context of metropolitan concerns about similar issues such as education and cinema, in order to temper the value judgments that some scholars have applied to similar programs in the British empire. Femi Shaka and Manthia Diawara, for example, have analyzed British film experiments in terms of the relative merits of their motivations, on a scale from “altruistic and progressive” to “paternalistic and racist.”100 Both lines of reasoning assume that there is somehow an ideal “objective” documentary or instructional film that exists outside the domain of “propaganda,” and that the faults or merits of British educational cinema lie in their relative success at approaching this ideal.101 When stripped of considerations of their moral merit, however, colonial film projects prove to be revealing on two levels. First, they highlight ways in which their knowledge (or imagination) of rural France shaped colonial administrators’ views of colonized peoples, and second, they indicate a deep ambivalence, both in France and in the empire, about the power of cinema. To expand on the first point, I have argued that debates about film audiences in the colonies paralleled debates about audiences in rural France. These debates demonstrate a growing awareness of the need to adapt film programs to local tastes and traditions. This awareness translated into a view of colonial audiences as real people capable of making individual choices, different from one another and different from French audiences. Paradoxically, this awareness of their difference from French audiences is in fact another parallel, because a similar interest in French rural audiences also emerged in the 1930s. Harry Gamble has made a similar case for the colonial education system more generally, arguing that the debates over educational reform in French West Africa during this period were strongly influenced by understandings of rural France at the same time.102 Robert Delavignette’s novel Les Paysans noirs helped to strengthen developing views of Africans as “peasants” rather than as “natives,” and therefore to emphasize parallels to farming communities in France. As was the case in France, where primary schools sought to combat the perceived “rural exodus” by teaching the importance of rootedness in local cultures and traditions, school authorities in Africa saw schools as a possible source of alienation for elites, who might move to urban centers and become déracinés.103 In reforming African education between the wars, they sought to create an adapted education system that was designed to maintain African

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peasant societies, allowing them to progress within the framework of local tradition.104 Adapted education thus came into favor as a “safe” course towards modernization. Some of these broader educational parallels were also reflected in colonial film programs. Film was an ideal complement to the méthode directe, the idea that the teaching of abstract concepts should always emanate from direct observation by the students, which dominated French educational philosophy of the time.105 Geography, for example, should begin with the students’ observations of their village and their immediate environs and then should lead them to a broader understanding of where their village fit into the more abstract geographic system of the French empire.106 Film could also be a valuable complement to éducation, a new emphasis on experiential learning and moral instruction rather than in instruction, or rote learning.107 The philosophy of éducation gained considerable ground in France during the interwar years.108 And finally, as in France, where one of the arguments in favor of rural film was to provide recreation in the villages, colonial officials also saw the virtues of healthy, state-sponsored recreational cinema as a potential way to improve people’s quality of life in outlying areas.109 These debates over film audiences provide a concrete example of a fundamental tension that haunted the French civilizing mission from the early twentieth century, and that intensified during the interwar years. This tension, which had many different threads, revolved around a debate over whether French colonial philosophy should be based on assimilation or association. The assimilation argument, stated simply, was that colonized peoples should be gradually transformed into models of French people, with all the political, social, and cultural advantages enjoyed by the latter. It is founded on a belief that all people are fundamentally similar, and that the inhabitants of the colonies were simply at a less-advanced stage of evolution along the same continuum as Europeans. The association argument, which gained currency over the interwar years, as Alice Conklin has argued, posited that “natives” in the colonies were different from French people. Colonial laws and policies should take these differences into account to develop a humane colonialism that would encourage colonized people to be productive “associates” of the French without seeking to imitate a French model.110 Raymond Betts gives the French prime minister Waldeck-Rousseau’s simple definition of association as “[To] develop the natives in the framework of their own civilizations.”111 Association came in many forms that spanned the

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political spectrum. On one hand, it could mean a deep interest in indigenous cultures that would lead to greater respect for them, albeit in exchange for greater cooperation, and on the other, it could also lead to more right-wing justifications for exploitation based on racialized readings of difference.112 While the film programs do not directly intervene in the assimilation/ association debate, the shift in attitudes towards film audiences outlined in this chapter is fueled by some of the concerns that this debate directly addressed. Early film programs were modeled on French programs, but plans in the late 1930s moved towards ideas for creating adapted programs that would take into consideration local populations’ inclinations and preferences. Greater attention was paid to the ways in which they might react differently from French viewers. It became important to pay attention to comprehension issues based on language, and to the possible pitfalls of offending local traditions and customs. So while the term “association” was not common currency in film discussions, these discussions did move towards the idea of adapted programs, reflecting the more general shift away from an assimilationist philosophy that would use a single model for all the colonies. In addition to shedding light on perceptions of colonized peoples, colonial film programs also reveal a deep-seated ambivalence on the part of colonial administrators towards what was still a fundamentally new medium. As film became more available to a mass audience, these officials wrote about their hopes, fears, and aspirations for cinema. While some anxieties may have been specific to the colonial relationship—in particular, the fears about representations of French military strength in comparison to other world powers—many were shared by authorities in France suspicious of the power of cinema to incite, corrupt, or simply to fatigue young minds. Rather than reflecting the altruism or paternalism of colonial endeavors, they reflect a long-standing, and perhaps universal, combination of faith in—and fear of—the power of visual images. Growing interest in using documentary cinema as a medium for reshaping ideas of the French nation during the interwar period was not limited to the model of rayonnement, sending educational messages and images out from the center towards the French regions and the colonies. A diverse group of public and private organizations also sought to harness the fascinateur for the transfer of images in the other direction: from the periphery to the center. The next two chapters explore the use of film to promote the regions and the colonies within the Hexagon.

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Chapter 5

“Mysterious and Subtle Cheesemaking”: Filming the French Regions

In every part of the Causses, from isolated farms or model dairies, milk is sent to a village [. . .] that hides the most curious of subterranean industries. [There] the mysterious and subtle ripening of Roquefort cheese will take place. —J. C. Bernard, Le Rouergue (1937)

[Cinema] will bring us visions of the world outside, of provincial life, of regional professions. It will contribute to the knowledge of craftsmanship the world over. It will present the faces of our country to our visitors. —Edmond Labbé, commissioner general of the 1937 Paris Exhibition1

A visitor to Paris in the summer of 1937 could hardly miss the event that had the entire city abuzz. Once again, a great fair had come to the shores of the Seine. Its ungainly title, Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, had poster artists scrambling for shortcuts. Many of them simply titled the gathering, “Paris 1937.” Strolling south across the Pont de l’Alma, this visitor would have a magnificent view along the river to the left towards the curving steel and glass of the Grand Palais. To the right, the blocky façade of the new Trocadero rose above the slopes of the Chaillot hill, facing off against the Eiffel Tower across the river, as they do today. Along the river in each direction, the view in 1937 would be quite different from that of a contemporary tourist. Special pavilions constructed for the fair of temporary materials sprawled all along both banks, from the Pont de la Concorde in the east to the Pont de Grenelle in the west. The fair also stretched out perpendicular to the river along the Champ de Mars, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

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From the Alma bridge, after taking in the broad views of the riverscape, the visitor could not help noticing a new building on the Quai d’Orsay just to the west of the bridge. A two hundred-foot square tower dominated two cubic volumes joined by a wedge-shaped structure, with outdoor steps leading down to the edge of the river. The otherwise stark stucco walls, pinkish in color, were covered with bas-relief sculptures.2 The tower resembled a strange hybrid between an Egyptian obelisk and a modernist lighthouse. Indeed, at night, a bright column of light shone vertically from the top of the tower. This was the Tourism Pavilion. The engravings on the outside of the tower, sculpted by Gaudissard, consisted of a representation of Paris as a star, with rays emanating out from it to symbolize French planes traveling abroad and visitors traveling around France.3 Upon entering this structure, the tourist would have found it rather dark inside. The architect, Pierre Sardou, had had to cut down on windows and doors because of insufficient funding for the project.4 Although the semi-darkness may not have been ideal for the exhibits of photographs of France’s “most beautiful sites and monuments,” it worked well for the film displays that were integral to the visitor’s experience. On that summer day, she might have sat down for an hour and watched a film about southwestern France, with shots of glovemaking in Millau, cattle raising along the river Tarn, and “mysterious and subtle cheesemaking” in the cool caves of Roquefort. Or, perhaps, she might have seen a demonstration of sandal making in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in Basque country, where she would learn that “the agility and the elegance of the Pyreneans can only be explained by the sandal with which their hikers’ and dancers’ feet are shod.”5 The strangely monumental Tourism Pavilion, and the 1937 fair more broadly, speak volumes about the regenerated national image that had been developing in France over the interwar period. The overall goal of hosting a fair in the midst of a depression was to restore France’s national prestige despite the growing success of fascism abroad, as well as to inspire capitalist confidence in national interests and thus to re-energize the French economy.6 In previous chapters, we have seen a national image emerging that would seek to include both regional and colonial cultures in a newly regenerated France. In 1937, France proclaimed this image visibly and publicly, both to itself and to the world. The last two chapters demonstrated the emergence of this national image in educational outreach through film to rural areas and the French overseas empire. The next two chapters explore ways in which

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images flowed in the other direction: from the periphery to the center. Film was one of the principal means by which urban dwellers in France learned about the “agility and elegance of the Pyreneans,” or the chamois hunters of the Alps, who were as foreign to them as elephant hunters in central Africa. This fair was the ideal place to learn about both, since it was the first World’s Fair in which rural France, as well as the French colonies, were given special emphasis. The Regional Center, the “star attraction” of the French exhibits, on ten acres adjacent to the Eiffel Tower, contained a collection of pavilions showcasing regional architecture. This center allowed the visitor to take a mini-tour of the diverse regions of France.7 From there, a visitor could simply cross a small footbridge and find himself in the Overseas France section, evocatively located on a narrow island in the middle of the Seine. This exhibit was placed so as to seem a natural extension of the Regional Center; each was designed to highlight the beauty and diversity of the French provinces and colonies.8 In addition to these two sections, rural France was also displayed in a Rural Center that presented a “model village” for the modernization of rural living, a French folklore exhibit, and the Tourism Pavilion mentioned earlier, which promoted travel in rural France. Across the French sections of the fair, regional and colonial diversity and rural life were crucial elements of the representation of the French nation. Because of the centrality of regional exhibits to France’s presence at the fair, this venue provides a particularly rich source of information about what was being said, to the rest of France and to the world, about rural and regional France. It is perhaps an even more appropriate venue within which to study what was being said through film, because film itself also had pride of place at the fair. The French have typically claimed the invention of cinema as their own, and film was thus foremost among the French “arts and techniques of modern life” on display.9 Not only was the 1937 World’s Fair the first to have an entire pavilion devoted to photography, film, and radio, but it also included over 40 screens for film projection, on which hundreds of films were shown over the six months it was in operation.10 Some of these films were specifically produced for the exhibition and therefore provide a reasonably good indication of what the fair organizers wanted visitors to think about rural and regional France. As this chapter will demonstrate, many of the films presented at the fair align with the broader goals of making the regions appear as “an integral element of a newly conceived nation.”11 Venues such as this fair

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made important attempts, as I have argued more broadly, in bridging the cultural divide between urban and rural France, as well as in blurring boundaries between opposing concepts such as traditional and modern, authentic and progressive, nation and region. Organizers sought to portray regional cultures at the fair through architecture and imagery that avoided quaint or nostalgic impressions. Rather, these cultures should appear as both strongly rooted in local traditions and also up-to-date and modern. Choosing to portray the regions in this way was fraught with political overtones; I will provide some background on the intellectual and political landscape for these choices before demonstrating how they played out in the films at the fair.

Regionalism, Interwar France, and the 1937 Exhibition Scholars differ on the interpretation of the new emphasis on regionalism in the recasting of national identity at the fair. In her overview of regionalism in France, Anne-Marie Thiesse argues that a regionalist consciousness had been central to national identity-building in France since the early days of the Third Republic, and that contrary to the theses of historians such as Eugen Weber, a form of regionalism that taught attachment to place and local soil had been part of French national education since that time as well. Because of the vagueness of the term, Thiesse argues that the fusion of regionalism with patriotism—a view of France based on unity in diversity—appealed to politicians of all political persuasions up through the outbreak of the Second World War, and that the idea had broad popular appeal as well. Prior to the fair planning process, the regionalist movement was spearheaded by the conservative Republican Jean Charles-Brun and the Fédération régionaliste française (FRF), a national organization founded to coordinate the diverse groups interested in regionalism. The FRF had had two primary goals since its inception in 1900: to resist the excessive centralization of the French administration, and to preserve and promote local cultures, literatures, and folk life. Resolutely committed to remaining above politics, the FRF was able to attract members from across the political spectrum, including some Socialists, although it drew its primary support from moderate bourgeois Republicans. Despite the interest of some ultra-Conservative monarchists such as Charles Maurras in emphasizing the French regions because they would represent a return to the provinces of the Old Regime, regionalism as defined by

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the FRF was neither anti-Republican nor anti-nationalist. Rather, the idea was that the path to developing a strong love for the French nation was through a love for, and an understanding of, the rich cultural diversity contributed by the French regions. It was this version of regionalism— recasting national identity in terms of a revitalization of the regions— that dominated the process of reconstruction after the First World War and that brought regionalist ideology into the main stream of French political discourse.12 The popularity of regionalism after the First World War was not limited to political philosophy. It also had a profound effect on architecture, popular culture, art, and even film.13 Although confined to a small group of films, it could be argued that regionalism influenced the development of pictorialist naturalism, a film movement that overlapped with documentary film in the 1920s. Naturalist theater director André Antoine, who moved into film directing during and after the First World War, insisted on the “visual authenticity” that was guaranteed by location shooting. This esthetic translated into a renewed interest in filming the French landscape. Other directors such as Louis Mercanton, Léon Poirier, and Jean Grémillon experimented with location shooting and rural characters.14 Rather than pursue a nationalist political or social agenda, these directors were after an esthetic form of regionalism. They rejected the mainstream French cinema dominated by Parisian studios and searched instead for a different kind of “authenticity” that could only be found in “real” (i.e. non-Parisian) France. It was not until a Marseillais playwright named Marcel Pagnol created his own production company in 1933 and teamed up with the novelist Jean Giono that a self-consciously regionalist cinema emerged.15 In Anne-Marie Thiesse’s view, regionalism in whatever form, despite its appeal across the political spectrum, was essentially based on the past. It was fueled by a desire to highlight and preserve a disappearing way of life threatened by modernization, industrialization, and war. Likewise, in her study of art and politics in interwar France, Romy Golan characterizes the themes of return to the earth and regionalism as “essentially reactionary issues” that were anti-modernist and backwards-looking. She does acknowledge that after the First World War, these themes, which went hand in hand with a renewed admiration for the peasantry that had sacrificed so much in the war, were no longer the exclusive domain of the political Right.16 She sees the presentation of France in regionalist terms at the 1937 fair as the triumph of a primarily conservative agenda presenting national authenticity in organic rather than

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industrial terms, arguing that the left-wing Popular Front government sanctioned it because it was an expansive notion that allowed them to include, if only partially, their own ruralist agenda.17 In contrast to Golan and Thiesse, Shanny Peer presents the regionalist emphasis of the 1937 fair not as a refuge in the past, but as a forwardlooking and progressive agenda. She argues that the French regions as presented at the fair were “dynamic and adaptive, rather than resistant to change.” In Peer’s view, the displays were intended to show that France’s distinct character lay in its ability to incorporate the changes brought by modernization while still maintaining a broad spectrum of diverse traditional cultures that taken together, made France uniquely French. This view was reflected most strongly in the Regional Center.18 In her more extensive architectural treatment of the Regional Center, Deborah Hurtt also finds in the design of the pavilions a fusion of modernist and traditional design elements and materials.19 This blending aimed to symbolize the view that regionalism could itself be modern and adaptive and could thus provide an alternative to international modernism, viewed as placeless and generic. The search for a vision of the regions that was neither too modern, nor too traditional, was also manifest in the treatment of hand-crafted objects that were displayed at the fair. The planning commissions in Paris sent out models for “improved” designs of traditional handicrafts, designs that sought to encourage modernization without destroying completely the link to traditional forms.20 Regionalist ideology was not the only motivating force behind the construction of the exhibits devoted to regional and rural life at the exhibition. A pragmatic and less publicly declared, but perhaps more important, goal of these pavilions was to present an attractive view of France’s regions that would encourage tourism. The tourist industry in France had fallen off by 75 percent between 1928 and 1935,21 and presenting France and its regions as attractive destinations with beautiful countryside and friendly inhabitants was a primary concern of the fair’s commissioner general.22 The Regional Center was initially designated to be the primary center of the tourism message. To garner financial support from the regions themselves, the regionalism commission in Paris promised that one of the benefits to the regions from their investment in the fair would be an increase in tourism. As fair planning advanced, some of the focus on tourism shifted away from the Regional Center to a Tourism Pavilion added to the plan in 1936 to provide

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a generically friendly image of the country for visitors lacking the stamina to visit the various regional pavilions.23 The Tourism Pavilion was co-sponsored by private associations such as the Tourism Commission, the National Center for the Expansion of Tourism, the Touring-Club of France, the Automobile Club, and the Alpine Club.24 Whether the representation of peasants, regional traditions, and rural life is viewed as reactionary or progressive, it is clear that for the first time at a major international exhibition in France, the question was not whether to include rural France in the displays, but how to present it. Evidence from the films and documents produced for the exhibition suggests that Hurtt’s and Peer’s arguments about the Regional Center were largely true for the film exhibits as well. Many films at the fair demonstrated a modernized regionalism, in which traditional practices and modern techniques could live together in peaceful harmony, rather than portraying modernization as a threat to local cultures that were receding into a nostalgic past. Before addressing the specific representations of the regions in film, an overview of the importance of film at the fair is necessary, as the scholarship in this area has been scarce.

Film at the 1937 Exhibition The emphasis placed on film at the 1937 exhibition was unprecedented in comparison to other World’s Fairs in France. Various forms of animated images had appeared at fairs since the invention of Edison’s kinetoscope. The Lumières’ cinématographe featured prominently on a gigantic screen at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair along with several exhibits of semi-synchronous sound films such as the Phonoscope and the Phono Cinéma Théâtre.25 The films shown in these settings were mere seconds long, and their interest lay primarily in their novelty value rather than in their content. It was not until after the First World War that film began to be used at fairs for its documentary and pedagogical value, to complement exhibits that sought to show aspects of the world outside the fair. At the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a limited number of documentary films were shown to complement the various exhibits. In 1937, as the journalist Guillaume-Michel Coissac remarks, “the situation of film in the present exhibition will be completely different; it will reign as master, less to entertain than to document.” 26 A journalist for

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La Cinématographie Française concurs: “This is the first time in history that [film] has such an important role in this type of event.” 27 Edmond Labbé, commissioner general of the exhibition, expressed his commitment to cinema in the following terms: At the present time, there is only one art that owes its birth, its nature and its form to the progress of the science of machines. This art is the art of photography and cinematography. [. . .Cinema] will bring us visions of the world outside, of provincial life, of regional professions. It will contribute to the knowledge of craftsmanship the world over. It will present the faces of our country to our visitors: in multiple images, it will show its landscapes, its customs, its traditions. It will be, in a word, one of the most complete expressions of this modern life that our Exhibition will show in its most varied and brilliant forms.28 The Photo-Ciné-Phono pavilion, which presented photography, cinema, and the phonograph as “the three elements,” was centrally placed on the fairgrounds, at the foot of the Eiffel tower and just across the river from the other central monument of the fair, the new Chaillot Palace. It housed a 1,000-seat movie theater, busts of Léon Gaumont, Charles Pathé, and the Lumière brothers, exhibits of French-made movie cameras and projectors, and explanatory exhibits and models showing how films were made.29 In addition to the cinema pavilion at the fair, various other pavilions housed over 40 large and small theaters dedicated to the screening of documentary films. Over the course of the fair, hundreds of titles came to life on these screens.30 Outside the cinema pavilion, film itself was no longer the object of these screenings; the films were shown to complement and reinforce the promotional messages within each venue. In the hygiene pavilion, for example, a rotating program included prophylactic films such as La syphilis (Syphilis), Savoir se nourrir (Know How to Feed Yourself), and L’allaitement maternel (Maternal Nursing). The Aluminum Pavilion screened a film entitled Le monde nouveau (The New World) devoted to explaining the role of aluminum in the various constructions at the fair. In the Education Pavilion, film was used to explain educational philosophies in Les moins de sept ans: l’école maternelle (Children Under Seven: Elementary School), and to demonstrate teaching techniques in a modern high school in Une classe de science naturelle au Lycée Janson-de-Sailly (A Natural Science Class at Janson-de-Sailly High School).

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The international pavilions were equally zealous in their use of film to shape the national images they wanted to promote for an international audience. Leni Riefenstahl’s still notorious Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will)—which had been banned in the United States, Canada, and Britain—proclaimed the power of the Nazi state alongside the other offerings at the German pavilion.31 The famous architectural face-off between the Soviet and German pavilions across the center axis leading down to the Seine from the Trocadero was reflected in a similar cinematic rivalry. The Soviets countered Triumph of the Will with films about Soviet athletic prowess, military parades, and social programs for workers.32 Films about rural and regional France featured prominently in the French exhibits at the fair. The principal sites were the Tourism Pavilion, the Rural Center, and the Regional Center, but several other pavilions also showed regional films. In the transportation pavilion, for example, the railroad exhibit included technical films devoted to the functioning of the railroad, such as Le frein Westinghouse (The Westinghouse Brake), Vitesse et sécurité (Speed and Safety), and Prévention des accidents (Accident Prevention), as well as promotional films designed to encourage train travel within France, such as Savez-vous voyager? (Do You Know How To Travel?), Images de Savoie (Images of Savoie), Au pays normand (In Norman Country), Cathédrales de France (Cathedrals of France), and Châteaux de France (Castles of France). These promotional films were commissioned and financed by the railroad companies to encourage use of their services. Colonial films could also be seen in several different theaters. The pavilions of French West Africa and Algeria had their own screening rooms and complete film programs, and colonial subjects were also shown in the transportation pavilion (railroad and maritime sections) and in the Tourism Pavilion. The films on regional and rural France at the exhibition can be roughly divided into two groups that generally parallel the differences in conception between the Regional Center and the Rural Center. Conceived and financed by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Rural Center presented a “model village” that was prescriptive in nature, designed to show how pleasant and efficient rural life could be anywhere in France if certain steps toward modernization were taken. While the Regional Center also strove to illustrate a modernized view of the regions, it placed a greater emphasis on diversity and local specificity, and on traditions inherited from the past. These differences are reflected in the film programs that complemented each installation.

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Modernizing Rural Life: Film at the Rural Center A late addition to the fair plan by the Popular Front government in 1936, the Rural Center was relegated to an annex outside the central fairgrounds, at the Porte Maillot. The geographical location did not seem to undermine its importance in the minds of its sponsor, the general commissioner, or the farmer’s organizations that had pushed for its inclusion and were satisfied to see that rural France had finally gotten the recognition it deserved on a national level.33 Designed as a model village, the Rural Center included modern farm buildings, various types of working agricultural cooperatives, social services, a community center (which was also the cinema), a village school, and a silo. According to Peer, it was aimed not only at urban bourgeois audiences, the typical fairgoers of the past, but also at rural audiences whom organizers hoped to draw to the fair. The overall aim in targeting these latter audiences was to combat the rural exodus by showing them how their agricultural lives could be improved by adopting modern farming techniques. The Rural Center even sought to extend its message out into rural areas by the publication of a newspaper entitled Le Centre Rural aimed at farmers who could not come to the fair.34 In this respect, therefore, the Rural Center served as a concrete representational display of an agricultural policy that was in no way invented by the left-wing Popular Front, but that had dominated the approach to agriculture on both ends of the political spectrum since the end of the First World War.35 With these rural audiences in mind, strict attention was paid to avoid any representation of farmers as quaint or backwards; the inhabitants of the farming exhibits were modern agricultural professionals. Because the Ministry of Agriculture had such a long-standing and extensive film library, the documentary films shown in the foyer communal at the Rural Center were primarily selected from among the existing collections. The small selection of films (19 titles out of a collection of nearly 700) served several purposes. First, in conjunction with the traveling bookmobile (or bibliobus) and communal library, the inclusion of a movie theater and a film program in the Center showcased the Ministry of Agriculture’s educational outreach programs. Urban audiences visiting the center would learn about the Ministry’s efforts to improve French agricultural education and to provide entertainment on long winter evenings in rural villages. Second, with films such as L’école nationale des industries agricoles de Douai (The National School for Agricultural Industries in Douai), the Rural Center’s films highlighted the

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activities of national agricultural schools and institutes. These films may have been selected with a crossover audience in mind, informing urban dwellers about the Ministry’s activities and about the professionalization of agriculture, but also suggesting to rural visitors the professional possibilities that might be open to them. The third purpose of the films was to inform the rural viewer of how his or her life might be improved through some of the techniques promoted at the exhibit. Chanson de l’eau (The Song of Water), for example, and Les joies de l’eau (The Joys of Water), explain the advantages in comfort and efficiency that indoor plumbing can afford. Visitors could also see these comforts for themselves in the modernized farm buildings at the exhibits. Much of the film discourse at the Rural Center, therefore, largely repeats and reinforces the messages that the Ministry sought to diffuse throughout rural France through its rural film networks. There are some notable absences, however, in the films that the commission selected for the fair. None of the films depicting a stupid, backwards peasant who must learn modern methods from an astute friend or neighbor are included in the program. Films such as The Good and the Bad Dairyman, The Correct Method, and The Revolt of the Beets, all of which use this narrative structure, have given way to films that completely eliminate any negative images of ignorant farmers. An excellent example of the “new” discursive approach is the short film made by J.C. Bernard in 1933 entitled Au service de la terre (In the Service of the Earth).36 The film opens with wide shots of agricultural landscapes, villages, castles, and cathedrals, with a commentary praising the efforts of past Frenchmen to transform the national landscape: “The calm beauty of the French countryside has been enriched by its people over the centuries by harmonious castles and magnificent cathedrals.” Then, over the horizon, a fleet of tractors and plows appears like a conquering army, intercut with shots of working oxen and horses. The commentary in praise of agriculture continues: The fertility of its soil and the mildness of its climate make France a fundamentally agricultural nation. For working the land, the farmer has not given up his horses or his oxen. But there are working methods that are more modern; vast stretches of land cultivated by powerful tractors. Here, the old methods are presented as natural and understandable, but not misguided; the path towards mechanization appears simply as a

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better alternative, more efficient and modern. The narrator goes on to present the advantages of various machines designed for specific tasks, explaining how much faster and more thoroughly they can perform the work, and even claiming that they are fun to drive. “Driving this little machine is a sport,” he says of a small motorized plow designed to work between rows of vines (Figure 5.1). Each new machine appears in a dissolve over an image of the older method of planting, weeding, or harvesting. No commentary specifically condemns the old methods; they merely fade out under the influence of the new. The new farmers are happier. They sing as they work, sure evidence of the improvement in their lives. In the final sequence, a group of farmers stand around relaxing, as a fleet of tractors sweeps over the crest of the hill, silhouetted against the sunset (Figure 5.2). Large letters spell out “the army of peace” on the screen as triumphant music swells and the narrator proclaims,

Figure 5.1 “Driving this little machine is a sport,” boasts the narrator of Au service de la terre (In the Service of the Earth, J. C. Bernard, 1933). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 5.2 A fleet of tractors—“The Army of Peace”—appears on the horizon in J. C. Bernard’s Au service de la terre (In the Service of the Earth, 1933). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

“each year, all over our beautiful country, from the large town to the modest village, French machines set out again, tireless, in the service of the earth.” This film reflects the tenor of promotional discourse that organizers of the Rural Center wanted to disseminate both to urban bourgeois and to rural audiences. While the Ministry of Agriculture was not interested in the preservation of local cultures for their own sake, it did seek to transform general perceptions of the farming profession, both within and outside of the farming community. For bourgeois audiences, viewed as consumers, portraying farmers as competent, modern workers would not only help to shape a generally positive perception of them, but it would also encourage consumers to recognize and purchase French products out of national pride, thus improving the rural economy. For rural audiences, the goal was to improve both the professional image of farming and the concrete aspects of everyday life in order to encourage

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younger farmers to take up their parents’ profession rather than emigrate to the cities in search of a better life. In both cases, images of rural life were invoked not as a nostalgic return to the past, but as a progressive approach to a better future.

Promoting Regional Diversity: Film at the Regional Center In contrast to the objectives of the Rural Center, which presented a generic vision of the modernized rural that could be applicable anywhere in France, the Regional Center sought to portray France as a diverse collection of local cultures whose regional specificities, taken together, made up what was distinctly French about the French nation. Although the specific definitions of what was a local culture and how it should be portrayed changed as fair planning progressed, the overall vision depicted the rich cultural diversity of regions that were nonetheless dynamic and open to modernization. For the Rural Center, the Ministry of Agriculture was able to draw upon its existing film collections for the film program, but no such corpus of film existed to animate the screens of the Regional Center. None of the various groups interested in regionalism under the umbrella of the Fédération régionaliste française had previously used film to promote their agenda. Nor do the archives reveal, prior to 1937, a self-consciously regionalist message in educational documentaries. In a 1934 catalogue compiled by the French Committee on Educational Documentary Film, at the request of the International Institute for Educational Cinema in Rome, only seven of the twenty-seven “regions” designated as such at the 1937 Exhibition receive any treatment in documentary film (Brittany, Normandy, Provence, Savoie, Champagne, Alsace, Corsica). Films devoted to the French provinces are included in the general category of “geography,” a category in which films tend to be devoted to a mountain range, a river valley, a city, or a department rather than a “region” in the 1937 sense of the word. Peer and Hurtt confirm that the definition of the regions for the purposes of the fair was the subject of great debate, because a complex web of economic interests were involved, and cultural elements such as language, architecture, dress, cuisine, or furniture did not map neatly into coherent and easily delineated geographic units. The final map of 27 regions devised for the fair was the result of extensive negotiation and debate,

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and even the Regional Commission itself admitted that the results were somewhat arbitrary.37 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that no existing documentary film focused exclusively on “Poitou, Aunis and Saintonge” (region 5 at the fair) or “Marche, Quercy, Périgord” (region 6). Nor could existing archives be counted on to provide the precise mix of modernism and the preservation of tradition that the Regional Commission was looking for, as unlike the message promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture, this form of regionalism had not hitherto been the subject of an aggressive propaganda campaign. Consequently, the Regional Commission decided to write and produce a series of films for the sole purpose of bringing the newly classified and reified regions alive at the fair. To carry out this initiative, the Commission designated Léandre Vaillat, an architectural journalist and longtime defender of regionalism in Le Temps, to write film treatments for each of the regions that would then be passed on to production companies for their execution. Vaillat, a representative of the Union corporative de l’art français (UCAF) on the Regional Commission until his dismissal in 1936, was a vehement defender of artists and artisans, and he believed that the Regional Center should highlight the work of man and not the progress of industry. His almost religious view of the regions as reservoirs of authenticity based on the past is reflected in an article he wrote in L’Illustration just prior to the opening of the fair. “In dance, as in language, archaic forms can be more surely preserved far from main roads and cosmopolitan intersections.” He goes on to write in essentialized and deterministic terms about the various peoples that make up the French nation. The game of pelote basque, for example, has “modeled the Basque race,” and the “Alsatian character has a particular humour and vivacity.” Vaillat seems to be torn, however, in his views on the extent to which contemporary views of the regions should be based exclusively on the past. On the portrayal of traditional costumes in the film Alsace, he explains that “it is not with the vain desire to prevent evolution from happening— costumes have always evolved—but to prolong the present by these perspectives on the past that have such charm.”38 Vaillat’s interest in portraying the charm of the French regions is clearly reflected in his film treatments, which consistently emphasize a painterly approach to landscape that would highlight its picturesque qualities. He wants to see the regions laid out in the films first and foremost as objects of esthetic consumption, and he turns to the language of

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painting and art criticism to convey this. In the introduction to his treatment for Méditerranée (Mediterranean), the film made for the LanguedocMéditerranée region, he writes of the coast in geometric rather than geographic language, as “a succession of arcs of a wide-radius circle, joining at points.” The painterly approach to landscape is explicit further on: [The film] should capture the appearance of low-lying lands suspended between water and sky, below sweeping clouds, in the manner of a Dutch landscape, where a few rowboats slip slowly along like the clouds.39 His references to painting are constant and specific; at one point, he mentions a painting of the Camargue region, “almost Japanese in character, with black bulls seen through a light curtain of tamarisk,” and suggests that the camera operator could use this painting as an inspiration for his composition. The progress of science, industry, and design, otherwise so important in the conception of the regional center, are all but eliminated from Vaillat’s cinematic vision of the region. He makes passing mention of Pasteur’s experiments on silkworms in his presentation of Launac, which he then quickly complements with a return to the neo-classical frame of vision, describing the “Latin composition” of the landscape “which seems to have been made for the brush of a painter like Poussin.” While he does include one shot of a hydroelectric dam, all other references to local manufacturing concerns are exclusively small-scale and family-operated: the Simon brothers’ bell-making company in Carpentras receives a passing mention, as does the Anduze pottery, the biscuit factory in Bédarieux, the silk stockings manufactured in Gange, and the mineral water bottling concern in Lamalou. All of these, the narrator emphasizes, are “local, family- and artisan-run industries.” Throughout the film, Vaillat insists on framing the old in such a way as to crop out the new. Montpellier is “an ancient city whose beauty is classical and traditional.” With six pages of the seventeen-page treatment devoted to this one city, not one single modern (i.e. post-eighteenthcentury) building is included among the long lists of postcard-style shots of “typical” buildings. Where an old monument (such as the Fontaine des Trois Grâces, completed in 1776) is surrounded by more modern edifices (such as the nineteenth-century opera house), as is the case in

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downtown Montpellier, Vaillat suggests that the fountain should be shot in the foreground of a medium shot to “isolate [it] from its mediocre environment.” In contrast, he urges the cameraman to shoot the entire ensemble of buildings surrounding the Romanesque church of Saint Martin de Londres, because of their “purity”: he describes the church as located “in an absolutely pure setting of old houses, with a cross.” He gives extremely specific instructions on how to shoot historic buildings without showing any telegraph wires; the reasoning is that the wires “compromise the beauty,” but they also serve as a reminder that modern life continues in these regions. Local traditions and festivals receive considerable attention, and here the emphasis appears to be on local color rather than on the actual age of the festival. For example, the Provençal festivals involving horses and bulls such as the feria and the course libre camarguaise date only to the mid-nineteenth century, and yet Vaillat gives them special attention in his film treatment. He also highlights the summer water jousts in Sète, an older tradition, dating at least to the early seventeenth century. Only certain traditions must be included in the film, however; the festivities in Saintes Maries de la Mer, for example, should not be included in the film, as they are “in decline.” This festival, dedicated to the patron “saint” of the gypsies, whose mythology has become attached to the church in Saintes Maries de la Mer, draws participants from all over France and the Romany world. While Vaillat does not explain his reservations, it would appear logical that he does not consider this event to be “authentically” rooted in local tradition as are the other festivals he mentions. The final view of the Languedoc region as summed up in the film’s conclusion is that of a strong connection to the past. In the summary paragraph, the region is characterized as a land of contrasts between two pasts: the Mediterranean, pagan, Latin culture of the coast combined with the mystical, Protestant, Cévenol culture of the mountains. In this odd and sweeping conclusion, which ignores the strong Catholic and royal traditions that led to much of the architecture shown in the film, Vaillat attempts to exoticize the region rhetorically by distancing it from the viewer. Vaillat’s film treatments for the other regions follow similar rhetorical patterns. He consistently emphasizes history and architecture, with very little mention of modern life or industry. Insisting on the connection between man and his environment as a natural one of harmony and interdependence, he makes repeated reference to the traces the past has

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left on the present, whether it be in the form of stone steps hollowed out by the feet of passersby, churches that stand as imprints of past religious fervor, or the natural mimesis between the curves of a river, the gesture of a peasant, and a Romanesque arch. In his film Aunis et Saintonge, he reminds the viewer of the historical existence of these regions as two Ancien Régime provinces, combined only after the Revolution into the department of the Charente Inférieure. The final image of this film, rather than a view, for example, of the new harbor under construction at La Rochelle, is that of Aix Island, from which “the grandest and most tragic departure” took place: that of Napoleon the First, en route to exile. These film treatments reflect a vision of the regions that is more rooted in the past than the modernist regionalism reflected in Vaillat’s writings on architecture. Architecturally, he was not among the pure traditionalists such as Gustave Umbdenstock who advocated a complete return to styles of the past. Rather, Vaillat and other modernist regionalists advocated a recasting of traditional vernacular forms with a view to the comforts of modern living.40 The latter view was clearly reflected in some of the regionalist films at the exhibition. L’artisanat breton (Breton Handicrafts), also written by Vaillat, is an example. This film presents a vision of Breton handicrafts that dovetails perfectly with the modernist view of regional culture that ultimately prevailed at the Regional Center and also, to some extent, at the Colonial Center.41 It opens with an anecdote designed to remind the viewer how attached to “tradition” Brittany remains: only two or three years earlier, a traveling salesman carrying hat buckles with only two catches instead of the customary three was not able to sell a single one until he had taken them back to the manufacturer to correct the mistake. It goes on to make a detailed inventory of handicrafts in Brittany by region, as well as certain folk museums where the best examples can be found. Next, the narrator comments: “Of course, what we have listed here, following administrative geography and to facilitate field research, is the survival of traditional craftsmanship. To live, this craftsmanship must evolve.” He then goes on to give the example of the clogmakers at Dinan, who under the supervision of an architect, now produce turned wood pieces in a modern workshop, which is much easier for the worker than the “primitive” conditions he is used to. The designs, also, must change; complicated motifs are simplified to streamline and speed up the process. The architect is not there to impose designs, but rather to “to correct what is not in the spirit of their tradition.” Without going

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into much more detail, the narrator sums up the philosophy in just a few final words: We will have shown the past, the present, and the necessary evolution of craftsmanship: tradition doesn’t mean immobility, but movement (tradere: to deliver), adaptation to contemporary life. Following this comment is an extremely brief and vague suggestion that the film will go on to discuss “modern Brittany” in terms of its industries and manufacturing. While this treatment is hasty in comparison to the other regional film scripts, and is probably unfinished, it does serve to confirm that Vaillat was not only interested in invoking the regions as repositories of the past. With the exception of Breton Handicrafts, most of the film treatments written by Léandre Vaillat show a coherently nostalgic vision of the regions that relies on references to history and “tradition” rather than on modernization and commercialism. Analyzing the impact of a particular aspect of the fair based solely on organizers’ intentions, however, overlooks the layers of chaos built into any production on such a grand scale and to overinterpret the coherence of the message. The evidence from surviving films and press reports suggests that the finalized film programs that were actually shown at the fair presented a far more complex and fragmented view of rural France than Vaillat had initially planned. The first level of deviation from the nostalgic message derives from the fact that most of Vaillat’s treatments were executed by private production companies (primarily Atlantic Films, Jean Benoit-Lévy, and Argus Films). Vaillat played a role as consultant and coordinator of film appropriateness, but the scale of the project was such that he could not micromanage shooting, editing, and commentary to the extent that his treatments suggest he would have liked.42 Individual filmmakers had considerable control over the final product, despite the constraints imposed upon them by the central planners, control that led to fragmentation of the actual messages that circulated at the fair. Second, while the initial plan in 1936 was for the Regional Center to finance the films, they ended up being co-sponsored by the Grands Réseaux des Chemins de Fer Français, the five large regional railroad companies.43 The involvement of financial concerns required adjustments and negotiations of the regional images to be promoted. The initial plan for the larger Regional Center included no displays of industry,

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commerce, or tourism, but local organizing committees in each region insisted on these latter inclusions to merit their support of their respective pavilions.44 The involvement of the railroads in the film project demonstrates a similar recasting of representational priorities. The railroad companies agreed to sponsorship because of their contribution to potential tourism by rail, but the product also had to accommodate this new layer of interests. Most of the regional films—at least those financed by the railroads—ended up shifting either to the Tourism Pavilion or to the Transportation Pavilion, and the surviving examples suggest that the rhetorical emphasis had also shifted away from a total reliance on the past for legitimacy, towards a vision of the regions that harmoniously blended history and tradition with commerce, industry, and scientific progress.

The Shift to Commercialism: Film at the Tourism Pavilion From the existing film record, it is possible to make a partial estimation of how regional France was portrayed in the Tourism Pavilion. Tourism, as we have seen, although not initially part of the concept of the Regional Center, was quickly marshaled as an argument by the fair organizers in Paris to garner financial support from local regional commissions. As fair planning progressed, some of the focus on tourism shifted to the Tourism Pavilion, designed to package all of France into one space to attract the visitor. This shift is evident in the transfer of many of the films initially designed for the Regional Center to the Tourism Pavilion. None of the surviving films from the exhibition uses rhetorical strategies so completely based on history and nostalgia as the initial film treatments written by Vaillat. In J.K. Raymond-Millet’s Aude, belle inconnue (Aude, Beautiful Stranger) for example, one of the films shown in the Tourism Pavilion, industry has its place alongside history.45 The film follows the river Aude from the mountains to the sea, passing scenes as diverse as hydroelectric dams—which produce “the fairy of electricity,” clearly a positive image rather than a blight on the landscape—as well as the august walls of Carcassonne, imbued with “twenty centuries of history.” The presentation of Carcassonne begins with a lengthy discourse on the history of its construction, which exudes “an intoxicating perfume of French history,” but it also includes a section on the modern town, the bustling markets, and the new constructions.

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The city of Carcassonne is not only a prodigious architectural construction; it does not have, and does not want to have, the beauty of a dead thing, and in fact a thousand inhabitants live in the shadow of its towers. Women grow vegetable gardens, children play after school, and friendly houses open lovingly to the sun (Figure 5.3). The film continues to follow the river in its course, stopping at some odd choices for tourist destinations such as a maritime cemetery for sailors lost at sea and a sanatorium for children. Other films shown at the Tourism Pavilion contain the same mix of pastoral scenes and modern industrial life that Vaillat seemed to have been so concerned to avoid. Such is the case for J.C. Bernard’s documentary, Le Rouergue (Rouergue) (Figure 5.4).46 The film opens with a

Figure 5.3 “The city of Carcassonne [. . .] does not have, and does not want to have, the beauty of a dead thing” Aude, belle inconnue (Aude, Beautiful Stranger, J. K. Raymond-Millet, 1937). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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Figure 5.4 “Age-old tradition” mixes with “industrial progress” in J.C. Bernard’s Le Rouergue (1937). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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commentary very similar to Vaillat’s opening in Aunis et Saintonge, with a reference to the “old provinces” of France. The Revolution confused geography by giving departments the names of rivers. Why the Aveyron, rather than the Tarn, or the Lot? It is much clearer and more precise to use the old name of the province: Rouergue. Bernard is not simply echoing official fair propaganda here; Rouergue was not even included as one of the official “regions” designated by the Regional Commission for the fair. The selection of this film indicates the extent to which official plans gave way to the exigencies of filling programs; Bernard was able to provide an acceptable film that corresponded more or less to the spirit of the pavilion, so his film was included. The film opens with a “seduction” sequence made up of picturesque shots of rural landscapes and villagers dressed up in “traditional” costumes, accompanied by a commentary informing the viewer that s/he will learn of this region’s “hidden beauty.” After about five minutes of rural scenes (barnyards, a village procession, farm animals), the scene changes to a brief view of a strip mine, included to represent economic progress. Seven more minutes of farming and folk traditions ensue, before the center of attention shifts: “next to age-old traditions, [we see] industrial progress.” The scene shifts to a train rushing along a track and over a soaring steel viaduct, which the narrator praises as the very epitome of modern life, before moving on to a hydroelectric dam that provides several departments with “power and light.” Electricity appears again not as a neutral term, but in words that highlight its positive benefits. A six-minute sequence on the “mysterious and subtle” cheesemaking industry in Roquefort follows, highlighting the harmony between modernization (mechanized conveyor belts, cheese handling and piercing) and ancient methods (aging the cheeses in the caves that naturally provide the perfect combination of temperature and humidity, scraping and salting the cheeses by hand, individual determination of readiness by the cheesemaker) (Figure 5.5). The train functions in this film as a kind of visual refrain, linking the various sequences together and providing a subtle reminder for the viewer that train travel is fast and comfortable. Other industries in the region—such as tanneries and leatherworking—appear side by side with images of rural life and farming, working together to reinforce the notion that the two can coexist and that neither is a threat to the other.

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Figure 5.5 In Roquefort, workers engage in “mysterious and subtle cheesemaking,” a practice that blends nature, tradition, and mechanization. Le Rouergue (J.C. Bernard, 1937). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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While the films in the Rural Center attempt to address both rural and urban audiences, it is clear that the Regional Center and Tourism Pavilion films were concerned primarily with an urban bourgeois audience as “consumer” of the France pictured on screen. The narrator’s commentary occasionally makes this particularly explicit, as in Étienne Nadoux’ film Images de Savoie, in which the narrator mentions that the lace ribbons made by the old women in the film will soon appear on bonnets in stores, “for your pleasure, ladies.” This is clearly a form of direct address to the urban women in the audience. He also mentions “our department stores,” urban venues, as the final destination of the wooden toys and other Christmas baubles that the viewer sees artisans making in the film.

Conclusion The various chaotic and competing images of provincial France that were available to fair visitors had at least one common thread. They used film to rationalize and package the regions in the service of a specific set of interests, largely external to the interests of the inhabitants pictured on screen. These interests included encouraging tourism, especially via rail, and restoring national prestige in the face of threats from abroad by recasting the unique qualities of France in terms of regional diversity. No longer considered a threat to French unity, as they were during the French Revolution, the regions were for the first time given pride of place on the national stage as necessary repositories of the cultural uniqueness that buttressed that unity. For the nationalist paradigm to work, a reactionary representation of the provinces merely as links to a glorious past was not sufficient. The possibility of harmony between modernization and tradition had to be suggested. For the most part, the films espoused both sides of the equation and attempted to present this delicate balance in complementary, rather than in oppositional, terms. These cinematic representations of regional and rural France were manufactured and controlled by forces in the center rather than in the regions themselves. Pierre Bourdieu’s observation about French peasants holds true, in this case, for the entire population of rural France: rather than controlling its own representations, it continued to be represented from the outside.47 The bas-relief sculptures on the tower of the Tourism Pavilion serve as an ironic reminder of this observation. Paris lies in the center, like a sun, with lines radiating out from it like rays. The lines that were drawn to symbolize travel to and from the metropolis also

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serve as a reminder that the capital would have the final control over what the French provinces would ultimately mean to the nation. This observation was also true of the pavilions in the Regional Center and the wares that they housed, and it did not fail to cause acrimony among the local committees who were called upon to finance them.48 Neither the leaders of the organizing committees appointed by the Popular Front government, nor the regionalist architect who initially defined the film treatments, nor the filmmakers who wrote the commentaries and shot the footage, nor the railroad companies who provided the financing were strongly rooted in the cultures they claimed to represent. While images of rural France had been circulating in documentary film since the early years of the century, the 1937 World’s Fair played an important role in generating films that specifically packaged the French nation in regional, rather than in geophysical, terms. Of the 31 million visitors that would flow through the fair in six months, some of them at least would return home having experienced a virtual visit to unknown regions of France through film. Some of them would also choose to visit some of those regions, as a 25 to 75 percent rise in tourism to the Jura, Loir-et-Cher, Eure-et-Loir, Bas-Rhin, Saône-et-Loire, and Seine-Inférieure departments in 1937 over 1936 indicates.49 At the very least, they could not fail to notice the government’s emphasis on defining modern France as strongly attached to its rural roots, especially in contrast to the modernist displays chosen by other nations at the fair. In the larger context of the fair, the films certainly played a role in disseminating modernized images of rural France to fair visitors. What distinguishes the films from the other types of exhibits is their longer shelf life. The profusion of films generated for the fair would continue to circulate for years after the exhibition had closed its doors. Many of the same regionalist films produced for the 1937 fair were sent to New York for the French pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, at which the French government chose to portray a similar view of modern France as a nation with a regional soul. They also circulated within France, through the educational film networks discussed in Chapter 2, and abroad via the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ public relations office, the Service des oeuvres françaises à l’étranger.50 Their importance in helping to naturalize the representation of France as a modern rural nation, therefore, goes beyond the influence they may have had at the fair. This view of the modernized rural also had echoes in the colonial films that circulated in France during the same period.

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Chapter 6

“Carcasses of Manioc-Eaters”: Filming Colonial France

This is our hope—immense, multiple. We will not give these forest races the tall stature of the races of the savanna, but we can broaden narrow chests, straighten paralyzed legs, and transform these carcasses of manioc-eaters into fine brothers of men. —Georges Manue, Cameroun, création française (1937)1

On August 10, 1923, a crowd of 3,000 spectators gathered for an outdoor film program on the Rapp Square in Colmar, Alsace, about 40 miles south-southwest of Strasbourg. The weather was predictably clear. Colmar is the driest town in France. A generator transported in an army truck lent by the Ministry of War powered the film projector, and the projectionist was a veteran camera operator who had shot war footage for the Army of the Rhine. The spectators had come to see a two and a half hour program of documentary film. As the skies darkened, the first images flickered on the large white screen that hung in a frame constructed from long poles. Broad expanses of brilliantly lit desert: Colomb-Bechar, in French Algeria. Over the course of the evening, visitors would experience a vast visual journey that would take them from this desert outpost to the Roman ruins of Baalbeck, from Habé dancers in Timbuktu to the rice fields of Tonkin. They would learn about the production of rubber and lime, juniper oil and coconuts, soap and tires. All of the images they saw were filmed somewhere in France’s vast overseas empire. Colmar was only one of 32 cities in Alsace and Lorraine that the Cinéma colonial du Petit Journal visited that summer. Posters advertised the event in both French and German for audiences whose native towns had only recently become part of France again, after 50 years of German rule

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(Figure 6.1). The German colonies that had been transferred to France after the First World War, Cameroon and Togo, were not featured on a program that primarily covered zones conquered by France alone: Algeria, French West Africa, Indochina, Madagascar. Xavier Loisy, chairman of the board of the newspaper that sponsored the event, was a former

Figure 6.1 A poster advertising the Cinéma colonial du Petit Journal in French (Summer 1923). CAOM, AGEFOM 845/2262.

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colonial administrator who became active in promoting the colonial project in France on his return. He served as assistant general commissioner for the 1922 colonial exhibition in Marseilles, which featured a free colonial film program that was enormously popular. This initiative gave him the idea of having Le Petit Journal co-sponsor free colonial film screenings for school children in Paris. The project, which kicked off in 1922–23, met with enthusiastic support from the Minister of Colonies, Albert Sarraut, and drew over 60,000 children in the first year. The success of this program in Paris led to a series of special summer circuits for the populations of Alsace, Lorraine, and for French soldiers occupying the Rhineland. The evening in Colmar described above was part of this program. The goal was to “show audiences our French colonies and their enormous economic resources.”2 The project met with the approval of the Ministry of Colonies and the Ministry of War, both of which offered financial support. The existing economic agencies for individual colonies lent films and also participated financially.3 Audience response was so enthusiastic that the organizers thought it wise to warn viewers against rushing off to start new lives in the colonies immediately. The energetic propaganda campaign spearheaded by the Petit Journal in the early 1920s provides one concrete example of the use of film to “nationalize the colonial idea” by disseminating ideas about the French colonial empire to the population of metropolitan France during the interwar period.4 This chapter analyzes the contribution of colonial documentary film to this project. It asks questions about what the state hoped to accomplish through film campaigns, what the film medium in particular had to contribute to a new vision of imperial France, and what the implications of this new vision might have been for the viewing public at the time. Reading colonial representation against the representations of rural France that have been analyzed in previous chapters provides evidence that the colonial story was as integral as the regional one to a rewriting of the national story. Both colonial and regional cultures took on new importance within metropolitan France. State intervention in colonial propaganda campaigns has been the subject of considerable historical attention. This attention has been partly fueled by recent interest in cultural aspects of colonialism.5 Since the 1980s, many scholars have worked on colonial representation in visual culture such as posters, postcards, children’s toys, magazine illustrations, comics, and museums.6 Historians of public opinion have attempted to trace the reception of a “colonial idea” on the part of the

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French public at large, to determine the extent to which propaganda actually influenced feelings about the empire.7 Much of this work mentions film in passing, but it does not devote attention to its specificity as a medium, to its newness as a vehicle for mass communication in the interwar period, or to the specifics of the messages promoted in individual films.8 Film historians, who are interested in the specifics of film discourse, have primarily focused on the representations of the colonies in fiction film, leaving the documentary archive largely unexplored.9 This omission can be explained in part by the difficulty of access to the films; until very recently, no inventory existed of the French National Film Archive’s holdings in this area. An additional explanation can be found in film scholars’ inherent prejudice against documentary, deemed esthetically inferior and therefore unworthy of study.10 Since French government involvement in film propaganda was mainly limited to the documentary form, such an omission is significant. Of the few studies that have been devoted to colonial documentary film, the works of Peter Bloom and Béatrice de Pastre stand out. Both scholars approach film history by analyzing representation with careful attention to the institutional context of production, distribution, and reception.11 The analysis of colonial propaganda films in this chapter also seeks to evaluate the importance of film representation within a social and cultural context, based on evidence from within and outside of the film frame. This chapter aims to provide a more complete and nuanced view of the contribution of colonial documentary film to the development of a generalized “colonial idea” in France than is available from earlier studies.12 Film discourse and its reception provide detail on what kinds of representations were circulating and how the public reacted. I will argue that colonial documentary films were primarily conformist documents, propagating the views of a political consensus that was broadly pro-colonial during the interwar years.13 Because of the characteristics specific to the medium, film was more successful than other forms of propaganda in creating the illusion of an empire that was homogeneous and rational, in which the French presence was a positive one. The rhetorical building blocks of this illusion were variations on the theme of mastery, which Alice Conklin argues is central to the French civilizing mission.14 The republican ideology that underpinned this vision of empire also fueled a series of myths and stereotypes about colonized peoples. Although tangential to the intended project of the films, these

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myths were nonetheless logical consequences of the principal tenets of French republicanism and its civilizing mission. Evidence from the documentary film archive suggests that information available to the French public about the empire through film became more explicitly nationalistic as the interwar years progressed. While many films from the 1920s demonstrated specific attention to individual colonies and local cultures, over the course of the 1930s, broad general films about the empire as a whole tended to highlight grand national themes at the expense of local specificity. They thus engaged in a process of erasure of cultural specificity and geographic precision. This erasure collapsed the complexity of the empire into a single narrative. Moving away from the idea that “France has colonies” and towards the idea that “France is an empire,” it may have helped to foster the kind of solidarity with the empire that certain opinion polls show among the French in the late 1930s. This vision of the colonial enterprise as a national one portrayed the empire as the antidote to France’s political and social ills in the interwar period. Film was a particularly useful handmaiden in this task. The medium of cinema shares a fundamental characteristic of the French civilizing mission in the colonies: universalism. Like the embattled Republic, the cinema aspired to be universal. The Republic imposed universal values on diverse regions of the globe, and film imposed a universal visual frame onto the disparate landscapes, peoples, and projects that constituted the vast French empire. Both the cinema and the Republic created an illusion of uniformity among very different subjects.15 Obscuring fragmentation and difference on the side of the colonizer as well as of the colonized, the colonial film sets up a series of binary oppositions that make the entire colonial project appear to make sense to an audience for whom the empire is at once “made known” and “made familiar.” This process, which we might label “visual annexation,” relies on a complex tension between sameness and difference. Overseas France appears to be different enough to be desirable and appealing, but this difference is at the same time managed through the use of icons of the French republic that would have been familiar to interwar French audiences. Film portrays difference while at the same time rationalizing and containing it within the uniform space of the frame.16 An audience participating in the “simultaneous collective experience” of watching a colonial documentary left the theater reassured that the

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empire was coherent and controlled. In addition, they would learn that despite France’s internal divisions, her colonial possessions provided a space in which Frenchmen were united in a common project that could make them proud of their nation.17 If the films’ explicit goal was to garner support for the colonial cause, implicitly, they also acted as propaganda for the republican cause throughout rural and urban France. The representations of colonial France in documentary films from the interwar years was, like colonial propaganda more generally, the heterogeneous result of a blend of public and private initiatives. In this respect, the Cinéma colonial du Petit Journal with which the chapter opened was typical of colonial information campaigns of the period. Although the state was very interested in “colonial propaganda,” public funding was limited, and many public initiatives relied on partnership with private interests. This chapter will bring out some of these tensions and ambiguities in an attempt to trace the development of state intervention in colonial propaganda via film and the resulting consequences.

Governmental Interest in Colonial Documentary Film Albert Sarraut, the interwar minister of colonies who was influential in developing film programs in Indochina, was also a strident defender of colonial propaganda within France. He believed that images should serve as a cornerstone of the campaign to convince metropolitan French people to support the imperial project. It is absolutely indispensable that serious, methodical, and constant propaganda, by word, image, press, lecture, film, and exhibition [. . .] influence the adults and children of our country [. . .] This teaching must be livelier, more expressive, and more practical; images, films, and projections must inform and amuse French youngsters who know nothing of our colonies.18 In 1926, Sarraut was still pursuing the same line of thought, describing in L’Europe Nouvelle the grand goals behind the development of a “colonial idea” in France: To spread [the colonial idea] ever more widely in the French imagination, to incorporate it into the very center of our economic and

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political preoccupations, [. . .] so that the people and the state can finally work together to organize a powerful effort that will make wealth, security, peace, and greatness burst forth from the seeds present in the colonial enterprise.19 In Sarraut’s vision, nothing less than international peace and prosperity were at stake in the attempt to convince French people to support and invest in the empire. These views clearly reflected those of the members of the colonial propaganda conference organized by the Institut colonial français at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition. We must help the immense majority of French people to realize the ever-growing importance of the role of our colonies in our economy and our national life. [. . .] We want to bring to our insufficientlyinformed compatriots facts that will settle into their minds and will finally crystallize into a deep conviction that the most certain and the most immediate interest of every French person is to take advantage of everything our colonies can give us.20 Sarraut’s plan for a propaganda campaign that would encourage the French population at large to support the colonial endeavor was firmly grounded in economic concerns. He believed that for a nation ravaged by war, the colonies could potentially offer secure markets, cheaper raw materials and agricultural products, a mechanism for minimizing adverse trade deficits, and a reserve of manpower for the French army. Promoting the colonial idea, therefore, meant encouraging French consumers to buy colonial products, attracting French capital to the colonies, and recruiting young people into the colonial services.21 Despite some internal debates about the future of the French colonial project, politicians across the ideological spectrum broadly supported the idea that the empire was crucial to national reconstruction and international grandeur.22 Sarraut believed that these economic goals could not be achieved through the old colonial method in which the colonies were required to be economically self-sufficient. In his definition of what Gary Wilder has termed “the imperial nation-state,” Sarraut included the need for France to protect the health and well being of colonized populations through various welfarist measures such as health, hygiene, and education, a reform effort that some scholars refer to as “colonial humanism.”23 This philosophy was fueled by the mercantilist conviction that the colonies

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could only prosper if their inhabitants were numerous and healthy. The connection continued to fuel colonial reformist ideology through the late 1930s.24 Doubtless because of its potential to reflect favorably on French colonialism in general, the theme of colonial humanism played a particularly important role in colonial publicity campaigns.25 A 1931 report on colonial propaganda in schools exemplifies this emphasis on colonial humanism: When we speak of exploiting our colonial domain, we do not mean for the sole benefit of one of the parties to the detriment of the other. We do not want to deprive natives of their natural rights [. . .] What we want is to associate, in an ascending march towards a better life, people who are French by origin and French by adoption. The generosity of this idea of solidarity between the Metropole and its Colonies is particularly French.26 Sarraut’s ambitious plan for colonial development, which he estimated would cost three and a half billion francs, was never completely funded. The propaganda campaigns that did take place in the 1920s were the result of a blend of public and private initiatives.27 Nonetheless, the 1920s proved to be a particularly productive decade for colonial documentary film, which played an important role in these campaigns.28 Indeed, film had a special role to play in this process that was different from other forms of propaganda. Marc Simon, secretary of the Colonial Institute in Le Havre, expressed in 1931 a widely held view, writing that “film propaganda is one of the most efficient means of popularizing the Colonial Idea because of the large number of viewers as well as the possibility of making documentary films appealing.”29 These two advantages of the film medium—its ability to reach the grand public and its inherent entertainment value—converged to convince colonial governments that film campaigns were worth pursuing despite their elevated cost. The principal assumption underlying the arguments in favor of film was that because of its appeal to the emotions, film could diffuse knowledge while inspiring sympathetic emotions. Gilles Manceron, the Resident general in Tunisia, expressed this idea in 1931: The general public [. . .] will come to know the captivating and varied physiognomy of this immense overseas domain that is the pride of France. These images will remain engraved on their minds, because

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visual memory has a prodigious capacity for adaptation [. . .] It will allow us to create in our country a vast current of ideas in favor of our colonies that deserve to be better known, in order to become appreciated and loved as they should be by all Frenchmen.30 In other words, knowledge will inspire interest, which in turn leads to sympathy, love, and eventually either colonial vocations or investment. Guillaume-Michel Coissac, the film journalist writing in an industry publication, echoes this official assumption: Besides bringing communities together, the image helps people to know one another, encourages travel and the mise en valeur [development] of our colonies; it procures the underestimated benefit of creating between all humans, even those separated by thousands of miles, bonds of brotherhood.31 Private actors seeking public support for colonial film campaigns used similar arguments. In the following passage, the director of the Petit Journal announces his colonial film proposal to Sarraut. He seeks to align his rhetoric with the minister’s own discourse: It seems essential, and you yourself have insisted on this point in your speeches and writing, to react against this ignorance, because by getting to know the populations and landscapes of our colonies, the French will become more interested in this other part of their country, and this is how we will progressively achieve a close union between the Metropole and its overseas possessions.32 One of Sarraut’s ideas that had particular importance for the development of colonial documentary film was the creation of economic agencies. Bureaus of the Ministry of Colonies devoted to the promotion of the economic interests of the colonies at home and abroad, these agencies were primarily responsible for the government’s participation in colonial publicity campaigns. Besides issuing press releases and participating in exhibitions, they also became involved in documentary film production and distribution.33 They commissioned production companies such as Gaumont, Pathé, Films J. K. Raymond-Millet, and others to make promotional films, of which they retained one or more copies and the non-commercial distribution rights. In some cases, rather than commissioning private companies for their film work, the economic

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agencies procured the equipment and the expertise necessary to produce and edit their own films. The agency for Togo and Cameroon, the Agence économique des territoires africains sous mandat, was particularly active in producing its own films to promote the territories it served. In the late 1920s, the governor of the territories agreed to equip a cartographer for the agency, René Bugniet, to shoot and edit short films in the course of his mapmaking rounds.34 His films consisted of tableaux of daily life in the territories and the economic activities of the French. They were extremely well received by the agency, the territorial government, and by the agency’s clients. “If only all the films sent abroad were of this quality!” raves the French consulate in Liège, referring to Bugniet’s films.35 By 1930, the territorial government was already discouraging other filmmakers to visit the region, writing to René LeSomptier, for example, that “all the interesting regions have already been filmed by Bugniet [and others].” He became known as the “official cinéaste of the territory,” and in 1935, he received the Legion of Honor, France’s highest distinction.36 In addition to direct involvement in film production and distribution, the French state indirectly supported imperialist film propaganda by providing logistical and sometimes financial support for private travelers who wanted to make films. The well-publicized Citroën croisières, or auto journeys, are the most well-known example of this kind of support. Such was the case for the Croisière noire (The Black Journey), the 1924–25 automobile expedition across French territories in Africa that came to be known by the title of Léon Poirier’s film of the expedition. In the planning stages of this journey, André Citroën corresponded extensively with French authorities. He borrowed Albert Sarraut’s language to shore up support for the endeavor, writing in his proposal, “the problem of mise en valeur of the French Colonies, where all nature of riches useful for rebuilding the national heritage currently lie dormant, has for several years been one of the primary preoccupations of political leaders.”37 He portrayed the Citroën voyage as beneficial to the French nation. It would demonstrate France’s political and military mobility in the colonies, draw the attention of a broad French and international audience to the richness and diversity of France’s African colonies, encourage investment, and further the cause of French scientific knowledge of Africa. Administrative response to Citroën’s plans was overwhelmingly positive. Although he did not receive financial support from the state, he did receive an official mission from the government as

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well as logistical support along the way.38 The resulting film was heralded in the colonial and the general press as a great testament to the virtues of French technology and the colonial enterprise in general, and the President of the Republic personally attended its gala premiere.39 Colonial documentary films enjoyed considerable circulation in France and abroad throughout the interwar period. Most of the films initially circulated in commercial cinemas through the private distribution companies, as documentary shorts accompanying their programs. This “brief career,” as Eric Le Roy writes, was then extended for years through the economic agencies’ free lending programs.40 The agencies lent out films to be shown in schools, as illustrations for scientific lectures, to local colonial propaganda committees, and as research tools for architects and archeologists. In 1932 alone, the agency for Togo and Cameroon lent films to organizations as diverse as the Committee for Colonial Propaganda in La Rochelle, the Seminary for the Pères du St. Esprit in Chavilly, the Industrial Society of Mulhouse, the Geographical Society in Angers, a hospital in Nîmes, a girls’ school in St.-Cyr (Var), and the Colonial Veterans’ Association in Caen.41 Clients of the rural film networks established by the Ministries of Agriculture and Education were particularly interested in receiving films about the colonies.42 The films were also used in various types of industrial and/or cultural exhibitions that included, but were not limited to, the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseille (1922) and Strasbourg (1924), the “colonial weeks” sponsored by regional propaganda committees in French schools, and the enormously popular International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (1931).43 Many colonies specifically commissioned new documentary films for the colonial exhibitions.44 In addition to promoting the colonies at home and the mère-patrie in the colonies, colonial documentaries were also projected abroad. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs devoted a bureau to promotion of French interests abroad (Service des oeuvres françaises à l’étranger), which worked with the individual economic agencies to identify settings in which the films could be shown. Shorter films were projected in schools, universities, ethnographic conferences, meetings of economic think tanks such as the Bureau of commercial economics in New York, and medical colloquia such as that of the Society of Swedish Doctors (Stockholm). Feature-length films were shown, albeit more rarely, in commercial cinemas.45 Often the Ministry depended on French consulates abroad, as well as offices of the Alliance Française, to organize screenings for local audiences.46 Letters received by the agencies confirm that French

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colonial documentaries were generally well received by the international clientele requesting them.47 While precise figures for the agencies’ film collections are rare, it is clear that the scale was smaller than that of the other ministries’ libraries, though not inconsequential. In 1927, the agency for Indochina had 152 films, French West Africa 92, and French Equatorial Africa only 1. The figure for Madagascar was 2,500 meters, which probably meant about three to five short subjects. The agency for Togo-Cameroon had five films in 1931, on the eve of the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris.48 Film loan figures indicate a consistent increase in interest on the part of the agencies’ clients, and a level of demand that often outpaced supply. The agency for Indochina made 1,500 loans between 1924 and 1927.49 French West Africa made 315 loans in 1922, 652 in 1924, 794 in 1925, and 854 in 1926.50 These non-commercial networks primarily distributed silent films through 1940, thus extending the life of the silents made in the 1920s. The economic agency’s collection of silent films on Togo-Cameroon, for example, were lent out and shown so many times that the copies were literally falling apart by the mid-1930s.51 In comparison to Britain’s Empire Marketing Board, which is consistently cited as the only significant example of state investment in imperial propaganda film before the Second World War, these numbers are roughly comparable. The EMB possessed 200 films when it closed in 1934.52 Official accounts clearly indicate that the overall goals for colonial film propaganda were to encourage the investment of capital in colonial markets, consumer preference for colonial products, and recruitment of young people into the colonial service. The overall strategy for this campaign was to produce films that inspired sympathy for the colonial enterprise in general, and an emphasis on colonial humanism was often deployed to this end. However, none of these accounts provides specific information about the kinds of stories the films were to tell, or their reception by the viewing public. The next sections of this chapter examine the films themselves, as well as public responses, to respond to these questions.

Films The films analyzed in this section deal primarily with the region of the French empire that has received the least attention from film historians, the French colonies and territories in sub-Saharan Africa. As in other

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chapters, the analysis highlights patterns of representation found across different films, based on the assumption that it was the repetition of these patterns, rather than the influence of one particular work, that gave documentary film its weight. In the case of colonial documentary film, this observation is reinforced by contemporary production practices. Images shot for one particular production, once in the hands of the economic agencies, were often reshuffled and reused for another purpose. Sometimes images of one colonial landscape were even passed off as another colony in a different film.53 Over the course of the interwar years, the emphasis in colonial documentary films shifted from the idea that “France has colonies” to “France is an empire.” By this I mean that as the interwar years progressed, films devoted to specific colonies gradually gave way to films that provided a broad and reassuring overview of the empire as a whole. This shift led to an erasure from the film archive of contemporaneous debates about colonial reform, and in particular, the debate over association. Attention to local traditions and the emphasis on local elites, important in association debates, gradually disappeared from colonial documentaries over the interwar years. Only some references to another side of the association debate, that of human mise en valeur, remained. By and large, documentary films came to reinforce an implicit assimilationist argument that even apparently different places could be “civilized” through the same processes that were bringing positive effects to metropolitan France.54 In the process, a multifaceted imperialist argument firmly grounded in French republicanism crystallized. The films supported mercantilist, imperialist, and humanitarian visions of colonialism, arguing that commitment to the empire would bolster France’s economy, political strength, and human resources respectively.55 This vision of the colonial enterprise is perhaps best described by Gary Wilder’s analysis of France as an “imperial nation-state” between the wars, in which “the French state’s project to integrate the nation, assimilate provinces, and constitute republican citizens was entwined with its overseas project to integrate the empire, assimilate its colonies, and constitute colonial subjects.”56 In other words, the colonial project became explicitly inscribed within the national project. The principal elements of this discourse of imperial France, as it plays out in the film archive, are various declensions of the idea of mastery. According to Alice Conklin, mastery was the foremost republican principle upon which the French civilizing mission was based. In the

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twentieth-century empire, the emphasis shifted from mastery of peoples, or conquest, to mastery of nature—including the human body—and mastery of “social behavior.” The resulting equation of “civilization” with “freedom from tyranny” included freedom from the tyranny of the elements over man, of disease over health, of instinct over reason, and of ignorance over knowledge.57 At least one of these versions of mastery serves as the underlying principle for each of the following films.

1920s: France has colonies Many colonial documentaries from the 1920s deploy the aforementioned rhetorical structures of mastery and visual annexation without making the kind of broad declaration of colonial ideology that would appear and strengthen over the course of the 1930s. A particularly clear example is a film about French Equatorial Africa, En Afrique noire A.E.F. (In Black Africa: F.E.A., 1925), produced by the French army film unit.58 In this film, the French arrival in a rural African village is portrayed as welcome, benign, and beneficial to the locals. The opening screen proclaims, “The white chief has promised to pay a visit to the native chief. In anticipation, the entire village prepares a joyous reception.” A French officer chats amicably with a local chief, and negotiations take place through gift exchange and open discussion. Subsequent sequences highlight the positive transformations brought by the French to this unknown colonial space. An army outpost brings order and happiness to the village. Close-ups emphasize the new changes: the tricolor flag, neatly organized rows of vegetables in a garden, straight rows of bricks that will form the walls of the outpost and the school, a blackboard with “Leçon de français” (French lesson) written on it in a meticulous hand. The visit from a French doctor receives particular attention. The French have easily demonstrated mastery by bringing order to chaos, without the need for violent conquest. The second part of the film completes the process of visual annexation of the empire by demonstrating that life there is different, but not too different, from life in France. Various images reminiscent of France appear. In a long shot bisected vertically by the French flag, Africans salute the colors at sunset. A mail plane arrives from France. The army officers play a game of pétanque in their free time, and then sip drinks in armchairs at the club afterwards. A French officer goes on an expedition with his uniformed colonial conscripts. A map appears to inform the

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viewer that the journey from France to Africa takes only ten days by boat, two days by plane. These images combine to articulate an argument that Africa is not too far away from France. Furthermore, one can experience the small pleasures of European life even in remote regions of the empire. There is no explicit attempt to relate this small example of colonial harmony to a broader imperial vision of the French nation, but the film establishes one of the elements on which this vision, which emerges in later films, will rely. While some elements of a broad national vision of imperial France were present in the films of the 1920s, this vision had not yet fully crystallized. The films made by René Bugniet for the economic agency of Togo and Cameroon in the late 1920s further this argument. Bugniet made Cameroun: Bamouns et Bamilékés (Cameroon: Bamuns and Bamilekes), Cameroun au pays Foulbé (Cameroon: in Fulbe Country), and Danses du Cameroun (Dances of Cameroon) for the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris. These films circulated widely and the economic agency for the territories was evidently proud of them. The films strive for the detached, scientific tone that the Marshal Lyautey envisioned for the exhibition, in contrast to the “shoddy exoticism” that had characterized other colonial events.59 Bugniet’s films demonstrate an intense interest in local life, customs, and traditions that characterized new policies of association. Cameroon: Bamuns and Bamilekes (ca. 1930) provides a representative example of Bugniet’s work (Figure 6.2). Silent with unadorned intertitles, the film opens in Fumban, Cameroon. It provides a whirlwind tour of Fumban, “Bamun country,” before moving on to Aschang, “the home of the Bamilekes.” Here, children line up for the camera, young women pose with babies, “Bamileke chiefs and their tattooed wives” compose frozen tableaux. Some of the posing subjects rotate slowly, almost mechanically, to show physical details: a hairstyle, teeth, scar patterns on a stomach, a back, a shoulder. This parade of body sections lasts four full minutes before wider shots portray a masked dance. Bugniet’s work exemplifies a rationalistic mastery over colonial subjects that erases their individuality and divorces them from a meaningful cultural context. Although he demonstrates a particular interest in human physical types and categorization, his films contain very little explanation of the practices illustrated. He never names the individuals shown, and sometimes he does not even show their faces. In this respect, the film conveys the impression of a human museum filled with a collection of unlabeled exhibits. As in the army film described above, Bugniet’s work “masters”

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Figure 6.2 Close-ups of human details in René Bugniet’s Cameroun: Bamouns et Bamilékés (Cameroon: Bamuns and Bamilekes, ca. 1930). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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the empire through display and documentation, without demonstrating a coherent imperial narrative. A contemporaneous film made by the army film unit presents another version of mastery, this time of technology over nature. A travers la Guinée (Across Guinea, ca. 1929/30)60 revives one of the key tenets of French colonial policy prior to the First World War, the idea that railroads were central to the economic and human development of the colonies.61 A train journey from Conakry to Kankan is the structuring principle of the film. Scenes of local life intervene as the train stops in various places. As in other silent films, there is no overarching proclamation of colonial philosophy. The mastery is implicit in the scenes of technology, in the form of the train, triumphing over the dense forest and steep mountain terrains it must cross. The train is simply a fait accompli; none of the human agents of this progress (the European train passengers) or the process needed to complete the railroad (which included forced labor) appear in the film. The festival in Kankan, for which no ethnographic explanation is provided, appears to indicate the happy response of the local populations to the arrival of this harbinger of progress brought by the French. A final film from the 1920s that helps to establish the elements of triumphant colonial discourse that would be combined and reinforced in films of the 1930s is the medical film Le réveil d’une race (The Awakening of a Race). Shot in Cameroon in 1929, the film was directed by Alfred Chaumel, a former colonial administrator, produced by Les Films Exotiques with support from the Commissioner of the Republic in Cameroon, and released in Gaumont cinemas in November 1930.62 The figure of Doctor Jamot and his aggressive campaign against sleeping sickness in Ubangi-Shari and Cameroon captured the public’s imagination.63 Unlike most other colonial documentaries, The Awakening of a Race received considerable attention outside the specialized press. It was billed in the widely circulated film weekly Ciné-Miroir as a “great documentary film on sleeping sickness.”64 This film provides a compelling example of the pathologized presentation of overseas France that would be key in later colonial propaganda films. In this view, the colony is diseased, requiring the external intervention of European science and medicine to exert mastery and provide a cure. Chaumel himself appears in the opening sequence, explaining his “emotional” encounter with Jamot.65 This introduction leads directly into a series of medium shots and close-ups of diseased patients. Extreme

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close-ups of the tsetse fly illustrate the causes of the disease. A lengthy sequence details Jamot’s program of diagnosis and treatment via a series of injections. The film ends with the declaration that “Jamot has decreased the mortality in this region from forty percent to six percent. He has saved millions of lives.” Framing the colony in terms of pathology and cure has two obvious results. First, through a discourse of mastery—here the triumph of science over disease—it legitimizes the French colonial presence. Second, it reproduces a hygienist discourse that was prevalent in France at the time.66 Depicting France’s efforts in the colonies as similar to hygiene campaigns in the métropole makes the subject appear familiar to viewers. It constitutes another example of narrative resonance with a metropolitan republicanism that promoted state assistance to the needy individual. This kind of discourse helped to inscribe the colonial project within a broader national project. For viewers at home, French imperialism thus acquired ideological coherence. As in the previous examples, this film stops short of making broad imperialist pronouncements, however. These generalizations began to appear as more forceful declarations over the next decade. The rhetorical declensions of mastery illustrated by these earlier examples—mastery over social chaos, ignorance, nature, and disease—became key elements in the articulation of a generalized and explicitly nationalistic rhetoric of empire that emerged in documentary film in the late 1930s. 1930s: France is an empire With the exception of a flurry of activity preceding the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition, the years 1931–35 were not particularly productive in terms of colonial documentary film. Charles-Robert Ageron has identified a drop in colonial sentiment in France during these years because of the arrival of the Depression and a corresponding drop in colonial propaganda. Between 1936 and 1939, various French governments renewed their interest in colonial propaganda films. This interest was in part motivated by the rise of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. It was accompanied by concerns that Germany might want to recover colonies it had transferred to France after the First World War. In addition to these international concerns, the Popular Front government elected in 1936 wanted to play a more active role in cinema production in general. At the Ministry of Colonies, a major proposal to reorganize film propaganda in 1936 revived the debate about how to encourage a

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vision of France and the colonies as a great and unified imperial nation.67 Renewed state interest in imperial propaganda translated into the production of many films during this period, often by private production companies with various forms of governmental support, that reinforced a nationalist vision of imperial France. One such public/private partnership was the film commissioned from France Outremer Film in 1936 entitled Terres arrachées à la mort (Lands Snatched from Death). Presented as a reportage, the film presents the French colonial experiment in French Equatorial Africa. Its rhetorical framework combines multiple elements of mastery into a triumphant declaration of imperial success. The first element is the mastery over death and disease. As the film’s title indicates, Africa is a land of danger, whether to Europeans or to its own people. The narrative reinforces this theme: In June 1889, one of Brazza’s companions navigated the Oubangui River up to the Elephant Rapids, to gain the confidence of the cannibals. His successor met with a tragic end. Attacked and captured, he was eaten, along with his companions, in 1890. The hostility of the climate and of the natives made Bangui a tomb for whites: soldiers, civil servants, and missionaries died there, but they were replaced by others, better adapted.68 This passage sets up Africa as a land of affliction. Long panning shots depict vast and empty expanses of river, reinforced by a commentary describing the “heavy torpor that weighs on this inanimate world.” The landscape of the river is a “lacustrian desert,” lifeless and inactive, where man becomes “a prisoner of the walls of greenery.” Disease is rampant: “too many children die young,” the narrator proclaims. Africa without the French is crippled by disease, an oppressive climate, and social pathologies. It is completely devoid of any ability to combat these problems. Naturally, the French arrive to master all of these problems one by one. Even cannibals, we learn, if given roads, schools, hospitals, and railroads, can learn to run coffee and cotton plantations, dig for gold and live in cities. Up-tempo music accompanies images of new roads, which have allowed for the cotton and coffee industries to develop and created a source of local wealth. “Attacked by iron and fire, the forest surrendered clearings [and submitted] to the straight line that is the mark of White genius.” The rhetoric of struggle, surrender, and mastery continues visually. Close-up shots focus on a new train line that allows

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cotton shipments to avoid turbulent sections of river. A scene of a new medical clinic in Bangui, where “the care is free, the nurses are friendly, and the clientele has snowballed,” emphasizes the triumph over disease. And finally, technology has even brought Africa geographically closer to France. “Equatorial Africa has lost its faraway character,” thanks to regular airline routes that mean France is only five days away. Having set up the alterity of the African environment, passages such as these quickly reassure the viewer that the French presence provides mastery and control. This control of the colonies through new technologies is further reinforced by the visual and textual economies of the film. The subjects within the frame become mastered, indeed tamed for a European viewer, by visual and textual elements of familiarity and control that further bring the chaotic colony into a rational and comprehensible framework. An example may be found in the opening sequence, in which a close-up on an African man’s face tilts down to his hands, which are drumming. The narrator translates the drumbeats into a statement of gratitude to the French: “If you understood the song of the tam-tam, you would hear our praises. The French are strong, rich, and generous.” With no establishing shots or synchronous sound to situate the sequence, the filmmaker has surgically separated the drummer’s image from its original context and imposed a narrative “translation” of its supposed meaning. The narrative control continues throughout, as spoken commentary tells the viewer what conclusions to draw from each image. In another striking example, the narrator tells the viewer what the explorer Savorgnan de Brazza was thinking in October 1880. “He thinks of Europe, of France, chosen to receive from his hands [. . .] this equatorial empire that would give a nation ravaged by the memory of 1870, a reason to find itself again.” An evident fabrication, this narrative device encourages the viewer to believe that if the empire could help France to recover in 1870, it could also help the nation to rediscover its grandeur after the First World War. This narrative mastery is also reinforced visually in Lands Snatched from Death. Many shots in the film are carefully framed to include African elements associated with European ones. An African soldier in uniform is framed in a tilt-up shot so that the French flag is clearly visible behind the man’s head. A series of European buildings appear to blend seamlessly with the African vegetation surrounding them. An African man holds a smiling European child. Tennis courts provide European entertainment in a tropical setting. French nurses, in medium shots, hold

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African babies. This visual imagery provides subtle reinforcement of the argument in favor of cultural assimilation. The images are designed to familiarize French audiences with the association of French icons and African faces. This visual mastery reassures the viewer, playing down the exoticism and adventure of the empire and demonstrating that it can be made familiar. The implied argument is that its inhabitants are perfectly capable of engaging in the same processes of civilization that had succeeded in the French provinces. The visual economy reinforces the film’s argument that combines mastery over nature, disease, and social pathology into a triumphant imperial vision. The goal is to convince the inhabitants of metropolitan France not just that they had colonies, but that they were part of an empire. The year 1937 saw the production of a film in Central Africa entitled Cameroun: création française (Cameroon: a French Creation) that continued in the vein of Lands Snatched from Death. In this film, the assimilationist argument appears even more clearly. Based on the assumption of a fundamental similarity between French people and Africans, this argument is deployed in the service of a strongly nationalistic proclamation. French colonization in Cameroon is shown to be superior to its predecessor in the colony, Germany. Through a series of maps, the viewer first learns of the victory of the French over German forces. The narration characterizes the German invasion as efficient but disinterested: “With detached hearts, they imposed their peace born from fear.” The French are quickly established as more caring colonizers. The viewer learns that the Germans had done little to improve life in the colony. Doctor Jamot’s campaign against sleeping sickness is presented as a “French victory,” with Jamot heralded as a “savior” for the “dying country.” It is clear that Jamot has saved Cameroon not just from the disease, but from the poor stewardship of the German administration. Comparative settlement statistics between German and French occupation are included, to underline the depth of French commitment to the colony. The narrator concludes that “our Blacks [. . .] can say, with naïve pride: we are French!” Images of the French flag and the map of French Cameroon are superimposed onto the faces of African children in this sequence. Implicit in these statements is the claim that France is a better colonizer than Germany. The film goes on to extol the virtues of various other French medical campaigns that would strengthen the French nation by improving the health of its African subjects. Given the increasing threat across the German border, the declining birthrate in France was a primary concern,

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and creating and assimilating as many healthy Africans as possible seemed to be one possible solution.69 French colonization of Africa, described as “a slow French impregnation,” would encourage the production and survival of strong, healthy, African babies. Of course, French nurses were needed to explain proper infant care to African mothers, who were otherwise a danger to their children. Images of African babies lined up by the hundreds in cribs, all dressed in identical nightdresses, drinking Nestlé sweetened condensed milk and tended by devoted French women, accompany this section. The paragraph with which this chapter opened, in which “carcasses of manioc eaters” are transformed into “fine brothers of men,” reinforces the idea of the physical strength and vigor that France’s colonized peoples, once healthy, can bring to the nation. The assimilationist rhetoric of Cameroon: a French Creation is reinforced in sequences that present Africans as cousins of their rural European counterparts. The visit to Bamileke country is described as “a landscape that could be in the Jura mountains,” and the narrator goes on to explain various agricultural programs, including the introduction of cattle breeds that actually do live in the Jura. “In the heart of peasant Africa,” he continues, “we find, different in form, identical in substance, the mystery of our [French] countryside, those same sorcerers whose dreaded curses hold sway over business transactions, harvests, animals.” African villagers walk in their fields before mass on Sunday, and the comparison continues. “In French villages, farmers also stroll in their fields before mass. All those who serve the land have a shared heart: the feelings, despite differences in race, are the same.” The lines underscore basic similarities between French and African people, in an attempt to persuade the French audience that the assimilation of Africans is not only possible, but desirable. Images and commentary that remind French audiences of the demographic power of the empire occur frequently in propaganda films from the late 1930s. Colonized subjects appear as more numerous, healthy, and vigorous than the young people assembling on the other side of the German border. A film completed in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war, provides an even starker illustration of this point. L’effort médical français: A.E.F./Cameroun (The French Medical Effort: F.E.A./Cameroon) contains aerial shots of a stadium where row upon row of African youngsters dressed in identical white uniforms perform gymnastic exercises.70 The sequence cuts to a tilt-up shot on the athletes that makes them appear larger than life. They parade shirtless towards the camera, showing off their muscular torsos. These images provide a striking visual echo of

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certain scenes in the 1938 film Olympia, by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. The German film seems to have served as a model for the stadium images, crowd scenes, and camera angles in The French Medical Effort. The French film proclaims that medical programs aim “to make little Africans into a healthier, stronger, and more beautiful race [. . .] Tomorrow these athletes will be Africa’s elite [. . .] marching proudly towards the destiny that France has forged for them.” While each of the previous films focuses on one colony, many films from the late 1930s use similar techniques to assert narrative control over the empire as a whole. A nationalist imperialist discourse had come to dominate French colonial documentaries by 1939. La France est un empire (France is an Empire) provides a representative example. Based on a film script written by the adventure novelist Jean D’Agraives, this film mobilizes all of the rhetorical strategies of mastery that emerged in films of the 1920s and intensified over the course of the 1930s. Additionally, this film applies these strategies to a vast narrative project that encompasses the French empire, thus creating a “mechanized world picture” of the empire as a coherent, unified whole.71 Film is the ultimate agent of the rationalization of empire. Jean D’Agraives intended his film to be “a lively synthesis of the French colonial enterprise and of the riches and possibilities of our empire,” with fresh, up-to-date scenes of contemporary colonial achievements.72 Because of support provided to him by French authorities at many levels of its completion, he was able to realize this vision, and the film came together in a matter of months.73 In its overall project, France is an Empire revives a narrative structure common to colonial propaganda films throughout the interwar period. An afflicted pre-colonial past is contrasted with a happy and healthy colonial present. The film is comprised of a montage of shots taken from various parts of the French empire. Beginning with images of the colonies as victims of various negative human and natural forces, the film then introduces the French presence, which will master and eliminate these problems. On a map of the world, a series of pulsating arrows thrust out from France towards Africa, the Middle East, and Indochina (Figure 6.3). Technology now reigns supreme. “Luxurious hospitals” spring up in French Guyana; “former slaves” in West Africa, “shivering on bare earth, come to know the caress of white sheets.” “The lightning-fast propagation of the dreaded yellow fever is throttled” in French Indochina. Western science, which “guarantees fertility,” comes to the aid of North African women fearing repudiation because of sterility. Bright white

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Figure 6.3 The trope of rayonnement was often depicted as rays of light emanating from France across the world, as it is here in La France est un empire (France is an Empire, Jean d’Agraives, 1939). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

images of immaculate sheets and clothing reinforce the forward march of hygiene and reproductive vigor. “The empire constantly grows with little beings,” the babies that represent France’s imperial future. Economic prosperity arrives with agricultural improvements and modern means of transportation such as roads, railroads, and air routes. France provides the infrastructure for local cultures and economies to flourish. This film constantly reinforces the similarities that link the inhabitants of the empire and those of France. In a sequence devoted to French schooling, European children sit alongside African students with the comment that “all children learn on the same bench. Same homework, same games, same rewards. [. . .] Writing is the same in any climate.” Young people in Africa and Indochina perform the same gymnastics. The audience learns that they all have the same willingness to perform military service, based on gratitude to the mother country, “their country.”

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Despite these fundamental similarities, the film also contains an argument about respect for local diversity and tradition that is reminiscent of the regionalist films at the 1937 exhibition. France is depicted as the protector of religious liberties and a patron of “native arts.” A French teacher instructs an African student on how to make an African mask (Figure 6.4); children learn to make carpets in North Africa; and “marquetry reappears in Moroccan furniture.” Because France is a benevolent colonizer, its peoples are happy to be part of imperial France. “These primitive souls have the sincerity of childhood,” states the narrator. “They worship their chiefs, but they love France.” This preparation leads up to a triumphant and militaristic crescendo about France’s readiness to fight a new war, bolstered by a healthy, loyal, and vigorous empire. The German threat appears between the lines: “From Senegal to Mauritania, from Cameroon to Togo, [local people] hear rumors of certain demands, and they respond: France is our mother!” Images of

Figure 6.4 A French teacher instructs an African student on how to make an African mask in La France est un empire (France is an Empire, Jean d’Agraives, 1939). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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colonized people of all colors all over the world follow in quick succession, and the narrator makes the following proclamation: At the same moment, from Indochina to Senegal, from Tunisia to Madagascar, from the Red Sea to the Southern oceans, an armed force of all colors, of all races, of all religions has risen [. . .] because there is not one France and its colonies, but one common fatherland, made up of men with a shared ideal: to live free or die. [. . .] Thus, 118 million human beings who ask nothing more but to live and work in peace, are standing up to defend freedom and the honor of their flag. Protecting the integrity of their land, they will fight to the end so that their children, in peace and security, will be able to continue to write: France is our fatherland (Figure 6.5). The last words of this statement accompany an image of a small African child writing in white chalk on a black slate the words, “France is our fatherland.”74 The technological mastery of the empire thus results

Figure 6.5 “France is our fatherland”—the last image of La France est un empire (France is an Empire, Jean d’Agraives, 1939). Courtesy Archives françaises du film.

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in a conflation of the represented empire with a revitalized nation ready to fight. France is an Empire draws together the many earlier threads of colonial propaganda into a powerful rhetorical package. It reproduces and propagates the notion of the repli impérial, the idea that France should compensate for a loss of prestige in Europe by concentrating on its role as an imperial power. This conviction would strengthen among the political elites in the months following the 1938 Munich accords. Julian Jackson writes of the debates following Munich as being about “the kind of society that France should aspire to be.” This idea of the colonies as a source of national renewal became popular not only on the extreme right, but also among some more moderate members of the Radical Party and the Alliance Démocratique. Alongside this renewed political interest in the French empire was a parallel cultural interest in the empire as a source of national pride. A flurry of films and books appeared, hailing France’s colonial achievements and attempting to convince Frenchmen and women that France’s universal values and civilizing mission were still important forces on the international stage. Other documentary films exemplify this trend. Examples are the 1939 film Missions de la France (Missions of France), commissioned by the National Center for the Expansion of Tourism, which extols France’s gifts to world civilization throughout the centuries, and Escales impériales (Imperial Ports of Call, 1939), which highlights the maritime routes linking the French empire into one vast and fertile network. Rather than explaining that “France has colonies,” these works produce the entire empire as a single and coherent object for the consumption of audiences at home. It remains to be seen what impact these messages had on the colonial opinions of the viewing public.

Reception and Popular Opinion Historians interested in public opinion about the colonies credit film, alongside the influence of radio propaganda and colonial exhibitions, as playing an important role in the development of a “colonial idea” in France outside the political sphere between the wars. Raoul Girardet, for example, who has charted the “colonial idea” in France from 1870 to 1960, calls the interwar years the “apogee,” “the apotheosis of Greater France.” What he means by this is that the interwar period was marked by the entrance, finally, of a true “colonial consciousness” in the minds

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of the average French citizen. Girardet and many other scholars attribute this new awareness of France as an empire primarily to the experience of the First World War. One million inhabitants of France’s overseas territories had come to the aid of the nation, either as soldiers or as workers, and more than 71,000 of them had lost their lives.75 The empire had massively supported the nation in its time of need. Images of the brave colonial soldier were so popular as to become successful merchandising logos. The figure of the Senegalese sharpshooter became the new logo for the chocolate-flavored breakfast drink Banania. It is still used, in modified form, today.76 With this general feeling of gratitude for services rendered came a new interest in colonial vocations. Lyautey’s Morocco was particularly fascinating to the French public, drawing many new French settlers in the years following the end of the war.77 Trade with the colonies doubled between 1913 and 1933.78 Airline routes between France and the empire multiplied. School geography and history curricula began to spend more time on colonial subjects. A host of new scientific publications brought knowledge of the physical, cultural, and economic aspects of colonial societies to the attention of the French public. Colonial films and literature abounded. The colonial exhibitions in Marseille and Strasbourg in 1922 and 1924, as well as the well-attended International Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931, played a role in publicizing the French empire in France. In short, writes Girardet, by the late 1930s, “the colonial presence is felt more and more inside the national consciousness.”79 Charles-Robert Ageron has attempted both to nuance and to quantify the notion of “colonial consciousness” among the French people at large for the interwar period. He argues that the French public was largely indifferent to the limited colonial propaganda campaigns that were conducted in France in the early 1920s, but that there was a burst of colonial propaganda and a concurrent increase in colonial sentiment from 1927 through the 1931 colonial exhibition. To gauge “colonial sentiment,” he uses indicators such as a sharp increase in articles devoted to the colonies in the non-specialized press, a doubling of private investments in the colonies from 1927 to 1931, a radio program entitled Voix coloniale that was broadcast at prime time, and a public opinion poll from 1959. The poll showed that people who were between the ages of 20 and 35 in 1930 felt more solidarity with Europeans in Algeria than did either younger or older people.80 Ageron argues for a downturn in such indications of colonial sentiment from 1932 to 1935. Several public opinion polls from the late 1930s,

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however, show the French public growing once again more attached to their empire in the face of international threats. In February 1939, 53 percent of French people surveyed declared that “it would be just as painful to give up a part of our colonial possessions as to give up a part of France,” and 40 percent of them declared themselves willing to go to war to defend the colonies. Between 1936 and 1939, polls show a specific hardening of French resolve on the question of returning the colonies that were transferred to France from Germany after the First World War. The question “should the colonies be returned to Germany?” received a resounding “no” (70 percent of those surveyed) in December 1939.81 It seems clear, therefore, that awareness of the empire and loyalty to it increased among the French public between 1919 and 1939. In the absence of targeted opinion polls, it may not be possible to establish an incontrovertible case for documentary film as one of the causes. However, the mix of cause and effect in Ageron’s analysis of radio programs and the press may also be applicable to the domain of film. Ageron argues that in the push for colonial propaganda from 1927 to 1931, indicators such as favorable time slots allotted to colonial radio programs and more colonial coverage in the non-specialized press both created and reflected an interest among the general public for colonial matters.82 He also mentions film, in passing, as a contributing factor to this interest, as does Girardet. Ageron argues, in particular, that one of the reasons colonial subjects had difficulty penetrating school curricula throughout the 1920s was the lack of available iconographic material that might allow teachers to introduce subjects with which the students had no direct experience.83 Over the course of the 1920s, these images became available, primarily due to commissions by governmental agencies, as did the distribution networks and projection systems that would allow them to be accessed.84 Other kinds of indicators provide evidence that film was a particularly successful form of colonial propaganda and had a strong effect on its audience. One such indicator is the belief among its proponents that colonial film could inspire strong emotions in its audience. The director of the Petit Journal film circuit, for example, actually feared that young people would rush straight off to the colonies after seeing his films. He thought this reaction to be so probable that he projected a text at the beginning of each screening warning viewers “against the spontaneous choice of a colonial vocation that they had not properly thought through.”85 The belief that film propaganda was strong and effective was still prevalent among colonial publicists in the early 1930s, as a comment by

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one of the speakers at the 1931 conference on colonial propaganda indicates: Because of their repercussions in the minds of a broad audience, it is important that the production of films showing the true face of French colonization should only be entrusted to convinced colonials. That is why we should ask colonial authorities that, for making propaganda films, they should ask experienced colonials, and they should require that the direction of film expeditions be entrusted to informed civil servants. If they listen to us, the consequences for colonial propaganda will be favorable.86 Haunting this latter passage is the fear that private actors might produce documentary images unfavorable to the colonial cause that might swing public opinion the wrong way. The publication of André Gide’s extremely critical travel narratives, Voyage au Congo and Retour du Tchad, in 1927 and 1928 respectively, might have fueled this fear. Gide traveled with a filmmaker, Marc Allégret, who shot a film entitled Voyage au Congo during the same expedition. Allégret’s film contains none of the accounts of the abuses of the concessionary system in central Africa that characterize Gide’s narrative; indeed, it is not an anticolonial film at all. Yet it is the expression of an intensely personal artistic vision that escapes the control of colonial publicists completely, an observation that cannot have escaped its contemporaries. The desire to control carefully any filmed images of the colonies was widespread. The government of Togo and Cameroon, for example, refused to give any support to filmmaker René Le Somptier, who wanted to film those territories in 1931. Their pretext was that they already had perfectly good films made by their official filmmaker René Bugniet. The Laval Decree of 1934 controlling films that were made in the African colonies provides further evidence of administrators’ fears of the unfettered power of film. While these fears do not prove that documentary film did have a strong impact on its audiences, they demonstrate that contemporaries believed they could potentially have such an impact. Another source of information about popular reception of colonial documentary films comes from contemporary press coverage. Film reviews appear to confirm Ageron’s argument that a colonial consciousness developed outside circles of specialists between 1927 and 1931. Reviews of colonial documentaries were primarily limited to colonial publications in the early 1920s.87 In the Annales Coloniales, a colonial newspaper,

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Emile Morinaud writes of a documentary film on North Africa that he was able to see by the special invitation of the Compagnie Transatlantique, “What cries of admiration I heard around me! I said to myself, ‘what excellent publicity for North Africa. Everyone in this room will want to travel there tomorrow or the day after.”88 His rhapsodic review concludes with a lament that such films are not more widespread and that there is not more government participation in this kind of endeavor. Indeed, this kind of event did not appear in the pages of a general film weekly such as Ciné-Miroir, in which colonial documentaries were rarely mentioned until the late 1920s. Paul Castelnau’s 1922 film Le continent mystérieux (The Mysterious Continent), as well as the films of the Citroën expeditions, La traversée du Sahara (Crossing of the Sahara) and La croisière noire (The Black Journey), are the only colonial documentaries that appear in the pages of this publication prior to 1928. From 1928 to 1931, coinciding with new publicity campaigns and the preparation for the International Colonial Exhibition, Ciné-Miroir covered many colonial titles. Both documentaries and fiction films, including a glowing illustrated review of The Awakening of a Race, appeared in its pages. This reviewer, at least, received the republican message of colonial humanism clearly enough to reproduce it for his readership: The Republic has never considered men as simple instruments of work and production. In every human being, there is a sacred element: humanity. To protect and defend this human spark, to lead these men with wisdom and perseverance towards a state of civilization where justice and peace reign with fraternity and liberty, this is our goal and our ideal. This goal, medically, in Cameroon, has been achieved.89 In its faithful reproduction of colonial humanist discourse, this review in the popular press provides at least some indication that the republican message of colonial documentaries resonated with a broader public. In his review of the cinemas of Paris for Le Figaro, France’s premier daily, the reviewer waxes similarly eloquent about René Le Somptier’s film La marche vers le soleil (March Towards the Sun), describing France’s relationship with the colonies as a great love affair.90 Guillaume-Michel Coissac published a long article on colonial documentary film in the 1931–32 general trade journal for the cinema industry, Le Tout-Cinéma, entitled “Le cinéma au service de la civilisation et de la propagande.” The same author also wrote a series of articles in the film journal Le Cinéopse, defending colonial propaganda film. He provides specific examples of

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economic enterprises that have taken off in the colonies because of the influence of film.91 Clearly, by the early 1930s, such topics were not the exclusive purview of the colonial press. Béatrice De Pastre’s work provides another source of information about public reception of colonial documentary film. When two films by Alfred Chaumel, The Awakening of a Race and Exotic Symphony, were shown to Parisian schoolchildren in 1933, the children were asked to write essays in response. Some excerpts from these essays were collected by the teachers and published in the educational journal Ciné-Document. “The Colonies! The name alone evokes dreamlike countries!” writes one student, who emphasizes the importance of visual images over written or oral narration. “Hardly a month ago, I did not know how to imagine you. [. . .] Until the day when I could contemplate scenes from your life, I knew nothing of you despite what I had been told in school.”92 Judging from their drawings and essays, the students retained both specific information and general principles from the films. They were able to reproduce the specific medical technology from The Awakening, for example. The boys, in particular, wrote about the possibility of working in the colonial service. Most interesting, the students seem to have retained an overall impression of humanist republican discourse. One student writes, “This is the ideal that France tried and will continue to try to follow. In its struggle against barbarity, our fatherland did not act as a conqueror, but as a soldier of Humanity.” Another adds, “I wanted to see these countries, to contribute to their growth and thus to continue the noble task of those who have courageously undertaken to help them benefit from our civilization.”93 De Pastre concludes that the students’ comments were not only influenced by the films, but also likely by other forms of colonial propaganda they would have encountered, such as the centenary celebration for the colonization of Algeria, in 1930, and a probable visit to the International Colonial Exhibition in Vincennes in 1931. Their drawings show that the films left a powerful visual trace. A student’s notebook held by the Musée National de l’Éducation provides reinforcement for De Pastre’s findings on The Awakening of a Race. In 1945, fully 20 years after it came out, the Citroën film, The Black Journey, was shown to schoolchildren in the town of Dontucat. Beautifully illustrated with drawings of the Citroën cars and African landscapes, the notebook confirms that that the story was still being taught—and the silent film was still being shown—in at least one school, on that date.

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The student’s concluding essay finishes thus: “How beautiful Africa is! And what great things the French have done there!”94 Whether shown in commercial cinemas or in non-commercial film venues, colonial documentary films were not generally the reason audiences came to the cinema. The public came for other reasons—to see a fiction feature, to learn about an agricultural technique—and ended up enjoying the colonial documentaries and wanting to see more. This observation, combined with Ageron’s and Girardet’s indicators of an increased popular consciousness of empire throughout the interwar period, would seem to suggest that colonial film propaganda was successful.

Conclusion Of the four areas of documentary film discussed in detail in this book— educational films sent out to the French regions and the colonies, and documentary films presenting the regions and the colonies to other audiences—the efforts analyzed in this chapter were probably the most successful in terms of communicating the desired messages to their audience. The large number and wide circulation of these films was both a cause and an effect of this success. More films were produced because audiences responded favorably to them, and many people got to see them because they were so numerous and could take advantage of multi-layered networks of distribution. While it is difficult to estimate precisely what kinds of information each specific audience took away from each film, indicators such as public attachment to the colonies, the response of school-age children, and contemporary commentators’ opinions seem to point to similar conclusions. Audiences for these films took away a generally positive view of French colonization, understanding it as a benevolent extension of the republican project in other less fortunate parts of the world. This favorable impression of the colonial endeavor was intertwined with patriotic feelings about France. To conclude that colonial documentary films were successful in conveying a nationalistic sense of imperial pride does not rule out the unintended consequences that may also have resulted from the dissemination of these documents during the interwar years. The shift documented in this chapter, towards films that use stronger and more explicit

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rhetoric to support the colonial cause, came at the expense of detailed information about individual regions of the empire. With this shift towards imperial unity came a parallel erasure of difference. The level of attention to geographic and ethnographic specificity that is evident, for example, in the cartographer René Bugniet’s films, all but disappeared from official films of the late 1930s, even as ethnography gained legitimacy as a discipline and the colonies served as important field work locations for young scientists. Indeed, even early ethnographic films, such as those made by Marcel Griaule in the late 1930s, contained elements of the dominant nationalistic imperial discourse for which official documentaries set the standard.95 While colonial documentaries seem to have been fairly successful in persuading their audiences that French colonialism was a positive force in the world, the republican discourse on which they relied also created a wealth of byproducts, images on which myths and stereotypes could feed. For the French presence in the colonies to appear beneficial, a discourse of affliction was required. Colonial spaces were plagued by hostile climates and primitive social practices. Indigenous people were in turn lazy, weak, and unable to solve their own problems. The bodies of the colonized were feminized, potentially productive only with the “impregnating” vigor of the French male and the accompanying assistance of the French female. The land itself could only realize its productive potential with the assistance of French administrators and agricultural specialists. These negative stereotypes, which became more explicit in colonial documentaries as the interwar period progressed, were part and parcel of the positive impression of French colonialism that audiences took away from the screening of these films. The availability of new scientific knowledge did little to dispel myths and stereotypes of the empire that fed on the rich source of imagery available through colonial documentaries. As Roland Barthes observes, changes in collective mentalities lag far behind the emergence of new knowledge among intellectuals. “Science goes straight and quickly along its path,” he writes, “but collective representations do not follow, they are centuries behind, maintained stagnant and in error by those in power, the press, and prevailing values.”96 Colonial documentary films, which were directed at a broad public, both reflected and conditioned collective mentalities in a way that scientific discourse did not. The images that were by-products of their official propaganda message were thus disseminated along with it.

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In his article on colonial fiction film in the 1930s, Pierre Sorlin argues that films were constructed to fulfill a certain set of Western expectations. By pinpointing these expectations, he argues, we can learn quite a lot about the imaginary world of the audiences for which they were intended.97 The same may be said of documentary films from the same period. While colonial documentary films did little to inform, they did much to persuade. They thus reveal much about how France defined itself in the difficult years between the two world wars. As tensions rose within France over political divisions, the economic crisis, the declining birth rate, and the international threat, the colonial project provided ground on which the republican consensus appeared to be alive and well. Colonial documentary films were primarily conformist documents that reflected and reinforced this consensus. As national defense against other European powers became more urgent, the discourse of empire in these films became more unified and more strident. The vision of France as an imperial nation crystallized, at the expense of any mission to use film as a faithful representation of colonial realities. In some respects, this vision would prove to be fairly consistent with the imperial propaganda promoted under the Vichy government during the Second World War.

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Chapter 7

Recycling Rural Images: The Vichy Propaganda Machine

The national revolution will not be limited to politics alone. It will also reach into the domains of economy, general culture, domestic and international affairs and also cinema. —Joseph Gœbbels, Minister of Information and Propaganda of the Third Reich, March 23, 1933 1

No one should lose sight of the idea that cinema is the primordial element of national propaganda. Everyone should think of the national and social role that cinema must play in the regeneration of our nation. —Louis-Émile Galey, director of the cinema service of the French state, June 5, 1942 2

The years of German occupation of France during the Second World War, 1940–44, have come to be known as les années noires, or “the dark years.” Defeated, invaded, and occupied by a foreign power, the French nation was deeply humiliated. 92,000 Frenchmen were dead; 200,000 more were wounded. Nearly two million were taken prisoner.3 The Prime Minister stepped aside for a white-haired war hero named Marshal Pétain, who had engineered a French victory in the battle of Verdun in 1916. Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler, ensuring the end of hostilities and France’s collaboration with the Germans. Two weeks later, the parliament voted to transfer “full powers” to Pétain, who would lead a new authoritarian French state. Many contemporaries thought that this grandfatherly figure, who would govern from Vichy, was their only hope in defending France’s best interests against the occupying power. A majority of French citizens saw in Pétain the figure of a national savior.4

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During the dark years, the parliamentary democracy that has now characterized nearly 140 years of French history was suspended. In losing the war, the Third Republic had lost its legitimacy.5 Pétain’s government actively pursued a political and social agenda that was closely aligned with those of the Nazi occupiers. Part and parcel of this agenda was the vigorous persecution and deportation to the death camps of individuals deemed undesirable to the regime. 76,000 of France’s Jewish population were deported. Only 2,500 returned alive.6 In the cultural realm, the Vichy government engineered a “National Revolution” that would remake France. Reaching back for its reference points into the pre-republican past, it emphasized themes of return to the earth, to rural values, to a loosely defined notion of “tradition.” Historians have reached relative consensus on the idea that the political, social, and cultural projects of the Vichy government, far from having been imposed by Hitler, were exclusively designed and implemented by the French.7 But whether this government embodied a clean break with the republican past, or whether it reflected some continuity with the Third Republic, continues to spark debate.8 Gérard Noiriel argues that although the solutions proposed by the Vichy government were different, the political problems they were addressing were similar to those defined under the Third Republic. In Noiriel’s view, social questions—such as how to integrate French people into the political body of the nation, and how the state could best solve the problems of the people—were central both to a republican view and to a Pétainist view of the role of government.9 Many cultural studies have added evidence to the theory of continuity between Third Republic and Vichy discourse. Robert Paxton has argued that one of the reasons the totalitarian regime gained such widespread national support when the Republic collapsed in 1940 was that the Vichy government promoted values that were not new, but rather comforting and familiar.10 In her analysis of the 1937 Paris Exhibition, Shanny Peer argues that references to rural France, regionalism, and folklore recurred in the discourse of both the Left and the Right during the Third Republic, foreshadowing cultural policies that have long been identified solely with the right-wing Vichy regime.11 Romy Golan reaches similar conclusions in her study of Third Republic art. Defining the function of ideology as “to naturalize representation—to make things appear unproblematic, innocuous and even naïve,” she argues that interwar art played an important role in making many of the racist tropes of Pétain’s National Revolution appear benign and innocuous to the French

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public in 1940.12 François Garçon, writing on fiction film, states that “the Marshal [Pétain]’s discourse, at least in many of its major themes, had already been invented cinematographically before 1940.”13 The evidence from this study of documentary film during the interwar years supports similar conclusions. The Vichy government is often credited with the “Discovery” of documentary film as a propaganda tool. It did implement some important measures that encouraged the extensive production and distribution of documentary films during the occupation. However, as is clear from the films and programs analyzed in this book, the use of documentary to promote the priorities of the state was already well underway during the interwar period. Two of the most important pillars of the Vichy cultural and political agenda—the emphasis on rural values and the importance of the colonial empire—were also clearly present in documentary film programs under the Third Republic. Many filmmakers who worked for republican governments continued their activity under the Vichy regime. Some Third Republic films were recycled for use in the Vichy propaganda machine. Nationwide commercial and non-commercial distribution networks were already in place by 1940. Some further detail about each of these observations will bring into sharper focus the role that interwar documentaries played in laying some of the groundwork for the success of Vichy propaganda efforts.

Vichy’s “Discovery” of Documentary Film Vichy officials took an immediate interest in using documentary film as a propaganda tool, in part to counter the occupying Germans’ manifest determination to control the French film industry. A centralized cinema office, the Service du cinéma, was created shortly after the signing of the armistice. This office reported to the Vichy government’s general secretary of information, which oversaw all forms of information and propaganda in the non-occupied zone. In occupied France, the German Propaganda Abteilung also had a bureau of cinema. With the creation of the COIC (Comité d’organisation de l’industrie cinématographique) in December 1940, the state sealed its control over the film industry for the first time in its history.14 “This was the first time that [cinema] was seen by Government as an industry and not [. . .] as an art form,” writes Steve Wharton. “This shift in emphasis underlines the authorities’ perception of the film industry as a means of arriving at a product, and one that they were determined to put to their use.”15

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In matters of propaganda, Vichy officials saw the documentary film and the newsreel as important agents for educating the public about the activities, goals, and philosophy of the National Revolution and the New Order. For Raoul Ploquin, the first director of the COIC, documentary was the best medium to “raise the moral, intellectual, and social level of the nation.”16 New legislation favored the expansion of documentary production and distribution. In October 1940, a new law banned the double feature in commercial cinemas. Mirroring similar laws that had already been passed in Germany, this measure opened up space on film programs for documentaries. Audiences expected more for their admission fee than just one feature film with the addition of a newsreel.17 Guaranteeing a market for the documentary, the law enabled the informational genre to become more financially viable, thus encouraging production. A total of over 550 documentary films were produced in France between 1940 and 1944.18 Although budgets were always tight, the Vichy film office was active in financing or co-producing some of these films, as well as a bi-weekly magazine of “government information” in documentary format entitled La France en marche (France on the March).19 The new legislation guaranteeing space for the documentary in commercial cinemas helped to compensate for other distribution problems facing the Vichy regime. Because rural populations played a key role in Vichy’s “New Order,” rural distribution of cinema was an important concern. Yet war and occupation had crippled many of the networks that had allowed the dissemination of non-commercial educational film. The Ministry of Education’s film program had been virtually wiped out by a catastrophic decline in budgetary allocations.20 The Ministry of Agriculture continued to produce films aimed at encouraging farmers and artisans to return to rural locales, but their distribution was limited.21 The Catholic-run Salles familiales, as well as the Offices régionaux du cinéma éducateur, which coordinated the bulk of rural film distribution by the late 1930s, had been closed due to their ideological opposition to the Vichy regime. One Vichy report indicates serious concerns about the implementation of a national film program without the aid of the regional film offices.22 The government made some provisions in an attempt to compensate for these deficiencies. When the government commissioned documentaries from private companies for distribution in commercial cinemas, some copies were kept in reserve for public schools, youth centers, and other non-commercial venues.23 When the 35-mm film format was mandated by law in 1940, virtually wiping out the 16-mm and 17.5-mm

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formats that had been in wide use in France before the war, an exception was made for cinemas in rural areas.24 These cinemas could continue to use the projection systems that were in place before the war. Regionalist propaganda committees and the National Peasant Corporation also stepped in to fill the need for rural film distribution. They organized rural film screenings of documentaries devoted to the landscape and folk life of various French regions.25 After 1942, with inflation and tight control of materials making film and developing chemicals more expensive and difficult to obtain, realizing an ambitious campaign of film propaganda throughout France became even more difficult for French authorities.26 However, they did continue to co-produce documentary films that were deemed to be “of national interest.”27 Various government ministries, in partnership with film journalist André Robert’s documentary film initiative, “Arts, Sciences, Voyages,” hosted France’s first-ever documentary film congress in 1943 to encourage and recognize independent production.28 The best documentary was rewarded with the grand prix du film documentaire, giving official recognition to the newly elevated status of documentary film.29 Also in 1943, an educational film commission was created at the Ministry of Education that would undertake to spread film propaganda in the schools.30 Steve Wharton and Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, the authors of the most extensive studies of documentary film under the occupation, both attribute the Vichy government’s immediate interest in the medium to a desire to keep pace with the occupying power. The German government had been far more successful than the French in mobilizing the power of documentary film for propaganda purposes since the early 1930s. However, it is clear from the evidence presented in this book that French governments under the Third Republic, although less successful in implementation than their neighbors across the Rhine, nonetheless had a long history of involvement with documentary film production and promotion for state purposes. Calls for a centralized government film office were repeated over the decade of the 1930s and intensified under the Popular Front government. The tightening of film censorship instituted under Vichy also reflected a continuation of measures taken in the late 1930s by republican governments concerned about France’s national image in the movies.31 Government interest in documentary film as a healthy, moral medium for national regeneration did not spontaneously arise in 1940 with the arrival of the Germans, but was instead the product of a long maturation process dating back to the First World War.

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Vichy’s Emphasis on Rural and Colonial Values In addition to a general interest in documentary film, a further continuity between Third Republic governments and Vichy was the promotion of rural and colonial values as central to the French nation. The National Revolution banished the republican trilogy “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” in favor of a new motto: “Travail, Famille, Patrie” (Work, Family, Fatherland). Pétain accused the Third Republic of having favored the industrialization and democratization of French society, sapping the nation of its ancestral values.32 A return to these traditional values, which would involve the reconstitution of a pre-republican rural society, was necessary to end France’s national decadence and restore its former glory. The French farmer, or paysan, and the French soil itself, were central to this vision: they were “the privileged objects of Philippe Pétain,” as Christian Faure writes.33 Faure has demonstrated that the Vichy government initiated a veritable renaissance of folklore studies, promoted local arts, crafts, and popular culture, and encouraged regionalist ideology throughout rural France. Film played an important role in this cultural project. Many of the documentaries that were now mandatory on commercial cinema programs focused on regionalist themes or folklore.34 The film that received the grand prize at the national documentary film congress in 1943 was Georges Rouquier’s Le Tonnelier (The Cooper), which celebrated the ancient art of barrel-making. The central theme of the film is the necessity to preserve and hand down traditional skills to future generations.35 The government-sponsored film magazine, France on the March, placed a similar emphasis on the French regions, rural values and traditions, and the French empire in its articulation of what Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit calls “the Vichy government’s fantasy of France.”36 Agriculture, the peasantry and the preservation of traditional values also held pride of place in the Arts, Sciences, Voyages screenings that gained broad national distribution and critical acclaim.37 These examples of the mobilization of images of rural France, regional diversity and folk life indicate a keen interest on the part of Vichy officials in regionalist cinema. To some extent, they were able to produce the films they needed for these efforts. However, the existence of a body of regionalist and agricultural cinema prior to 1940 was naturally of interest to them as well. The state invested considerable effort in re-evaluating existing documentaries for their usefulness in the new programs. Many Third Republic documentaries continued to circulate,

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after receiving the required visa from the new censorship board under Vichy. By 1943, when the educational film commission was putting together its program, 439 documentaries of interest to the commission had received the necessary visa, and many of the available titles were films produced before the war.38 Because of Vichy’s strongly ruralist agenda, it is perhaps no surprise that existing regionalist films such as those produced for the 1937 fair in Paris were among those approved and recirculated. Such is the case, for example, of Jean-Claude Bernard’s Le Rouergue, discussed earlier,39 as well as many of the films made by the independent filmmaker Étienne Nadoux and Atlantic films, also active in production for the fair. In 1937, Nadoux produced several regional films about Savoie, including Images de Savoie (Images of Savoie), and De belles images d’Annecy (Beautiful Images of Annecy). In 1942, he produced Visages de Savoie (Faces of Savoie), in which he reuses many of the images from his earlier films and simply wraps them in a new commentary. While the earlier film on Annecy includes many more references to urban life and modern technologies, Faces of Savoie presents Savoyards as “rough mountain loggers” who nonetheless “have been able to conserve the beauty of their primitive customs.” These mountain people “seem unaware of the word ‘modernism’ but aren’t any less happy because of it.” The case of Faces of Savoie is emblematic of the fundamental continuities between interwar documentary film and that of Vichy. As has been argued in earlier chapters, idealized images of rural France and the discourse of “a return to the earth” were common in interwar films. Both the films aimed at convincing rural populations of the benefits of remaining in agricultural professions and the films presenting the French regions to urban audiences relied heavily on an idealized view of country living. Although many Vichy films were focused on the past, even the fusion of modernism and tradition that characterized Third Republic films resurfaced in some Vichy productions. Steve Wharton gives the examples of Laffont’s Naissance de la soie (Birth of Silk, 1943) and Étienne Lallier’s Alerte aux champs (Alert in the Fields, 1942). Both of these films circulated widely as part of the Arts, Sciences, Voyages screenings that received extremely positive responses from the regime. In these films, as in earlier agricultural documentaries, modern science is deployed to protect and preserve ancient traditions such as the production of silk and the protection of French crops from agricultural pests. Furthermore,

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the preservation of these traditions is presented in a forward-looking, national framework. Silk can be used in the production of French haute couture, which will help to spread France’s reputation for exquisite taste throughout the world. The fight against the Colorado Beetle is presented as a national struggle for the benefit of French agriculture. Although the emphasis on the preservation of tradition was stronger in some Vichy films, the basic rhetorical strategies deployed are quite similar to those that had become familiar to French audiences throughout the interwar years. Documentary films presenting the colonial empire during the Vichy period show similar rhetorical continuities with prewar colonialist arguments. The Vichy government placed special emphasis on a colonial renaissance. The empire provided one of the few remaining sources of French pride in the face of the national humiliation brought on by military defeat. Colonial resources also constituted a potential source of “booty” to offer to the Germans. Ensuring the early alliance of the colonies to the Vichy government rather than to De Gaulle was an urgent priority in 1940. Pétain himself mobilized various forms of colonial propaganda to convince colons (European settlers) and French colonial authorities that obedience and unity of the colonies were indispensable. He made his first speech to this effect on September 3, 1940, and established an empire-wide colonial radio station, “Allouis” in 1941.40 The need to present a positive view of French colonialism as a source of national pride and to keep the colonies loyal to Vichy led wartime filmmakers to fall back on the same colonial humanist arguments that had fueled much of the documentary production during the interwar period. As Wharton has argued, films such as Pélerins de la Mecque (Pilgrims to Mecca, 1940), Au pays des buveurs de sang (In the Land of the Blood-Drinkers, 1943) and Sortilège exotique (Exotic Spell, 1943) all contain elements of this argument, found in many interwar documentaries. France appears as a benevolent colonizer that gains the affection and respect of the peoples under its rule through good works. Bertin-Maghit finds in Vichy propaganda films such as Paysans noirs (Black Peasants, 1943), a binarism that closely mirrors interwar rhetoric. Indigenous peoples, while portrayed in a positive light, are nonetheless afflicted in some way, and are thus in need of transformation by the French.41 Another aspect of interwar colonial documentary that is also found in colonial films under Vichy is the presentation of a coherent, rationalized

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empire. In many films from the late 1930s, France proclaims its respect for local traditions and differences, yet the structure of the films unifies and homogenizes the various parts of the empire into a comprehensible whole. “Unity in diversity” is a concept that Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit has identified as a common theme in many colonial documentaries under Vichy. In his analysis of the musical tracks of wartime films, he finds colonial spaces accompanied musically by a “globalizing, generic native music that is independent of any one colony in particular.”42 He also highlights as typical of the National Revolution the films’ tendency to emphasize France’s respect for “traditions and ancestral gestures.”43 Filmmakers under the Third Republic had long used similar strategies to make the French empire appear diverse and yet familiar to French audiences. Cultural differences among various inhabitants of the empire were carefully framed and controlled. The French colonizer was portrayed as respectful of local traditions, fostering the same kind of diversity that could be found in the French provinces and that was vital to the French nation. Audiences could see republican ideology mobilized to respect this diversity while at the same time bringing modernization and triumphing over obstacles to liberty such as poverty, ignorance, and disease. Because the republican vision of empire was articulated along such nationalistic lines, films used in defense of French colonization under Vichy had a rich source of ready-made imagery and rhetoric on which to draw. The filmed empire that audiences encountered during the occupation must have seemed to most viewers to be quite a familiar one. Not only were Third Republic arguments and rhetoric recycled under Vichy; actual films also recirculated under the new regime. Two of the films analyzed by Wharton appear to be merely re-edited versions of earlier documentaries, with a slightly altered commentary. The 1943 version of In the Land of the Blood-Drinkers was originally produced around 1931 as Le vrai visage de l’Afrique: chez les buveurs de sang (The Real Face of Africa: In the Land of the Blood-Drinkers) and shown at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition.44 Exotic Spell is likely related to Exotic Symphony, a whirlwind tour of the French colonies that Alfred Chaumel and Geneviève Chaumel-Gentil made in the mid-1930s, which includes strong colonial humanist rhetoric.45 Exotic Spell, which was part of the Arts, Sciences, Voyages screenings, was screened all across southern France in the fall of 1942.46 The recycling of these films for Vichy propaganda purposes indicates the extent to which their visual and textual

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economies were close enough to Vichy ideology to be reused, with only slight modification. The apparent continuities in film discourse on rural and colonial themes between Third Republic and Vichy-era documentaries is perhaps not surprising given the fact that many documentary filmmakers active prior to 1940 continued to work throughout the occupation. J.-K. Raymond-Millet, who made many colonial and regional documentaries in the 1930s, including Promenade en A.E.F. (A Stroll in F.E.A.) in 1931 and Aude, belle inconnue (Aude, Beautiful Stranger) in 1937, went on to produce seven other documentary titles between 1940 and 1944.47 Marcel Ichac, who authored the colonial films Missions de la France (Missions of France) and La France dans le monde (France in the World) in 1938–39, made three more films during the occupation.48 His film, A l’assaut des aiguilles du diable (Assaulting the Devil’s Needles), won one of the first prizes at the 1943 documentary film congress.49 Jean-Claude Bernard, previously an independent filmmaker and director of the 1933 film Au service de la terre (In the Service of the Earth) as well as Le Rouergue (1937), was hired year-round in 1942 by Vichy’s Service du cinéma to make propaganda films. Alfred Chaumel and Geneviève Chaumel-Gentil were among the best-known colonial documentary filmmakers during the interwar period, and Geneviève Chaumel-Gentil was the first recipient of the Légion d’honneur during the Vichy period.50 In its documentary film initiatives, then, the Vichy government relied on many existing institutions, actors, films, and rhetorical structures that were inherited from the Third Republic. Many representations of rural, regional, and colonial France that circulated widely in France and the colonies before the war could be smoothly integrated into Vichy imagery and discourse. The shift in emphasis must have been barely perceptible to the audiences. These images drew on an “existing repertoire of cultural symbols inherited from the Third Republic,” as Shanny Peer has written.51 Although they were used by Vichy in the service of a reactionary cause, prior to the war they were largely motivated by the economic, political and cultural concerns elaborated in this book. In the earlier context, they do not necessarily have reactionary or anti-modern resonance. Even under the Vichy regime, the traditionalists who set the cultural agenda and dominated public relations were in competition with modernizing technocrats who were extremely influential in determining economic and social policy as the war progressed.52 The assumption that all regionalist or colonialist discourse is right-wing or conservative,

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therefore, overlooks important progressive strands of these discourses during the interwar period.

The Memory Box The documentary film archive from the interwar years serves as a “memory box,” although perhaps not in the way that P. Legros, writing in L’écho des provinces in 1942, had hoped. “Cinema is a precise, irrefutable, and magical memory,” he wrote, “a faithful reflection of moving, changing, fleeting realities of the ephemeral world.”53 His vision was similar to that of André Bazin who, in a seminal essay in 1946, wrote that photography “embalms time” and that cinema, its extension, “mummifies change.”54 These views of film rely on the concept of the field of view as a transparent window. Objectif in French signifies not only “objective,” but also “lens”; in its very linguistic manifestation, it appears neutral.55 The frame disappears, as does the framer, the viewer, and the multiplicity of human interactions that surrounded the moment of framing. It was this view of film, and particularly of documentary film, as a transparent medium, that dominated up through the end of the Second World War. This early period carved out for expository documentary, which Bill Nichols calls the “Voice of God” documentary, a special cultural niche. It was viewed as a pure vehicle for truth, an ideal medium for association with existing power structures. This view laid the groundwork for its subsequent adoption by totalitarian regimes.56 Following the “propagandists of totalitarian states,” the Vichy government “believed, in effect, that the image could incite mimetic behavior [. . .] that projecting the values of the French state would be enough to form the good citizen.”57 As has been clear in this book, this belief in documentary cinema was not unique to the totalitarian state. A successive chain of governments under the Third Republic since the First World War held a similar conviction. Their efforts at promoting social programs through film, and their pronouncements about what they were doing, indicate a clear faith in cinema as an exemplary medium. For them, as for Bazin, the image held an almost sacred relationship with truth. It simply could not lie. When harnessed to an expository argument, therefore, it transferred that guarantee of truth to the argument.58 This view of expository documentary began to be challenged after the Second World War. Nichols links its subsequent disfavor to the problems inherent in the narrative structure itself, a “didactic reductionism” that

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makes the “dubious claim that all things are as the film represents them,” which no self-respecting audience member should be expected to believe.59 These problems were present from the beginning. The audience responses presented in this book indicate that audiences were always keenly attentive to messages they suspected that films might be trying to force upon them. Many French administrators wrote of the need to conceal “propaganda” cleverly in order not to be rejected out of hand by the audience.60 In addition to its narrative problems, the expository documentary also suffered from a close association with authoritarian regimes. Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Vichy France all made extensive use of the medium to spread their views of civilization that were so thoroughly discredited after the war. Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit’s book on Vichy documentary is appropriately titled Les documenteurs, “The Docu-liars.” It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that many contemporary scholars have found them unworthy of attention. When all of the human interactions surrounding documentary production are pulled into focus alongside the frame and the framer of a film, documentary films serve as a different kind of memory box. Neither faithful records of bygone practices, nor outdated documents that are patently untrue, they become dynamic sites of negotiation and exchange. Glimpses of forgotten conversations flicker into view inside and outside the frame. These glimpses sketch out the contours of the prevailing discourses, the discourses of consensus, of a particular time and place. The prevailing discourse that emerges from the documentary films studied in this book reflects a turn inwards, towards the French nation. It can be read as a response to a period of crisis. Battered and disillusioned by the First World War, France had to rebuild not only its architecture but also its self-image. Two vital cultural questions were central to this renewal: how to resolve the tensions between tradition and modernization, and how to integrate the diverse peoples and cultures of metropolitan France and its empire. Modernization could potentially bring standardization or worse, Americanization. Accepting cultural diversity could potentially threaten the centralized political unity of the republic. The films studied in this book offer a response to these cultural questions. They articulate a vision of France that relies on a healthy balance between modernization and tradition. They inscribe rural and colonial societies, whether imagined as actors on the screen or as spectators in theaters, into this idea of balance. On screen, these people were living

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embodiments of ancestral knowledge and tradition, guarantors of the success of a French model of civilisation that respects diversity while simultaneously forging national unity and progress. In their seats, they were the essential agents of the modernization of France, spectators whose individual tastes and preferences must be respected even as they must be convinced of the benefits of modernization proposed by the centralized government. Above all, they, like their urban counterparts, must be persuaded of their fundamental importance to the regeneration of France. Setting out with the voluntary object of analyzing rural and colonial films side-by-side, this book suggests that rural and colonial spaces played a similar role in the refashioning of the French national story during the interwar period. Similar tensions between modernization and the preservation of tradition existed in economic and social programs. A similar emphasis on the rootedness in local cultures also emerged. This rootedness was not a threat to the republic, but rather a source of national strength. A growing interest in diverse rural populations as distinct groups of individuals rather than as homogeneous masses further links outreach efforts to the regions and the colonies. These similarities raise questions about the extent to which the colonial or rural situation was necessarily the determining factor in a particular historical circumstance, or in a particular set of myths and stereotypes, as some studies might suggest. The apparent parallels between understandings of rural and colonial France in the domain of film point towards possibilities for future research in other areas of overlap between political, social, and cultural developments in rural France and the empire. Perhaps one reason that contemporary scholars have largely overlooked this overlap is that the national integration of rural and colonial spaces respectively in the latter half of the last century has taken such divergent trajectories. As the consolidation of the European union shifts from the economic to the cultural and political realms, questions emerge about what defines a nation in the context of a new Europe, and indeed, if France is still “French” enough. Rural and regional France continue to play an important role in the French national imagination, while decolonization has thoroughly discredited the colonial paradigm, posing a new set of challenges to contemporary France. Rural spaces and regional diversity were important in establishing France’s economic identity in the second half of the twentieth century.61 France currently receives more foreign tourists per year than any other nation (82 million in 2007), and tourism accounts for 6.2 percent of

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GDP. In part, these visitors are attracted by historic art and architecture, the natural beauty of the country, and a well-developed infrastructure for tourism. The preservation of cultural diversity in the regions and rural areas is also important to the tourist industry.62 Visitors value the architectural, cultural, and gastronomic diversity that they encounter in traveling around the country. Visitors to France spend one-fourth of their vacation budgets on gastronomy, often seeking out specialties that are particular to a place. Many French products gain added value because of their local connections: Roquefort cheese, Burgundy wine, and Champagne are just a few examples. As the percentage of French citizens active in agricultural professions has dwindled, tourism has brought new sources of revenue to rural areas, accounting for 20 percent of total tourist expenditures. The success of its tourist industry would appear to suggest that at least in the eyes of foreign visitors, France has achieved its modernization without falling prey to the placeless standardization that was held up as a danger of the American model in the 1930s. The cultural diversity of the regions is still valued as a national asset. The integration of colonial spaces into the national paradigm that played such an important role in interwar discourse has followed a quite different trajectory. The colonialist model of civilization has been completely discredited in the wake of decolonization. The benevolent republic that valued a diverse collection of local cultures living under the French flag has disappeared in a tsunami of social criticism. The permanent presence in France of immigrants from the former colonies and their descendents has instead provoked another kind of deep questioning of what it means to be French. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s new Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and CoDevelopment sparked vigorous opposition from voices on the Left because it explicitly links the question of immigration to national identity. The supposedly color-blind republic continues to struggle with the unequal opportunity, discrimination, and outright racism facing French citizens of different origins. Because of its egalitarian principles, France has had difficulties addressing these problems and even collecting data on them.63 These debates play out against a background of ongoing discussion, often acrimonious, about colonial injustices, exploitation, and war crimes. The paradoxes that were inherent in the republican colonial project will continue to haunt French national memory for many years to come. In light of the very different destinies of rural and colonial France in recent years, paralells between their stories in the 1920s and 1930s have

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been largely erased from memory. And yet, these parallels shed light on the development of French republicanism as it sought to come to terms with a crisis of modernization and reached for new cultural paradigms. Grasping the importance of rural and colonial societies to the national imagination in the quite recent past deepens our understanding of the new crises of identity facing France in the twenty-first century. Reaching into the “memory box” constituted by the documentary film archive illuminates some of these stories. It also raises questions about current documentary film production and what kind of memory box it will leave behind for future generations.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4

5

6

Cited by Guillaume-Michel Coissac, “Le cinéma au service de la civilisation et de la propagande,” Le Tout Cinéma (Paris: Publications Filma, 1931–32), 58. All translations of quotations from the French are my own. Heralded as the quintessential modern means of communication, film—and particularly documentary film—was accorded pride of place for the first time in a national exhibition in France in 1937, at the Paris World’s Fair. On this occasion, rather than functioning as a complement to other kinds of visual exhibits, as had been the case at past exhibitions, film itself was on display. Antoine de Baecque, “À la recherche d’une forme cinématographique de l’histoire,” Critique 632–3 (January–February 2000): 154–5. De Baecque states further that “twentieth-century man imagines, analyzes and describes reality cinematographically.” He mentions elsewhere that many commonly used colloquial expressions such as “flashback,” “slow motion,” and “close up” are derived from cinematic practice. De Baecque, L’histoire-caméra (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 24. Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Dziga Vertov was a pseudonym for Denis Kaufman. Best known for his 1929 experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov’s newsreels were sent out to be screened in remote areas on special trains and steamboats. The aim was to unite the people of the Soviet Union by keeping them uniformly informed about the continuing struggle. For a starting point on Vertov and other Soviet pioneers, see Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 51–71; Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum, 2005), 27–43; Jean-Michel Frodon, La projection nationale: cinéma et nation (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1998), 45–59; Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). A selection of Vertov’s writings can be found in Annette Michelson, ed. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). On Medvekin, see also Chris Marker’s film Le Dernier Bolshevik (The Last Bolshevik) (ARTE/La Sept/Channel Four/Les Films de l’Astrophore, 1993).

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166 7

8

9

10

11

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See, for example, Rolf Giesen, Nazi Propaganda Films: A Filmography and History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co, 2003); also Stephen Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2007); Ray Müller, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Omega Film/Nomad Films/Channel Four/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen/ARTE, 1993); Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Christel Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif: regards sur le rôle du cinéma éducatif dans la politique internationale du fascisme italien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). Barnouw and Ellis, A New History of Documentary Film, provide introductory information on Grierson. Barnouw 84–99 and Ellis 57–75. See also Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (New York: Routledge, 1990). The exclusion of documentaries that are not “Griersonian” enough comes from Ellis, A New History of Documentary Film, ix; the dismissal of films that lack esthetic appeal is from Guy Gauthier, Un siècle de documentaires français: des tourneurs de manivelle aux voltigeurs du multimédia (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004). I am responsible for the speculation that some films have remained unexamined for cultural and political reasons. Steve Wharton, Screening Reality: French Documentary Film during the German Occupation (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 24. Guy Gauthier, Un siècle de documentaires français (Paris: Armand Colin, 2002), 57–83. Thomas G. August, The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 104. They claim to exclude any film that is “scientific” or “educational” rather than social, and thus study only works from the United States, Britain, and Canada. Ellis, A New History of Documentary Film, ix–x. When I first began the research for this project, the catalogue of the French national film archives was not available to the public; a researcher had to write to the archive with a specific title in mind and ask them if they had it. This has changed significantly in the past ten years as a portion of the catalogue (31,670 of its over 100,000 titles, of which 7,375 are documentaries) has been entered into a database and is now publicly available online at http://www.cnc-aff.fr/. In 1995, the Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma took on the formidable task of cataloguing all existing French nonfiction films, an undertaking that is still in progress. The Summer 1995 issue of this association’s journal, 1895, entitled Les images du réel 1900–1930, was devoted entirely to publishing new data on early French documentary film. This book is based on research at the Archives françaises du film as well as in the film collections of the Ministère de l’Agriculture, the Musée National de l’Éducation, and the Établissement cinématographique et photographique de l’armée. A full list of manuscript archives consulted in addition to these film collections can be found in the bibliography.

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Frodon, La projection nationale. While Frodon’s arguments are sometimes far-fetched, his central concept of projection as a common thread linking cinema and nation is a useful one. Robert Paxton, French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgères’s Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 7. One of Royal’s comments during the campaign that raised eyebrows on the Left was her wish that every French family would own a French flag and would display it on Bastille day. For discussion of the inflection of the campaign regarding this issue, see, for example, Véronique Soulé, “Il ne faut pas refuser le débat sur l’identité nationale,” Libération, May 12, 2007, 8; Eric Dupin, “L’identité nationale, une thématique codée qui profite à Nicolas Sarkozy mais pas à Le Pen,” Le Figaro, March 30, 2007, 17. Herrick Chapman, “Modernity and National Identity in Postwar France,” French Historical Studies 22 (1999): 293. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 112. Christian Metz writes that the documentary film process transforms events into “individual signifiers.” Sergei Eisenstein’s films, for Metz, show “the course of real events refracted through an ideological point of view, entirely thought out, signifying from beginning to end.” Metz, Film Language, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 36–7; italics his. [Originally published as Essai sur la signification au cinéma, Tome I (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1971).] Bill Nichols explains that this is partly because “documentaries offer pleasure and appeal while their own structure remains virtually invisible, their own rhetorical strategies and stylistic choices largely unnoticed.” Nichols, Representing Reality, x. To wit, Le petit Robert (2000) defines a documentary as “a didactic film, presenting authentic documents that were not produced for the occasion (as opposed to a fiction film)”; the Oxford English Dictionary proposes the following: a documentary film is “factual, realistic; [. . .] based on real events or circumstances, and intended primarily for instruction or record purposes.” Nichols, Representing Reality, 113; Michael Renov, “The Truth About NonFiction,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2. Nichols, Representing Reality, 3. I borrow the term “truth peddler” from Lauren Miller, a contributor to the Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum Project website at Longview Community College, http://mcckc.edu/longview/ctac/ corenotes.htm, accessed June 27, 2008. Marc Ferro, “Le film, une contre-analyse de la société?” in Faire de l’histoire. Nouveaux objets, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 241. Paul Landau has written that people use images to “to draw together previously inchoate social meanings from their own societies, and then use them to ‘recognize’ people from other societies.” Landau and Deborah Kaspin, ed.

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Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2, 5. The conclusions of Weber’s classic work on the centralization model [Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976)] have been debated and revised by such scholars as Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Rural France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Jean-François Chanet, L’école républicaine et les petites patries (Paris: Aubier, 1996); Jean-Pierre Jessenne, Les campagnes françaises entre mythe et histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006); Susan Carol Rogers, Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: The Transformation and Reproduction of an Aveyronnais Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 World’s Fair (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998). Ford, Creating the Nation, 6–7. Chapman, “Modernity and National Identity,” 296. Alice Conklin, Frederick Cooper, and Ann Laura Stoler have been instrumental in setting this new research agenda. See in particular, Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in French West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Cooper and Stoler, ed. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). World’s Fairs have proved to be a useful starting point, as Harry Gamble has shown in his work on “colonial regionalism” at the 1937 exhibition. He argues that including the colonies as an extension of the regional exhibits at the fair reveals deeper parallels between the ways traditional societies in France and in the colonies were viewed as traditional and modern, as exotic and authentic. Harry Gamble, “Artisans, Craft Industries and the Progress of ‘Overseas France.’” Chapter of forthcoming book manuscript, Colonial Educations: Framing the Future of French West Africa, 1930–1950 [provisional title]. Much of the recent publication in this field focuses on visual imagery of colonized peoples and places that circulated in the métropole, or visual representations of rural France produced for consumption in Paris and other urban centers. See Chapter 4, note 15 for more detail and sources. It is this relationship that was at the heart of Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin’s 2002 edited volume, Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, which aims to undertake “the serious investigation of visual signs in the experience of colonialism.” Robert Sklar, “Oh! Althusser!: Historiography and the Rise of Cinema Studies,” Radical History Review 41 (Spring 1988): 27, 32. In French cultural history, the works of scholars such as Eugen Weber and Pascal Ory exemplify this trend. In French film history, this trend is exemplified by scholars such as Raymond Chirat, François Garçon, Alan Williams, and Susan Hayward, whose narratives are based on great works, directors, and movements, and the institutions that generated them. Raymond Chirat, Catalogue des films français de long métrage: films sonores de fiction 1929–1939 (Brussels: Cinémathèque royale,

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1981); François Garçon, De Blum à Pétain: cinéma et société française (1936–1944) (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1984); Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993). Vanessa Schwartz adopts a similar tactic in her book It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Ferro 241. Bruce Austin’s extensive bibliography of publications on audiences also supports this claim: The Film Audience: An International Bibliography of Research (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1983). My approach is also inspired by Chartier’s work on the book, described in Roger Chartier, “Le monde comme représentation: redéfinition de l’histoire culturelle,” Annales ESC 44:6 (November–December 1989): 1505–20. Combining disciplines that are traditionally separated, Chartier considers books not only as texts to be analyzed but also as “cultural practices,” objects of material consumption and cultural appropriation. Jean Epstein is known for his Flaherty-like studies of “authentic” people (Finis terrae 1929, Mor-Vran 1930, L’Or des mers 1932). Jean Painlevé set his artfully lighted studies of underwater natural phenomena to avant-garde musical scores (Oeufs d’épinoche 1928, L’Hippocampe 1934). Jean Vigo’s “city symphony” (À propos de Nice 1930) is often linked to those of Walther Ruttmann and Alberto Cavalcanti, and Fernand Léger experimented with the extension of modern painting into cinema (Ballet mécanique 1924). These artists are often characterized as “temporary fugitive[s] from fiction,” as Erik Barnouw writes. Barnouw 50. I have classified the films in this book as documentaries based on a definition that combines filmmaker intentions with audience reception. Simply put, a documentary in this view is a film made by someone intending to make a statement about the real world whose work elicits a “documentary reading” by the audience. This definition blends one devised by the founding members of the World Documentary Union in 1947 with the emphasis on audience suggested by Roger Odin, and it has the advantage of accepting the categorization that was in place at the time rather than trying to impose a retroactive classification system. According to this definition, a documentary was “any film that, through rational or emotional means and using shots of real phenomena or their sincere and justified reconstitution, has the goal of consciously expanding human knowledge and exposing economic, social and cultural problems and their solutions.” Cited in Jean Painlevé, “La castration du documentaire,” Les Cahiers du Cinéma 21 (March 1953): 27. Roger Odin, “Film documentaire, lecture documentarisante,” in Cinémas et réalités (Saint-Étienne: Centre interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherches sur l’expression contemporaine, 1984), 267–71. Although filmmakers and theorists between the wars did debate further subcategorizations of the genre, proposing distinctions such as educational vs instructional vs informational film [see, for example, Benoit-Lévy 76], I have chosen to maintain a broadly conceived distinction between fiction and nonfiction, or documentary, because the fiction/nonfiction divide was the only

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categorization that was generally clear and perceptible to audiences. I have included in the study any films that presented themselves as nonfiction and thus asked for this documentary reading from their audiences, with the exception of newsreels, which occupied their own place on film programs and were widely recognized as time-sensitive documents, fundamentally different from documentaries. It is one contention of this book that documentary film does not differ in any fundamental way from propaganda film. I have not chosen to use the term “propaganda” in this study primarily because of the present-day assumptions associated with it: propaganda spreads lies, it is used by totalitarian regimes, and it is addressed to unintelligent people. In interwar France, the term propagande was used liberally in a context we might call “public relations” today; that is, to refer to the process of disseminating information (not necessarily incorrect, and certainly not necessarily right wing). Francis-Jean Moyse, “L’avenir des documentaires,” Ciné-Spectacles 471 (June 3–9, 1928). Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xi. Ellis, A New History of Documentary Film, 74. Griaule’s daughter, Geneviève Calame-Griaule, expressed her indignation at the pro-colonial commentary of her father’s films, stating that “I won’t say anything about this commentary; it was obviously added later as it couldn’t have been written by Griaule,” in Guy Seligmann’s film, Les Dogon: Chronique d’une passion (Paris: La Sept/Arte-SODAPERAGA, 1997 [DVD Arte video, 2006]).

Chapter 2 1

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Jean Benoit-Lévy, Les grandes missions du cinéma (Montréal: Lucien Parizeau, 1945), 9. Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 87. John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London: Collins, 1946), 12. “We were interested in all instruments which would crystallize sentiments in a muddled world and create a will toward civic participation,” he writes. He believed fervently, however, that despite this persuasive aspect, documentary conveyed the truth. “Documentary would photograph the living scene and the living story. [. . .] We believe that the original (or native) actor, and the original (or native) scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of the modern world. [. . .] The materials and stories thus taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article. [. . .] Add to this that documentary can achieve an intimacy of knowledge and effect impossible to the shimsham mechanics of the studio, and the lily-fingered interpretations of the metropolitan actor” Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, 15, 80–2. Two exceptions are Peter Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Valérie Vignaux, Jean Benoit-Lévy ou le corps comme utopie (Paris: AFHRC, 2007).

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Notes to pages 13–16 6

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On this, and for an overview of the early developments in documentary cinema, see Barnouw, Documentary. The film of workers leaving the factory, however, widely considered to be the world’s first documentary film, was in fact a reconstruction of a real event that was staged for the camera; evidence for this can be found in the fact that the workers are dressed in their best clothes and that some of the same figures “re-exit” the factory several times. For more on Lumière, see Georges Sadoul, Louis Lumière (Paris: Seghers, 1964), and Jacques Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinema (Paris: Casterman, 1968), vol. 2. See Charles Musser, Thomas A. Edison and His Kinetographic Motion Pictures (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 26–7. Barnouw, Documentary, 29. Doyen’s films were not well received by the French medical establishment, partly because an early camera operator kept the negatives and sold them without Doyen’s knowledge, so they were soon circulating all over Europe in “special screenings” for audiences in search of sensationalism. Doyen had intended the films to be used exclusively for training of medical students in surgical practices. Thierry Lefebvre, Cinéma et discours hygiéniste (1890–1930), (unpublished dissertation, Paris III, dir. Michel Marie, 1996), 15, 19–20. Auguste Bessou, Rapport général sur l’emploi du cinématographe dans les différentes branches de l’enseignement (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1920), 5. André Braun-Larrieu, Le rôle social du cinéma (Paris: Éditions du Cinéopse, 1938), 150. See Pierre Véronneau, “Le Fascinateur et la Bonne Presse: des médias catholiques pour publics francophones,” 1895 40 (July 2003), 25–40. See Thierry Lefebvre, “Charles Urban et le film d’éducation,” 1895, special issue: The Will Day Collection of Cinematograph and Moving Picture Equipment (1997), 129–35. AN, CAC 238, Inventaire des archives du Ministère de l’Agriculture. A key to all archival references can be found in the bibliography. For many citations of early audience studies, see Bruce Austin, The Film Audience: An International Bibliography of Research (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1983). Robert Sklar, “Oh! Althusser!: Historiography and the Rise of Cinema Studies,” Radical History Review 41 (Spring 1988), 10–35. The monographs, conducted under the auspices of the Motion Picture Research Council and financed by the Payne Fund, sought to determine whether movies showing crime, violence, or otherwise immoral acts encouraged viewers to imitate such behavior, a debate that continues to rage in the early twenty-first century over violence in video games. While their results were varied and controversial, the Payne Fund studies generally concluded that movie viewing does affect attitudes and behavior of the audience to some extent, and although the effect is not as great as was originally feared, it is in general bad. The subjects included: Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct ; Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser, Movies, Delinquency, and Crime; W.W. Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary; Edgar Dale, How to Appreciate Motion Pictures; Wendell Dysinger and Christian A. Ruckmick, The Emotional Responses of Children to the Motion Picture Situation; Perry Holaday and George

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D. Stodard, Getting Ideas from the Movies; Mark A. May and Frank K. Shuttleworth, The Social Conduct and Attitudes of Movie Fans; Charles J. Peters, Motion Pictures and Standards of Morality; Samuel Renshaw et al., Children’s Sleep; L.L. Thurstone and R.C. Peterson, Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children. All were published by Macmillan and Co. In the United States, quantitative studies on motion pictures and learning formed the basis of six Ph.D. dissertations at the University of Iowa, New York University, Ohio State, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State University between 1929 and 1935. Published articles reporting the findings of quantitative studies appeared in social science journals such as the Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Experimental Education, and the American Journal of Sociology over the same period. Before its closure in 1937 due to Italy’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, the institute authored an international agreement abolishing taxes on educational films as well as an international catalogue of educational cinema. It also organized an international conference on educational cinema in 1934 that attracted over 400 participants. Its International Review of Educational Cinema published numerous articles on cinema and education, some of which were also the results of quantitative studies. For more on this institute, see Christel Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif: regards sur le rôle du cinéma éducatif dans la politique internationale du fascisme italien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). See, for example, Léo Pelland, Comment lutter contre le mauvais cinéma (Montreal: l’oeuvre des tracts, 1926). According to Grierson himself, he first used the term “documentary film” in English in a review of Robert Flaherty’s film Moana published in the New York Sun in February 1926. Grierson, who acknowledged having borrowed the term from French, dismissed the French usage as meaning only “travelogue,” which showed his limited knowledge of the developments in documentary film in 1920s France. However, in English-language histories of documentary film, he is generally credited for having coined the term first in any language. Grierson was the prime mover in what would become the British documentary film movement, a group of producers and directors working for the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) film unit whose contributions to the articulation of what they called “the documentary form” in the early 1930s were unparalleled in any other country at the time. Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, 11, 78. Trésor de la langue française, http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm, accessed July 1, 2007. “Cessons le discrédit jeté chez nous sur le documentaire [Let’s put an end to the discredit we tend to heap on the documentary],” writes Guillaume-Michel Coissac in Le Cinéopse 26 (October 1921): 694. The glossy film weekly CinéMiroir writes of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in 1922, “au point de vue documentaire, la production la plus belle qu’on puisse voir [from a documentary point of view, the most beautiful production one can see].” In June 1923, the reviewer of La traversée du Sahara en autochenilles uses the term “grand film documentaire.” Jean-Paul Colleyn, Le regard documentaire (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), 31; Barnouw, Documentary, 98.

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Notes to pages 17–21 26

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Francis-Jean Moyse, “L’avenir des documentaires,” Ciné-Spectacles 471 (June 3–9, 1928). Moyse, “L’avenir des documentaires.” Bessou, Rapport général, 4. Guillaume-Michel Coissac, Le Fascinateur (September 1910), cited in Véronneau, “Le Fascinateur,” 30. SHA, 7N 568 (supp), Rapport sur la réorganisation du Service cinématographique de l’armée. CAOM, AGEFOM 800/1865, “Le service photo-cinématographique de l’Indochine.” They initially purchased 100 projectors, which were sent to school districts all over France, and 100 boxes of 200 slides each. The service grew quickly, and by 1914, the Musée was lending out 36,000 slides a year. Subjects included history, fine arts, geography, travel, natural history, physics, astronomy and meteorology, chemistry, agriculture, horticulture, apiculture, machines, industry, and the army and navy. The magic lantern slide collection continued to be used well after the launch of the film program. In 1932, the Musée Pédagogique had 200,000 magic lantern slides. Le Tout-Cinéma 12 (1932–33): 326. During the war, demands for slide shows in schools slowed, but the collections were used to entertain wounded men in hospitals. “Le service des vues du Musée Pédagogique,” Bulletin du Musée Pédagogique (September 1929): 3–8. Cited in Eugène Reboul, Le cinéma scolaire et éducateur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1926), 4. Paul Painlevé, Minister of Public Instruction, to the President of the Republic, 1916, cited in Bessou, Rapport général, 2. While the commission was deliberating, individual professors continued experimenting with film. A. Colette, a primary school principal, published an article in the Revue Pédagogique in 1917 promoting the use of film as the ideal tool for encouraging learning through direct observation. The article lays out specific lesson plans that walk the reader through a film-enhanced lesson, question by question, including various possible responses from students. A. Colette, “Les projections cinématographiques dans l’enseignement,” Revue Pédagogique 71:12 (December 1917): 601–10. Elected as an independent republican, Painlevé positioned himself on the Left and would later work with Herriot and Blum to oppose the conservative Bloc National government after the First World War. How to teach morality without God was a trial by fire for the secular school system that faced stiff opposition from the church. The final compromise on this issue indicates an understanding of the term “secularism” [laïcité] as neutrality in terms of religion rather than as the absence of religion. The curriculum of the public primary schools as defined in 1882 assumed that children would come to school with some notion of God, albeit from different branches of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The duty of the schoolteacher was to acknowledge the importance of God as the source of all moral laws, and to encourage the child to use her conscience and her reason to discover and to follow these moral laws. Arrêté du 27 juillet 1882, On the

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pedagogical organization and the curriculum for public primary schools. Cited in Pierre Ognier, “La laïcité scolaire dans son histoire (1880–1945),” in Yves Lequin, ed. Histoire de la laïcité (Besançon: CRDP de Franche-Comté, 1994), 109–11. “Schools should play the primary role in the moral regeneration of the race,” wrote a primary school inspector in 1920. “La culture morale à l’école de l’après-guerre,” Journal des Instituteurs (May 15, 1920), cited in Ognier, “La laïcité,” 189. Ognier, “La laïcité,” 189–90. Bessou, Rapport général, 4–5. Bessou, Rapport général, 3. Adrien Bruneau, “Les bienfaits du cinématographe dans l’enseignement,” Le Cinéopse 33 (May 1, 1922): 434–5. See Harry Gamble, Developing Cultures: Debates over Education in French West Africa, 1930–1950 (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 2002), 52 and Ognier, “La laïcité,” 188–9. Cited in Reboul, Le cinéma scolaire, 8–9. Bessou, Rapport général, 3. CAD, SOFE 462, November 6, 1936. Le Tout Cinéma 12 (1932–33): 326. AN, F10 2691, Cinémathèque agricole: répertoire des films, 1938. This is the formulation used by Jean Benoit-Lévy, “La situation actuelle du cinéma d’enseignement: rapport présenté à la Semaine du cinéma français avril-mai 1929,” Bulletin du Musée Pédagogique 1–8 (1929–31): 13. The pedagogical film commission at the Musée Pédagogique forbade the inclusion of sound films in the collection at least through 1936. CAD, SOFE 462. One of the most popular films in the catalogue was a short film entitled Choix d’un cheval, which showed a galloping horse in slow motion. CAC, 850473, Art. 2, Enquête sur le fonctionnement du cinéma éducateur, 1930. Despite its fictional story, the director intended the film to be “clearly related to the documentary genre”; the interiors, he states, “were filmed in real Burgundian interiors and in real schools.” Jean Gourget, “Comment j’ai réalisé Jeannette Bourgogne,” Revue du Cinéma Éducateur 7 (December 1938–January 1939): 10. Ch. Mangolf, “Jeannette Bourgogne: film à la gloire de l’école,” Revue du Cinéma Éducateur 6 (March 1938): 20–1. Ciné-Document 3 (March 1932): 179. A. Sentilhes, “L’audiovisuel au service de l’enseignement,” La Gazette des Archives 173 (2nd trimester 1996): 177. Le Cinéopse 218 (October 1937): 180, confirms that this number did not change significantly during the 1930s. Jehan de Vimbelle, “Cinéma scolaire et cinéma d’enseignement: le bilan de l’année,” Le Cinéopse 77 (January 1, 1926): 61. Jean Benoit-Lévy, Les grandes missions du cinéma (Montréal: Lucien Parizeau, 1945), 228. Categories in the catalogue include urbanism, agriculture, technical education and career counseling, surgery and medicine, and geography. See http:// www.filmsjbl.com.

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Notes to pages 27–28 58

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AN, F 60 300. For more on health and hygiene film programs, see Thierry Lefebvre, Cinéma et discours hygiéniste (1890–1930). Le Cinéopse (January 1, 1931): 2. On the initiative of Albert Sarraut, the Agence générale des colonies was founded in 1919, and individual agences économiques for each overseas territory followed, beginning with Indochina in 1920. CAOM, AGEFOM 574/359, Rapport du congrès d’action et de propagande coloniales organisé par l’Institut colonial français, 11-12-13 May 1931, section I. The SOFE promoted partnerships with the private sector, such as nonprofit organizations, chambers of commerce, and industry. It was divided into four sections: schools and universities, arts and literature, sports, tourism, and cinema, and a fourth section was devoted to various activities such as the support of the Alliance française and the Mission laïque, the Catholic and Protestant Propaganda Committees, and a host of friendship associations between France and other countries. In a letter to a deputy from the Hautes Alpes, the director, Jean Marx, describes the bureau’s role in matters of cinema: “The SOFE works to use film for the dissemination of our thought and the propagation of our language. In this respect, the SOFE plays the role of organizer [animateur] and advisor. Informed by our representatives abroad on the tastes of foreign audiences, it works to encourage every possible measure that would encourage our film sales, prevent foreign films from harming our national image, and guide the French newsreel companies.” CAD, SOFE 462, SOFE to Maurice Petsche, député des Hautes Alpes, April 20, 1935. For example, they worked with the French chargé d’affaires in Santo Domingo to protest the screening of La garçonne, judged “undesirable” because it portrayed an “odious caricature of a young French woman.” The main character in the film is a prostitute. CAD, SOFE 92. A representative of the SOFE sat on the commission de contrôle cinématographique, which delivered the visas that were required for films to be shown in France and its overseas territories. One typical package, received by the French Consulate General in Australia on May 22, 1925 included the following films: Hydroelectric Power, The École Polytechnique, Marseille, The French Navy, The Textile Industry, Syria: Baalbeck, The Seine Valley, Chantilly, Paris and its Monuments, Several Normandy Beaches, The Great Wines of France: Anjou, and The Mysterious Continent: Timbuktu. CAD, SOFE 92. Consulat général de France en Australie to SOFE, May 22, 1925. Colonial propaganda films vaunting France’s accomplishments in health, education, or economic development were not considered political, and were frequently included in these packages. However, the SOFE turned down a film entitled Death of Iron because it was pacifist, and therefore “too political.” CAD, SOFE 462, March 29, 1935. For more information on the Offices, see Raymond Borde and Charles Perrin, Les offices régionaux du cinéma éducateur et la survivance du muet, 1920–1940 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1992). Ognier, “La laïcité,” 185–6. On the history of la morale laïque in the schools, see Yves Lequin, ed. Histoire de la laïcité (Besançon: CRDP de Franche-Comté, 1994), chapters 3–8.

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176 69 70

71

72 73 74 75

76 77

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Notes to pages 29–30

Véronneau, “Le Fascinateur,” 31–2. Gustave Cauvin, Vouloir: rapport sur l’activité et le développement de l’Office régional du cinéma éducateur de Lyon en 1927 (Lyon: Office régional du cinéma éducateur, 1928), 4. Edouard Herriot, then mayor of Lyon, encouraged Cauvin in his early efforts. Cauvin reports that the films available for the three screenings he organized in the first year were scarce: one of the few “morality” films he could get was a film entitled The Victims of Alcohol produced by Pathé Frères in 1910. Cauvin, Le cinéma éducateur à l’école et dans nos oeuvres (Lyon: Office régional du cinéma éducateur, 1939), 6. Much of what we know about Cauvin comes from his own publications, which are in the form of brochures and are not readily available; I was able to consult only two: Vouloir and Le cinéma éducateur. Other titles include La propagande laïque par le cinéma, Le cinéma éducateur (1927); Persévérer (1929); Résister (1930); Dix ans après (1931); and Éclairer (1932). Of these last titles, Borde and Perrin claim to have the only existing copies. Cauvin, Vouloir, 3. Cauvin, Le cinéma éducateur à l’école, 7. Cauvin, Vouloir, 42. Cauvin’s lending program ran on a nonprofit basis; a 100-franc subscription was required to receive eight educational programs per year, and his “recreational” programs could be rented for a fraction of the cost of those from a commercial distributor. For these recreational programs, which were shown outside of school hours and to a broad audience, audiences would pay a one- or two-franc admission fee. Any profits from ticket sales returned to the school fund. Cauvin, Vouloir, 5. “Some schoolteachers who volunteer their time to organize rural entertainment programs are engaged in a daily struggle with mayors whose stupidity is equaled only by the hatred they have for the public school [la laïque],” he writes. “These mayors paralyze the devoted efforts of our teachers; some will even open up the school grounds to enemies of the school.” These schools received special preference in program frequency and rotation. Cauvin, Le cinéma éducateur à l’école, 14. Cauvin organized a national conference on educational cinema in 1926, in Lyon, which was followed by two others that same year sponsored by the Ministry of Education, in Saint-Etienne and Lille. Both of the latter conferences resulted in the creation of regional film offices for their respective regions. Ciné-Document, “Ciné-Document et le congrès national du cinéma éducateur en 1931,” Le Cinéopse (January 1, 1931): 1. Le Tout Cinéma 12 (1932–33): 339. Revue Pédagogique (1st semester 1929). Borde and Perrin’s analysis is primarily drawn from Cauvin’s writings, and Cauvin is one of the strongest supporters of the recreational, rather than the educational, aspect of cinéma éducateur. Raymond Borde and Charles Perrin, Les offices régionaux du cinéma éducateur. Other sources, such as the Revue du Cinéma Éducateur and the Bulletin de la ligue française de l’enseignement, suggest

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that many supporters and clients of the regional film networks advocated a healthy balance between documentary and fiction. 83 The Lyon office had 1,800 documentaries and 700 fiction films in 1927. AN, 310 AP 62, Speech by Joseph Brenier to the Senate, November 8, 1927. 84 Le Cinéopse 26 (October 1921): 719. An advertisement for “Le bon film” reads: “‘Le bon film’ gives a formal guarantee that all its films have been censored.” 85 Borde and Perrin, Les offices régionaux du cinéma éducateur, 76. 86 Le Cinéopse 77 (January 1926): 57. 87 Véronneau, “Le Fascinateur,” 31–2. 88 Borde and Perrin give a detailed analysis on the handling of the transition to sound by the Offices. 89 Le Tout Cinéma 12 (1932–33): 342. This association founded a new journal, the Revue Internationale du Cinéma Éducateur, that published articles of interest to educators, both on secular and religious education through film. 90 Joseph Brenier, “Le cinéma au service de l’enseignement et de l’éducation populaire,” Revue du Cinéma Éducateur 3 (July–September 1935): n.p. 91 This observation by Cauvin appears to contradict Véronneau’s conclusion that the arrival of sound effectively sounded the death-knell for Catholic cinema programs after 1930. Véronneau, “Le Fascinateur,” 32. 92 Gustave Cauvin, “L’activité des offices,” Revue du Cinéma Éducateur 3 (July– September 1935): n.p. 93 Cited in Bulletin du Musée Pédagogique (Melun: Imprimerie administrative). 94 Guillaume-Michel Coissac, “Sur l’écran ministériel,” Le Cinéopse 204 (August 1936): 144. 95 Pascal Ory, La belle illusion: culture et politique sous le signe du Front Populaire 1935–1938 (Paris: Plon, 1994), chp. 8. 96 Also on the table was a proposal to transform censorship by introducing representatives of the artistic avant-garde and by limiting the defense ministry’s veto to questions directly related to national security. 97 Chataigneau had been the director of the Service des oeuvres françaises à l’étranger since 1933. As a member of the comité d’action artistique, commission du cinématographe, Présidence du Conseil, he instituted newsreel censorship at the Présidence du Conseil in 1936 and was appointed to the Commission des films documentaires at the Ministry of Education, that same year. AN, F60 301, Lettre circulaire, June 27, 1936. By 1938, Chataigneau was secrétairé general à la présidence du conseil. 98 This commission grouped documentary filmmakers such as Jean Painlevé, Jean Benoit-Lévy, and other less well-known figures with ministry officials to address these problems. AN, SOFE 462. 99 Marcel Ruby, La vie et l’oeuvre de Jean Zay (Paris: Marcel Ruby, 1969): 318–20. 100 UFOCEL received support from the Ligue française de l’enseignement and the Confédération générale des oeuvres laïques. 101 Joseph Brenier, “Le cinéma au service de l’enseignement,” n.p. 102 Cauvin, Le cinema éducateur à l’école, 13, 19–22. 103 Some of the examples Cauvin gives are the Fédération des cooperatives, the Éclaireurs de France, the Comité des femmes en faveur de la paix, the Foyer

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178

104 105 106

Notes to pages 34–37

du soldat, the Association nationale de soutien à l’enfance, etc. Cauvin, Le cinéma éducateur à l’école, 25–34. Cauvin, Le cinéma éducateur à l’école, 25–34. AN, F60 301. AN, F60 301.

Chapter 3 *

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A version of this chapter was first published as the article “Projections of Rural Life: the Agricultural Film Initiative in France, 1919–1939”, by Alison Murray Levine, in Cinema Journal 43: 4 (2004): 73–95. Copyright ©2004 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Ministry of Agriculture (unsigned), Rapport sur le cinéma agricole, 1930. A commune is the smallest administrative district in France. Communes rurales are the districts that have low population density and fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. M. Obert, the mayor of Us (Seine-et-Oise), reports that rural dwellers would come from as far as 60 kilometers away to spend an evening at the movies, if they had access to a motor vehicle. Spectators would walk in to Us from 3 to 5 kilometers away. CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Ministry of Agriculture, Réponses à l’enquête sur le cinéma agricole, 1930. Jean-Pierre Jessenne cautions against the conflation of villagers and farmers when writing about rural France. Jessenne, Les campagnes françaises: entre mythe et histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006), 2. As will be clear in this chapter, while the film program primarily targeted farmers, it also had an impact on villagers, as the screenings usually happened in village centers. The existing scholarship on agricultural cinema has tended to isolate film content from promotional aims and audience reactions. The best source is Valérie Vignaux, Jean Benoit-Lévy ou le corps comme utopie (Paris: AFRHC, 2007), 156–90. See also Christine Buzzini, “La propagande par le cinéma au ministère de l’Agriculture,” 1895 18 (Summer 1995): 128–143, and Ronald Hubscher, “Savoir scientifique et pratique du savoir: le rôle du film agricole,” Bulletin du centre d’histoire économique et sociale de la région lyonnaise 2–3 (1983): 113–121. Film historians base this assessment on commercial cinemas. In 1938, 75 percent of France’s nearly 4,000 commercial cinemas were still located in and around the nation’s seven largest cities. Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Le cinéma français sous l’Occupation (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1989), 291. See also Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 361–74. See Michel Gervais, Marcel Jollivet, and Yves Tavernier, La fin de la France paysanne, vol. 4. of Histoire de la France rurale, ed. Georges Duby and Armand Wallon (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 555–60; Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (New York: SUNY Press,

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Notes to pages 37–40

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1998), 10–14. Slower to industrialize than other countries of Western Europe such as Great Britain and Germany, France continued to regard itself as a rural nation well into the twentieth century; the date of the “tipping point,” when the urban population surpassed the rural population, was 1931. For socialists, the farmer was the ultimate anti-capitalist, owning his own methods of production and having no employees outside his own family. Gervais, Jollivet, and Tavernier, La fin de la France paysanne, 12, 554. Robert Paxton, French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgères’s Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11–50. This vision is consistent with the general goals of interwar agricultural policy as elaborated in Gervais, Jollivet, and Tavernier, La fin de la France paysanne, 555–60. See Jules Méline, Le retour à la terre et la surproduction industrielle (Paris: Hachette, 1905). Shanny Peer argues that the theory of the balanced society was a strong undercurrent at the 1937 exhibition held under the left-wing Popular Front government. She gives the example of Henri Sellier, the Popular Front minister of public health, making a speech in favor of return to the earth at the fair. Peer, France on Display, 10–14. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism, 28. Actually, the rural exodus had slowed quite a bit prior to 1931, and it even reversed temporarily during the early 1930s as many people returned to their villages seeking refuge from the Depression. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism, 27. A higher percentage of farmers died during the First World War in comparison to factory workers or middle-class soldiers. Five million acres of rich farmland in the North and East were destroyed in battle. Annie Moulin, Les paysans dans la société française (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 170–5; Paxton, French Peasant Fascism, 28. Henri Queuille, “Préface,” Cinémathèque agricole: répertoire des films (Paris: Ministère de l’Agriculture, 1938), 1–2. Quoted in Queuille, “Préface,” 1–2. The contest is described in the Journal Officiel, July 12, 1920. Ricard describes his plan in detail in “La marche ascendante du cinéma rural,” Le Cinéopse 78 (February 1926): 166. CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Réponses à l’enquête. The number grew to 450 in 1930 and 545 in 1939. Hubscher, “Savoir scientifique,” 120. The total number of films available (because of multiple prints) grew from 558 in 1924 to over 5,000 in 1939. Guillaume-Michel Coissac, Le cinématographe et l’enseignement: nouveau guide pratique (Paris: Éditions du Cinéopse, 1926), 37; AN, CAC 238, Inventaire des archives du Ministère de l’Agriculture. CAC, 850473 Art. 2. Le Cinéopse 161 (January 1933): 55. CAD, SOFE 466, Utilisation des films au cours de la saison 1935–36, Ministère de l’Agriculture. Shows film loans by title. See Chapter 2 for more information about these networks. Le Cinéopse 218 (October 1937): 180.

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Notes to pages 40–53

Le cinéma agricole: répertoire des films (Paris: Ministère de l’Agriculture, 1931), 4. Le cinéma agricole: répertoire des films (1931), 4. Peer, France on Display, 112. He writes of the “deplorable consequences” that some commercial fiction films can have. Of Topaze, for example, he writes, “projected in front of an audience that had no way to avoid generalization, it had considerable negative effects on the perception of civil servants. This work should have remained in the theater [. . .] where the audiences are smaller and have a greater capacity for criticism.” Benoit-Lévy, Les grandes missions du cinéma (Montréal: L. Parizeau & Cie., 1945), 320. Benoit-Lévy, Les grandes missions, 345. Collection MA. Collection MA. Collection MA. Collection CNC. Collection MA. Buzzini, “La propagande,” 139. CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Société nationale d’encouragement à l’agriculture to Alfred Masse, President of the Commission permanente du cinéma agricole, November 22, 1929. CAC 850473 Art. 2, Minstère de l’Agriculture, Enquête sur le cinéma agricole, 1930. CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Réponses à l’enquête. Ricard, “La marche ascendante,” 166. Le cinéma agricole: répertoire des films (Paris: Ministère de l’Agriculture, 1928), 59. A typical evening of cinema began with a newsreel, then included a short documentary or comic, before moving on to one or two longer fiction films. It cost between 200 and 300 francs to rent a full program from a commercial distributor such as Gaumont or Pathé; similar programs could be had for as little as 110 francs through the regional film offices, but not all areas had access to one of these offices. Gustave Cauvin, Vouloir (Lyon: Office régional du cinéma éducateur, 1928), 28. François Garçon, De Blum à Pétain: cinéma et société française (1936–1944). Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1984), 198. The director of the regional agricultural services in Chaumont (Haute-Marne), for example, writes, “The technical films quite quickly lost their interest. When you think about it, it could hardly be otherwise, since if you project before farmers operations that they execute daily, it couldn’t interest them. What is more, if they see a gesture, or a movement poorly executed, or a practice that is different from that of the region, criticisms and reflections, [. . .] are heard and they cast certain ridicule on the film that is playing before them.” CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Réponses à l’enquête. Henri Mendras, Sociologie de la campagne française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959), 91–3. Casaubon, director of the Foyer régional et rural in Pourrain (Yonne). CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Réponses à l’enquête. CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Réponses à l’enquête.

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CAC, 850473 Art. 2, Ministère de l’Agriculture (unsigned), Rapport au sujet de l’enquête sur le fonctionnement du cinématographe dans les communes rurales, 1930. CAD, SOFE 466.

Chapter 4 1

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This story was told by the writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ and is repeated in many anecdotal references including Denise Brahimi, Cinémas d’Afrique francophone et du Maghreb (Paris: Nathan, 1997), 7. Unfortunately, the anecdote does not include information on what was shown that night, and why. AN, F60 711. This is a possible program that I have imagined from the list of films that were actually shown in Saïda on various dates. De Paemelaere, “Le cinéma scolaire de Saïda,” Revue Pédagogique 71:9 (September 1917): 289. De Paemelaere 285–6. The categories were geography, leçons de choses, natural sciences, agriculture, history, and current events. De Paemelaere 286. De Paemelaere 289. De Paemelaere 288. See, for example, Femi Okiremuete Shaka, “Instructional Cinema in Colonial Africa: An Historical Reappraisal,” Ufahamu: Journal of the African Activist Association 27:1-3 (1999): 27–47; Manthia Diawara, “Sub-Saharan Film Production: Technological Paternalism,” Jump Cut 32 (April 1987): 61–5; James Burns, “Watching Africans Watch Films: Theories of Spectatorship in British Colonial Africa,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 20:2 (2000): 197–211; Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Burns makes only a passing reference to French colonial film programs, and he situates the beginning of French involvement as late in the Second World War. Diawara states explicitly, “Unlike the British and the Belgians, [. . .] the French had no policy of producing films that were especially intended for their subjects in Africa. [. . .] France was indifferent to the state of cinema in the colonies.” African Cinema, 22. The French were in fact involved much earlier. Diawara, African Cinema, 22. Peter Bloom’s work has begun to fill this gap, analyzing the humanitarian arguments, primarily based on medical research, that appear in some colonial documentaries and feature films from the late nineteenth century through the outbreak of the Second World War. See Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Bloom’s excellent analysis does not provide much detail about the circulation of film in the colonies. The film collection went from 240 films in 35 mm in 1927 to 710 in 1932; from 1,000 films in 9.5 mm in 1927 to 6,000 in 1932; and from 54 users in 1927 to 400 in 1932. Ciné-Document no. 17 (July 1933): 615. See also Gustave Cauvin, Persévérer (Lyon: Office régional du cinéma éducateur, 1929), 95–7.

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182 12

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Notes to pages 59–61

Kenchela, Constantine, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Aïn-el-Arba, Blida, and Ténite-el-Hâad, were the cities equipped for educational film projection in 1929. Cauvin, Persévérer, 96. In Algiers, for example, the Office claimed to have organized 80 Thursday film screenings for school children in one theater alone in 1928; according to its director, M. Pestre, each screening drew an average of 5,000 students. Cited in Cauvin, Persévérer, 96. See in particular, Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in French West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Harry Gamble, “The Regionalist Movement in French West Africa: Colonial Schooling from the Great Depression to Vichy,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 29 (2001): 133–41. See also Gamble’s Ph.D. dissertation, Developing Cultures: Debates over Education in French West Africa, 1930–1950 (New York University, 2002) and “Artisans, Craft Industries and the Progress of ‘Overseas France.’” Chapter of forthcoming book manuscript, Colonial Educations: Framing the Future of French West Africa, 1930–1950 [provisional title]. See, for example, the sumptuously illustrated volumes of French colonial imagery produced by Pascal Blanchard et al. such as L’autre et nous: scènes et types (Paris: ACHAC, 1995); Images et colonies: iconographie et propagande coloniale sur l’Afrique française de 1880 à 1962 (Paris: BDIC-ACHAC, 1993); Images d’empire 1930–1960: Trente ans de photographies officielles sur l’Afrique française (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 1997). See also recent work on museums and exhibitions such as Alice Conklin, “Skulls on Display: The Science of Race in Paris’s Musée de l’homme, 1928–1950,” in Daniel Sherman, ed. Museums and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 250–88; Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L’exposition coloniale (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1991); Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, Paris (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). A notable exception to the one-way studies of colonial imagery is Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, ed. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). This study analyzes images circulating in European metropolitan centers and in various parts of the empire and aims to undertake “the serious investigation of visual signs in the experience of colonialism.” Peter Bloom also finds this link; see French Colonial Documentary, 140–4. See, for example, Femi Okiremuete Shaka, “Africa in Colonial Instructional Cinema: A Critical Analysis of Terry Bishop’s Daybreak in Udi,” The Literary Griot 12:1 (Spring 2000): 62–86; Diawara, “Sub-Saharan African Film Production”; and Burns, “Watching Africans Watch Films.”

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Notes to pages 61–65 19 20

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Burns 198. L.A. Notcutt and G.C. Latham, The African and the Cinema: An Account of the Work of the Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment During the Period March 1935 to May 1937 (London: The Edinburgh House Press, 1937). The partners included the Carnegie Corporation, the British Colonial Office, the British Film Institute, the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, the World Missionary Council, and several colonial governments in East Africa, as well as three private mining companies with interests in the region. Notcutt and Latham 11, 25. See also Diawara, “Sub-Saharan African Film Production.” Notcutt and Latham 9. Notcutt and Latham 9–10. Notcutt and Latham 9. Notcutt and Latham 106. It was discussed, in particular, by the members of the Haut comité méditerranéen, a committee reporting to the French Prime Minister created under the Front Populaire government that commissioned a study on cinema and its effects in Muslim countries. AN, F60 711, minutes from the meeting of the Haut comité méditerranéen, March 21, 1939. See also Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 135–9. CAOM, AGEFOM 248/363, “Le cinéma éducateur en Indochine,” undated newspaper clipping, ca. 1920. CAOM, AGEFOM 248/363. CAOM, AGEFOM 248/363, La presse indochinoise June 30, 1924. The primary markets in France were exhibitions and the large newsreel companies; detailed information on metropolitan distribution can be found in Chapter 6. The five-year contract, signed in 1924, was renewed in 1929 for another three years. CAOM, AGEFOM 530/41. Peter Bloom, “À travers le miroir cinématographique,” in Blanchard, ed. L’autre et nous, 236. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 25. The government also added to this collection copies of films that had been made for previous exhibitions such as the one in Marseille in 1922, produced by Pathé and by Indochine Films et Cinéma. The collection focused on “the state of political, social and economic development of the colony, its sites, its landscapes and its archeological monuments, some of which are well known (the ruins of Angkor, the Halong Bay are veritable marvels).” CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 27. Clifford Rosenberg, “Albert Sarraut and Republican Racial Thought,” French Politics, Culture and Society 20:3 (2002): 97–115. Albert Sarraut, La mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923), 93. Sarraut’s plan, published in 1923, was first presented to the National Assembly in 1920. The Marshal Lyautey himself referred to the “fierce hearts” (coeurs farouches) that must be won over. Louis-Hubert Lyautey, “Le sens d’un grand effort,” L’Illustration 4603 (May 23, 1931). Cited in Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar,

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53 54

Notes to pages 65–68

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 302. Peter Bloom, “À travers le miroir cinématographique,” 234. Cited in Général Verraux, “Le cinéma aux colonies,” L’Oeuvre, February 10, 1923. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 8. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Note sur le cinéma scolaire en Annam,” June 2, 1932. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, Directeur général de l’instruction publique en Indochine to Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, August 19, 1932, 2. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Le cinématographe à l’école,” (signed Gaboulet, chef local du service de l’enseignement en Cochinchine), June 25, 1932. Of 58 total titles, 20 were devoted to the geography of France and 18 to the French empire. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Note sur le cinéma scolaire en Annam,” June 2, 1932. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Le cinématographe à l’école,” (signed Gaboulet, chef local du service de l’enseignement en Cochinchine), June 25, 1932. AN, F60 711, “Afrique occidentale française,” October 5, 1938. CAOM, FM/1AFFPOL 859, response from Togo to the Ministry of Colonies questionnaire, August 11, 1932; CAOM, AGEFOM 746/1584, M. Puig to the Directeur de l’Agence économique des territoires africains sous mandat, December 6, 1932. CAOM, FM/1AFFPOL 859, Gouverneur général des territoires africains sous mandat to the Ministère de l’Instruction Publique (signed Boisson), August 11, 1938. CAOM FM/1AFFPOL 859, “Rapport du directeur de l’enseignement de l’A.E.F. sur l’organisation du cinéma éducateur dans les Colonies françaises,” October 1, 1938. CAOM, FM/1AFFPOL 859, Le gouverneur de la Guadeloupe to the Ministre des Colonies, January 25, 1939; Secrétaire général du gouvernement chargé de l’expédition des affaires courantes (La Réunion) to Ministre des Colonies, November 22, 1938. CAOM, FM/1AFFPOL 859, Inspection-Conseil de l’Instruction publique (Martinique) to Ministre des Colonies, November 9, 1938. “Une intéressante lettre d’un colonial,” Le Cinéopse 142 (June 1931). CAOM FM/1AFFPOL859, “Rapport du directeur de l’enseignement de l’A.E.F. sur l’organisation du cinéma éducateur dans les Colonies françaises,” October 1, 1938, 6. CAOM, AGEFOM 248/363. By 1940, French Indochina had a total of 96 working commercial cinemas. Algeria, although not a colony, is often included in statistics on cinema in the colonies, and is the only region that may have had more commercial cinemas than Indochina; the Haut comité méditerranéen counted 70 commercial cinemas in Algeria in 1939, but some sources are higher. In terms of numbers of cinemas in 1939, Morocco was next with ca. 50, followed by Afrique Occidentale Française (ca. 35), Tunisia (ca. 30), Madagascar (ca. 15), and the

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Notes to pages 69–73

55

56 57 58 59

60

61 62 63

64

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other colonies with fewer than 10. Statistics are compiled from the following sources, which give varying estimates: Le Tout Cinéma, saison 1938–39; AN, F60 711, Haut comité méditerranéen, “Le cinéma en pays musulman et en Afrique du Nord,” March 21, 1939, 32; CAOM, AGEFOM 248/363, Gouverneur général de l’Indochine to Agence économique de l’Indochine, April 8, 1940. CAOM, INDO/GGI 42047, Le Galley, Service des affaires économiques et administratives, to the Governor General of Indochine, December 20, 1921, 1. Le Galley 1, 4. Le Galley 3. Le Galley 2. On these fears in the French colonies, see Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 148–50. These fears were not unique to French authorities. Both Smyth and Shaka point out that in addition to the desire to educate Africans about hygiene and agriculture, British film programs in Africa were motivated by a desire to “counter the influence of Hollywood films in the colonies.” Responses to British film projects clearly showed little interest on the part of African audiences, who preferred to watch commercial entertainment films such as the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The influence of these entertainment films caused British officials some consternation, however; as Smyth writes, “Britain felt that both her economic and political interests in Africa were threatened by the stranglehold which the American film had gained on the commercial cinema circuit in the 1920s.” Officials were particularly concerned about the morally corrupt images of Western cultures that were conveyed in commercial films and their potential power to undermine respect for British authority among colonized peoples. Femi Okiremuete Shaka, “Instructional Cinema in Colonial Africa: An Historical Reappraisal,” 28; Manthia Diawara, African Cinema, 3–5; Rosaleen Smyth, “Movies and Mandarins: The Official Film and British Colonial Africa,” in James Curran and Vincent Porter, ed. British Cinema History (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1983), 129. CAOM, AGEFOM 854/2298. Lettre du gouverneur Marchand à l’Agence économique des territoires africains sous mandat, January 13, 1924. (italics mine) Les Annales Coloniales, May 22, 1930. Les Annales Coloniales, June 7, 1930. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60024, Institut International du Cinématographe Educatif de Rome. The IICE was interested in developing a report on film censorship worldwide, with the goal of furthering the development of film as a vector of internationalism and pacifism. Only the governments of Madagascar, Côte des Somalis, India, New Caledonia, Oceania, Guyana, St Pierre and Miquelon, and Togo-Cameroon sent brief responses to this survey. For more on the IICE, see Christel Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif: regards sur le rôle du cinéma éducatif dans la politique internationale du fascisme italien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). CAOM, 1AFFPOL 859, Directeur des affaires politiques au Ministre des Colonies, (signed Gaston Joseph), n.d. [1932].

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186 65 66 67

68

69

70 71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

Notes to pages 73–76

Joseph. Joseph. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Enquête sur le développement des entreprises cinématographiques en Indochine en vue de l’adoption pour l’ensemble des Colonies françaises d’une ‘Politique du Film’” (1932). CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Enquête sur le développement des entreprises cinématographiques en Indochine.” Bloom argues that fear of commercial cinema was linked more to “new forms of public assembly ushered in by colonization” rather than to “indigenous resistance movements per se”; my sources suggest that at least in Indochina, fears of film crowds were indeed closely linked to the fear of rebellion. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 148. For detailed statistics, see note 48. Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters (New York: Berg, 2001), 93–4. For more on the Yen Bay uprising and French repression in Indochina, see N. Van, Viêt-Nam 1920–1945: révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale (Paris: L’Insomniaque, 1996). CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 27. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, Le Résident Supérieur du Tonkin to Monsieur le Gouverneur Général de l’Indochine, 5. The only films that were censored in the 1920s by the commission de contrôle in Indochine were some American silent films that were judged too violent and would constitute “a school of crime” for the local populations, in addition to one Chinese newsreel prohibited in 1929 because “it seemed to incite the chauvinism of the Chinese nationalists established in Phnom Penh.” CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 15–16. “Certain realist films, French productions, that could make our subjects think that social problems are rampant in Europe [. . .] and risk giving a false idea of the values of our society.” CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 20. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 16, 19. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 2–10. In the context of the centenary of the colonization of Algeria, the Office algérien du cinéma éducateur organized a special session on international film activities, in which M. Pestre, a former deputy mayor of Algiers and school principal, makes this argument: “In a country where illiterates make up the great majority, written or oral propaganda is sure to fail. Only cinema can speak to all. The image, perceived by all, brings the idea with it. This is why the colonies, even more than the métropole, should be equipped for methodical instruction by the projection of still images and film. [. . .] We will justify our presence in the colonies by our attachment to the work of civilization that conforms to the French ideal.” Cited in Guillaume-Michel Coissac,

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Notes to pages 76–81

79

80

81

82

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84

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“Le cinéma au service de la civilisation et de la propagande,” Le Tout Cinéma, 1931–32, 70. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 23. In France, survey respondents also cited difficulties with rural audiences’ slowness in reading that made it difficult to follow the intertitles, and the continued use of silent film, with live explanations by a local schoolteacher, was also proposed as a solution. The French version of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are regularly cited as exceptions to the rule that French cinema was too boring for the colonial viewing public. Paulin Vieyra, “Propos sur le cinéma africain,” Présence Africaine 22 (October– November 1958): 109–10. Manthia Diawara, African Cinema, 22–3; Jean Rouch, Films ethnographiques sur l’Afrique noire (Paris: UNESCO, 1967), 21. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 20. CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 29. The argument was that because local theaters were already performing French plays translated into East Asian languages, such films would also be likely to interest audiences in Indochina, particularly those that have attended French schools where they would have studied these texts. CAOM, INDO/ GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 23. “To these American demonstrations of military strength and the exaltation of the ‘new continent,’ we need to oppose our great historical and documentary films showing the glorious strength of France.” CAOM, INDO/GGI 60025, “Développement de l’industrie cinématographique en Indochine,” 1932, 15. AN, F60 711, A. Charton, “Note sur la propagande impériale par le cinéma,” December 12, 1936. AN, F60 711, Activité de la commission d’études et du secrétariat général du Haut comité méditerranéen en matière de cinéma musulman, 1937–39. Such coordination was needed because Muslim populations with perceived cultural and linguistic similarities lived in countries under different administrative entities (Ministry of Colonies for West and Equatorial Africa, Ministry of the Interior for Algeria, Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Syria and Lebanon). AN, F60 711, Haut comité méditerranéen, “Le cinéma en pays musulman et en Afrique du Nord,” March 21, 1939. “One might add that [Egyptian cinema fosters] a feeling, secret or not, among audiences that the Arab world has a kind of intellectual unity, which serves the cause of panarabism and shows that the gifts of the West, even in a domain as technical and exclusive as cinema, are not indispensable to the East.” AN, F60 711, “Note sur le cinéma musulman (Tunisie),” n.d. [1938]. Le Galley 5–7.

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188 94

95

96 97 98

99

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101

102 103

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105

106

Notes to pages 81–87

Evelyne Cohen, “Le fil d’un symbole: la semeuse d’Oscar Roty,” http://sceco. univ-poitiers.fr/franc-euro/articles/ECohen.pdf, accessed December 9, 2008. The date of 1930 is approximate; however, it is based on letters dated 1930 confirming that a film entitled La maladie du sommeil was shown to more than 1,500 people at the Nantes Geographical Society and later to the Swedish Society of Medical Doctors. Although the film I am discussing was made to be shown to Africans, it is plausible that the same film would have been shown in these contexts as an example of France’s efforts towards the medical education of populations under French rule. CAOM, AGEFOM 919/2802. Les Annales Coloniales, October 22, 1930. Bloom, “À travers le miroir cinématographique,” 236. For more on colonial documentaries and sleeping sickness, see Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 95–123. Peter Bloom, “Entre la représentation graphique et l’hygiène coloniale: le cinéma de propagande coloniale de l’entre-deux-guerres,” Perpignan: Les Cahiers 71–72 (July 1997): 19. Femi Okiremuete Shaka, “Instructional Cinema in Colonial Africa,” 27–47; Rosaleen Smyth, “The Development of British Colonial Film Policy, 19271939, with Special Reference to East and Central Africa,” Journal of African History 20:3 (1979): 437–50; Manthia Diawara, “Sub-Saharan Film Production,” 61–5. Burns, on the other hand, demonstrates how film experiments in British Africa generated a series of discourses and “rural myths” about African spectatorship that informed British film programs for decades. James Burns, “Watching Africans Watch Films,” 198–204. Gamble, Developing Cultures, 20. Gamble, Developing Cultures, 2. See also Jean-François Chanet, L’école républicaine et les petites patries (Paris: Aubier, 1996), for a discussion of the teaching of local cultures in Republican primary schools. Georges Hardy, “Le Congrès de la société indigène,” Outre-Mer: Revue Générale de la Colonisation 4 (December 1931): 472–3, cited in Gamble, Developing Cultures, 22. Albert Charton, inspector general of education in French West Africa in 1932 writes, “What can we expect, in the native context, from education through cinema? First, a reinforcement of our concrete, direct education that associates things with words.” CAOM, 1 AFFPOL 859. “Note de l’inspecteur général de l’enseignement,” Dakar, July 25, 1932. Georges Hardy, director of public instruction in French Morocco, in his 1931 report on French colonial education in Africa, refers to this philosophy as the méthode active: “[This method] calls on observation and reasoning rather than on memorization; it attempts to move carefully and gradually from the visual to the concrete, from sensory acquisition to the simplest degrees of abstraction.” Georges Hardy, L’enseignement aux indigènes dans les possessions françaises d’Afrique, Institut colonial international: XXIè session. Paris 5-6-7-8 mai 1931, Rapport préliminaire (Bruxelles: Établissements généraux d’imprimerie, 1931), 334.

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Notes to pages 87–91 107

108 109

110 111

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In writing in favor of bringing film to the schools of French West Africa, Charton writes: “Its action, in the area of moral education, well directed, could be extremely effective.” CAOM, 1 AFFPOL 859, “Note de l’inspecteur général.” More discussion of this topic is found in Chapter 2. Charton argues for “object-lesson films that awaken curiosity and stimulate emulation, films on hygiene, the plow, irrigation, the model native village,” as well as “recreational films that will revive the native’s natural gaiety.” CAOM, 1 AFFPOL 859, “Note de l’inspecteur général.” Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 210. Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 18901914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 131. Eric Jennings provides a nuanced synthesis of Conklin’s argument in Vichy in the Tropics, 24–9.

Chapter 5 1 2

3 4 5

6

7

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Edmond Labbé, “Discours,” Revue du Cinéma Éducateur 4 (February 1937): n.p. Bertrand Lemoine, Paris 1937: Cinquantenaire de l’Exposition internationale des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne (Paris: Institut français d’architecture, 1987), 256. Lemoine, 256. Lemoine, 256. Léandre Vaillat, “Un portrait de la France par le cinéma,” L’Illustration 4912 (April 24, 1937): 446. James Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 5. The final form of the exhibition was the result of a complex web of negotiations among differing interest groups, as well as a response to planned exhibits by other nations as details of these plans became known. The French exhibits on “Social Questions,” for example, such as “Women, Children, and Families,” “Cooperation,” “Solidarity,” “Security,” “Youth Projects,” and “Hygiene,” were not part of the original plan for the fair; they were added after the French committee learned that Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union were going to have extensive social exhibits. Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (New York: SUNY Press, 1998), 31–2. On the Regional Center, see Deborah Hurtt, “Simulating France, Seducing the World: The Regional Center at the 1937 Paris Exposition,” in D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren, ed., Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place (New York: Berg, 2004): 147–8; also Peer, France on Display. Harry Gamble analyzes parallels between the regional and colonial exhibits in “Artisans, Craft Industries and the Progress of ‘Overseas France.’” Chapter of forthcoming book manuscript, Colonial Educations: Framing the Future of French West Africa, 1930–1950 [provisional title].

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190 9

10

11 12

13

14

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16 17

Notes to pages 91–94

This claim is based on the Lumière brothers’ invention of the cinématographe, which could project a large image on a wall, rather than on Edison’s earlier kinetoscope, whose moving images projected inside a small box give the United States a separate claim to being the birthplace of cinema. The French date the birth of cinema to December 1895, the date of the first projection in public of a film using the cinématographe. Pierre Michaut, “L’exposition de Paris 1937 donne au cinéma sa véritable place dans la vie moderne,” La Cinématographie Française 973 (June 25, 1937): 107. Hurtt, “Simulating France,” 148. Peer, 62–3; Anne-Marie Thiesse, Écrire la France: Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Époque et la Libération (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), 78. Romy Golan has argued that “reactionary issues such as the return to the soil, anti-urbanism, the questioning of technology—and their ideological corollaries such as agrarianism, regionalism, corporatism—had a profound impact on French modernism from 1918 all the way to Vichy.” Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), ix. On regionalism and the architecture of reconstruction, see Deborah Hurtt, “Rivalry and Representation: Regionalist Architecture and the Road to the 1937 Paris Exposition” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2005). Antoine made Les frères corses (The Corsican Brothers) in 1917 and Les travailleurs de la mer (Workers of the Sea) in 1922. Mercanton’s Miarka (1920), was filmed on location in the Camargue region, and Léon Poirier’s La Brière (1924), tells the story of a farm family in lower Brittany. Jean Grémillon, who started his film career making travel films about the French regions, made two important contributions to the genre, Maldone (Misdeal, 1926) and Les gardiens du phare (The Lighthouse Keepers, 1929). This last film, set on an island off the coast of Brittany, shares many characteristics with Jean Epstein’s semi-fictional “documentaries” Finis terrae (Land’s End, 1929) and L’or des mers (Gold from the Seas, 1932), also shot on the Breton islands using non-professional actors, in the search for true “authenticity” on screen. Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 116–18. Pagnol and Giono produced such classic portraits of rural life in Provence as Jofroi (1933), Angèle (1934), Regain (Harvest, 1937), and La femme du boulanger (The Baker’s Wife, 1938). Williams, 203; Brett Bowles, “Representing Rural France: A Cultural History of Marcel Pagnol’s Cinema (1933–1938)” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1998). Golan 40–1. Of the parties that made up the Popular Front coalition, only the Radical party had strong support among rural voters, and the Socialist and Communist parties hoped to garner additional support among this constituency by showing they were dedicated to improving the lives of farmers and not just urban workers. Neither of the left-wing parties truly supported the collectivization of agriculture, and the Popular Front’s agricultural agenda remained

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Notes to pages 94–108

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25

26

27 28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40

41 42

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solidly in support of the traditional arguments in favor of maintaining a large number of medium-sized family farms in France. Peer 2. Hurtt, “Rivalry and Representation.” Gamble demonstrates a similar approach to traditional handicrafts in the colonial exhibits at the fair. “Artisans,” 9. Peer 30; Hurtt, “Simulating France,” 147–8. Hurtt, “Simulating France,” 149–50. Hurtt, “Simulating France,” 160. Exposition internationale, arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, Paris 1937. Guide officiel (Paris: Éditions de la Société pour le Développement du Tourisme, 1937), 132. See Emmanuelle Toulet, “Le cinéma à l’exposition universelle de 1900,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 33 (April–June 1986): 179–209. Guillaume-Michel Coissac, “A Paris, en pleine exposition,” Le Cinéopse 215 (July 1937): 134. Michaut, “L’exposition de Paris 1937,” 107. Labbé, “Discours.” Pierre Autré, “Visite au Pavillon du cinéma de l’Exposition,” La Cinématographie Française 992 (November 5, 1937): 15. Pierre Michaut, “Imposant répertoire des films documentaires projetés à l’exposition de Paris 1937,” La Cinématographie Française 1000 (December 31, 1937): 273–86. Peer 29. Michaut, “Imposant répertoire,” 273–86. Peer 99–100. Peer 112. For a more complete discussion of the philosophy of the “balanced society,” see Chapter 3. Collection CNC. Peer 76–7; Hurtt, “Simulating France,” 150–1. Léandre Vaillat, “Un portrait de la France par le cinéma,” L’Illustration 4912 (April 24, 1937): 446–7. Léandre Vaillat, “Film Méditerranée: Scénario,” AN, F12 12255, 1. In his views on architecture, Vaillat did believe in the particular form of architectural blending of vernacular and modern styles that would come to characterize the architecture of the Center. Peer 26, 64, 66. Gamble, “Artisans,” 19–26. Shortly before the exhibition opened, correspondence shows that Vaillat was not even able to view all the films himself, but instead had to rely on assurance from assistants that the producers were conforming to expectations. Albert Cornu to Léandre Vaillat, May 7, 1937. AN, F12 12255. AN, F12 12255. Peer and Hurtt also found that as private interests became involved in fair planning, organizers’ initial visions had to shift. Local committees, as Hurtt shows, were very concerned about the payoff in terms of tourist revenue that they would gain from their financial support of the fair pavilions. Hurtt, “Simulating France,” 147, 153–4, 157–9.

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192 45 46 47

48 49 50

Notes to pages 108–118

Collection CNC. Collection CNC. Pierre Bourdieu, “Une classe objet,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 17–18 (1977): 4. See Peer 94–6. Labbé, Rapport général, vol. 8, xxxi, quoted in Peer 75. Peer 168–70; CAD, SOFE 462.

Chapter 6 1 2

3

4

5

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Collection CNC. CAOM, AGEFOM 845/2262, Xavier Loisy to Ministry of Colonies, “Rapport sur le cinéma colonial du Petit Journal,” September 26, 1923. CAOM, AGEFOM 845/2262, Petit Journal to Ministry of Colonies, June 26, 1923. Albert Sarraut, “Nationalisons l’idée coloniale,” L’Europe Nouvelle 428 (May 1, 1926): 581. See the introduction by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler in “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56. Studies of colonial propaganda in print form range from David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) to Thomas August’s The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890– 1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), to Tony Chafer’s and Amanda Sackur’s recent collection, Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Colonial exhibitions have received particular attention; see, for example, Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L’exposition coloniale (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1991); Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, Paris (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). See, for example, Malek Alloula, Le harem colonial: images d’un sous-érotisme (Paris: Garance, 1981); Pascal Blanchard and Armelle Chatelier, ed., Images et Colonies: Nature, discours et influence de l’iconographie coloniale liée à la propagande coloniale et à la représentation des Africains et de l’Afrique en France, de 1920 aux Indépendances (Paris: SYROS-ACHAC, 1993); Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Laurent Gervereau, ed., Images et colonies: iconographie et propagande coloniale sur l’Afrique française de 1880 à 1962 (Paris: BDIC-ACHAC, 1993); Benoît de l’Estoile, Le goût des autres (Paris: Flammarion, 2007); Daniel Sherman, ed. Museums and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). See Charles-Robert Ageron, “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française,” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 77:1 (1990): 31–73; Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1870 à 1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972); Chafer and Sackur, Promoting the Colonial Idea.

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Notes to pages 118–120 8

9

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193

A notable exception is Peter Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). See Pierre Leprohon, L’exotisme et le cinéma: les “chasseurs d’images” à la conquête du monde (Paris: Éditions J. Susse, 1945); Pierre Sorlin, “The Fanciful Empire: French Feature Films and the Colonies in the 1930s,” FCS ii (1991): 135–51. Guy Gauthier writes that documentaries from the period are “boring” and full of “platitudes.” Gauthier, Un siècle de documentaires français: des tourneurs de manivelle aux voltigeurs du multimédia (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004), 82–3. Pierre Sorlin seems to share this view. He writes that the documentary was “despised” in France before 1940. Sorlin, “France,” in Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken (New York: Routledge, 2006), 434–42. Eric Le Roy, director of the CNC’s film archive, confirms that the delay in creating an inventory of colonial documentaries is in part due to the “esthetic” criteria that play a role in the decisions about which films to restore. Le Roy, “Le fonds cinématographique colonial aux Archives du film et du dépôt légal du CNC,” Journal of Film Preservation 63 (October 2001): 57. At the time of writing The Selling of the Empire, Thomas August was simply unaware of the existence of a substantial archive of colonial propaganda films in France. Béatrice De Pastre, “Cinéma éducateur et propagande coloniale à Paris au début des années 30,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 51:4 (October– December 2004): 135–51; Peter Bloom, French Colonial Documentary; Bloom, “Entre la representation graphique et l’hygiène coloniale: le cinéma de propagande coloniale de l’entre-deux-guerres,” Perpignan: Les Cahiers 71–2 (July 1997): 16–24. The best of these is Peter Bloom’s French Colonial Documentary; on the intersections of educational cinema and colonial cinema and their contribution to the colonial idea, see in particular 125–52. Guy Gauthier argues that educational film in general throughout the interwar years was “conformist.” Gauthier 82–3. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in French West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 5. This use of rhetoric based on a principle of film as the ideal vector of universal humanism was very similar to that used to promote the agricultural film campaign in France. Peter Bloom explains this phenomenon as a “narrative victory” on the part of colonial documentary film, a medium that was able to fabricate a coherent narrative for a colonial story that had none. Bloom, “À travers le miroir cinématographique,” in L’autre et nous: scènes et types, ed. Pascal Blanchard et al. (Paris: ACHAC, 1995), 236–7. Dudley Andrew and Steve Ungar make this same point about colonial exhibitions, which “transposed displays of difference into encounters with otherness.” Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 301. The term “simultaneous collective experience” is borrowed from Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51.

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194 18 19

20

21

22 23

24

25 26

27 28

29

30

31 32

33

Notes to pages 120–123

Cited in Ageron 35. Albert Sarraut, “Nationalisons l’idée coloniale,” L’Europe Nouvelle 428 (May 1, 1926): 581. CAOM, AGEFOM 574/359, M. Pessemesse, “La propagande scolaire,” in Rapports du congrès d’action et de propagande coloniales organisé par l’Institut Colonial Français 11-12-13 mai 1931 (Paris: Exposition coloniale internationale, 1931). See August 37–51; also Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, Culture coloniale: la France conquise par son empire, 1871–1931 (Paris: Autrement, 2003); Gary Wilder, The Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 29–36. Wilder 29. See, for example, Girardet 272; Wilder 77; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Continuité ou rupture? L’humanisme colonial du Front populaire,” in Jacques Thobie, et al., Histoire de la France coloniale, 1914-1990 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), 259–66. Sarraut is cited in Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Colonisation ou impérialisme: La politique africaine de la France entre les deux guerres,” Mouvement Social 107 (June 1979): 52, 57. On the Front Populaire, see CoqueryVidrovitch, “Continuité ou rupture,” 265. See also Alice Conklin, “Redefining ‘Frenchness’: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and West Africa, 1914–1940,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 65–83. This is one of Bloom’s central arguments in French Colonial Documentary. CAOM, AGEFOM 574/359, M. Pessemesse, “La propagande scolaire,” in Rapports du congrès d’action et de propagande coloniales organisé par l’Institut Colonial Français 11-12-13 mai 1931 (Paris: Exposition coloniale internationale, 1931). Ageron 38. Eric Le Roy estimates at 384 the number of colonial documentary films produced from 1920 to 1939 that are conserved in this collection alone (224 for 1920–29, 160 for 1930–39). Le Roy 57–61. CAOM, AGEFOM 574/359, Marc Simon, Gouverneur honoraire des Colonies, secrétaire général de l’Institut colonial du Havre, “La publicité moderne et son application à la propagande coloniale,” in Rapports du congrès d’action et de propagande coloniales organisé par l’Institut Colonial Français 11-12-13 mai 1931 (Paris: Exposition coloniale internationale, 1931). Cited in Guillaume-Michel Coissac, “Le cinéma au service de la civilisation et de la propagande,” Le Tout Cinéma (Paris: Publications Filma, 1931–32): 64. Coissac 65. CAOM, AGEFOM 845/2262, Director of Le Petit Journal to Minister of Colonies, December 20, 1922. On the agencies, see Elisabeth Rabut, “Un acteur de la propagande coloniale: L’agence des colonies,” in Bancel et al., Images et colonies, 232–5. Rabut writes that the agencies did not come to film until the 1930s, which is true for

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Notes to pages 124–126

34

35

36

37

38 39

40

41 42

43

44

45 46

47 48

195

some colonies (French Equatorial Africa, Togo-Cameroon) but not others (Indochina, French West Africa). The initial request was made by M. Truitard, the director of the agency for Togo and Cameroon. CAOM, 1AFFPOL 859, Consul de France à Liège, to the Service des oeuvres françaises à l’étranger, January 9, 1933. CAOM, 1AFFPOL 859, René Bugniet to the Director of the Agence économique des territoires africains sous mandat (Truitard), September 10, 1935, and Commissaire de la République au Cameroun (Repiquet) to the Director of the Agence économique des territoires africains sous mandat (Truitard), August 22, 1936. André Citroën, Projet d’organisation des grandes lignes de communications africaines, 1924. MAAO, 4ºGMH 24. He also met personally with the President of the Republic. For more on La croisière noire, see my article, “Film and Colonial Memory: La croisière noire 1924–2004,” in Alec Hargreaves, ed. Memory, Empire and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (New York: Lexington Books, 2005), 81–97; Fabien Sabatés, 1924–1925: La croisière noire Citroën (Paris: Eric Baschet, 1980); Jacques Wolgensinger, L’aventure de la croisière noire (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2002); Eric Deschamps, Croisières Citroën: Carnets de route africains (Paris: Éditions ETAI, 1999). Eric Le Roy, in writing that colonial documentaries had a very “brief career,” does not take into consideration the non-commercial distribution networks. Le Roy 58. CAOM, AGEFOM 919/2802, “Cameroun: Propagande—Prêts de films 1930–32.” The 1930 user survey of the rural film programs indicates that colonial films were among the most highly desired subjects by rural audiences. CAC, 850473, Art. 2, Ministry of Agriculture, Réponses à l’enquête sur le cinéma agricole, 1930. In 1932 alone, the agency for Togo and Cameroon lent films to organizations as diverse as the Committee for Colonial Propaganda in La Rochelle, the Seminary for the Pères du St. Esprit in Chavilly, the Industrial Society of Mulhouse, the Geographical Society in Angers, a hospital in Nîmes, a girls’ school in St.-Cyr (Var), and the Colonial Veterans’ Association in Caen. CAOM, AGEFOM 919/2802. “Cameroun: Propagande—Prêts de films 1930–32.” On films produced for the 1931 Exhibition, see Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 125–35. CAOM, AGEFOM 919/2802. Areas specifically targeted for this international educational distribution circuit were the United States, South America, and Northern and Central Europe. CAOM, AGEFOM 745/1581 and 919/2802. CAOM, AGEFOM 919/2802. (September 1, 1931). CAOM, AGEFOM 745/1581, Monsieur René Bugniet, chef dessinateur principal de l’Agence économique des territoires africains sous mandat, to M. le Gouverneur des Colonies, Commissaire de la République Française au Cameroun, October 1, 1931.

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196 49 50

51

52

53

54

55

56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63

64

Notes to pages 126–131

Bloom, “À travers le miroir,” 237. CAOM, AGEFOM 794/1841. This is an undated, untitled press release, but the statistics given end in March 1927, which confirms its approximate date. CAOM, 1AFFPOL 859, Commissaire de la République au Cameroun (Repiquet) to Agence économique des territoires africains sous mandat (Truitard), August 22, 1936. See, for example, August 101–5. August writes that the Empire Marketing Board and the Empire film unit were “virtually unique in understanding and applying the principles of long-range propaganda in the early 1930s.” Some of the images of Cameroon shot by Alfred Chaumel for Le réveil d’une race, for example, were used by the Agence économique de l’AEF for a film entitled Promenade en A.E.F. Peter Bloom finds this image shuffling among agencies to be common practice; see his “Hygienic Reform in the French Colonial Archive,” Journal of Film Preservation 63 (2001): 19. Association in French West Africa, as discussed in Chapter 4, involved a distinct shift away from assimilationism towards paying more attention to local traditions, returning some power to African chiefs, emphasizing human mise en valeur, and exerting firm control over labor markets and the access to citizenship for Africans. Conklin argues that coercive labor practices designed to inculcate a work ethic into “lazy” Africans accompanied this ideological shift. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 7–8, 212–45. Charles-Robert Ageron identifies these three phases in French colonialism in France coloniale ou parti colonial? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), 27–36. Wilder 25. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 5. Collection ECPA. The date was supplied by the ECPA and I have not been able to verify it independently. Lyautey’s expression was exotisme de pacotille. Collection ECPA. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 6. Les Annales Coloniales October 22, 1930; Les Annales Coloniales February 16, 1931. On the acquisition and distribution of this film by the Cinémathèque de la Ville de Paris, see De Pastre, “Cinéma éducateur et propagande coloniale.” See P. Richet, “Eugène Jamot: son oeuvre,” Médecine Tropicale: Revue Française de Pathologie et de Santé Publique Tropicales 39:5 (September–October 1979): 485–93; Jean-Pierre Dozon, “Quand les pastoriens traquaient la maladie du sommeil,” Sciences Sociales et Santé 3:3-4 (November 1985): 27–56. The copy that became the property of the economic agency for Togo and Cameroon was one of the films most often requested by borrowers throughout the 1930s. The film that was originally released in 1930 was probably about an hour long and complemented a fifteen-minute segment on Jamot with other scenes of daily life in Cameroon. Because of the agency practice of re-editing films for different purposes, it is not clear exactly which film of those held at the Archives françaises du film is actually the one originally shown under the title Le réveil d’une race. The copy I screened was one hour in length, and matches the description of the commercial release given in

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Notes to pages 131–142

65

66 67

68 69

70 71 72

73

74

75

197

Ciné-Miroir in December 1930. However, DePastre thinks that the film shown to Parisian school children in 1932 consisted only of the fifteen-minute segment on Jamot, and the newspaper account in Les Annales Coloniales in February 1931 would seem to support the idea that a fifteen-minute version of the film, focusing exclusively on Jamot, was used for non-commercial venues. “Let me tell you the emotion I felt upon encountering this mission. I have tried to reproduce its daily life as faithfully as possible,” says Chaumel to the camera. See Peter Bloom, French Colonial Documentary. AN, F60 711, A. Charton, “Note sur la propagande impériale par le cinéma,” December 12, 1936. Collection CNC. This argument held sway among colonial advocates both on the Left and on the Right up through the Second World War. Collection CNC. I borrow the term from Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 180. D’Agraives wanted to make a clean break with the tradition of colonial documentaries that were a “hodgepodge of stock footage pulled out of film libraries,” instead sending reporters all over the empire to shoot new footage. Jean D’Agraives, “Projet de scénario,” March 30, 1939. AN, F60 711. In preparation for this film, D’Agraives submitted his film script to the Haut comité méditerranéen, the national bureau created under the prime minister to coordinate “Muslim affairs” emanating from various ministries. This bureau had a committee devoted to cinema that regularly received proposals from private producers wishing to make films on French colonization. (For more details on the committee, see Chapter 4.) The committee’s response to France is an Empire was positive. On their recommendation, the Minister of Colonies contacted the governors general of Indochina and Madagascar, the Commissioner of the Republic in Cameroon, and the High Commissioner in Beirut asking them to help out the filmmakers. He also wrote to the Ministry of Air asking for aviation support, to the Naval Administration for the participation of the French navy in the maritime scenes of the film, and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for cooperation in the sections of the film involving Tunisia and Morocco. The film commission preparing France’s contribution to the New York World’s Fair provided a grant for the preparation of an English-language version of the film to be sent to the fair. AN, F60 711. This final, militaristic declaration is an addition to the film since the presentation of the initial script in early 1939, which mentioned the possibility of an attack on the empire and its response in the conditional tense. The film was completed in late 1939, after the “phony war” with Germany had begun but before the occupation and collaboration. These numbers are contested; Charles-Robert Ageron gives 71,000; the source is the archives of the Ministry of War. Raoul Girardet gives the much higher figure of 205,000 in L’idée coloniale en France de 1870 à 1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972), 177. This latter figure, which Ageron thinks is inflated, comes from a 1929 estimate given by a colonial publicist, O. Homberg. Ageron, “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française,” 34.

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198 76

77

78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86

87

88 89

90 91

92

93 94

95

96 97

Notes to pages 142–149

For more on the tirailleur sénégalais, see Bloom, French Colonial Documentary 35–64. Girardet gives the figure of 120,000 French settlers moving to Morocco in 15 years, in L’idée coloniale en France, 178–9. Ageron nuances this figure by stating that of the 115,628 French in Morocco in 1931, only 57,614 of them were born in France and were therefore “drawn” to Morocco. Ageron, “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française,” 37. Girardet 180. See also Ageron, “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française,” 43. Girardet 185. Ageron, “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française,” 45–9. Ageron, “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française,” 69–70. Ageron, “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française,” 50–1. Ageron, “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française,” 42. Le Roy 57–61. The text told viewers, “you must not go in search of adventure, or a problematic and immediate fortune, but with the clearly defined intention to use overseas expertise acquired in the pursuit of a specific career, and to work in your specialty, in enterprises that require energetic and persevering men.” CAOM, AGEFOM 845/2262, Xavier Loisy to Ministry of Colonies, “Rapport sur le cinéma colonial du Petit Journal,” September 26, 1923. CAOM, AGEFOM 574/359, Marc Simon, Gouverneur honoraire des Colonies, secrétaire général de l’Institut colonial du Havre, “La publicité moderne et son application à la propagande coloniale,” in Rapports du congrès d’action et de propagande coloniales organisé par l’Institut Colonial Français 11-12-13 mai 1931 (Paris: Exposition coloniale internationale, 1931). The colonial newspaper Les Annales Coloniales, for example, had a regular “Cinéma colonial” section as of 1921. Les Annales Coloniales, December 22, 1921, 1. “Le Réveil d’une race (au Cameroun),” Ciné-Miroir 229 (December 31, 1930): 52. “Chronique des cinémas de Paris,” Le Figaro (January 26, 1930): 6. Coissac specifically refers to oyster harvesting in Madagascar. GuillaumeMichel Coissac, “Au service de la civilisation,” Le Cinéopse 140 (April 1, 1931): 175. Excerpt from a student essay, Ciné-Document 17 (July 1933): 624–5, cited in DePastre 147. Cited in DePastre, 149. Album d’élève, Dontucat, 1945. MNED, 1945 (V) 3.2.03 99.00669. For more on the popular response to the film, see my article, “Film and Colonial Memory.” Marcel Griaule made Au pays des Dogon and Sous les masques noirs in 1935 and 1938 respectively. Excerpts from these films can be seen in Les Dogon: chronique d’une passion (Paris: Arte Video, 2007). Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 67. Pierre Sorlin, “The Fanciful Empire: French Feature Films and the Colonies in the 1930s,” FCS ii (1991): 136.

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Notes to pages 150–154

199

Chapter 7 1

2 3

4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13

14

15

16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27

Cited in François Courtade, Les malédictions du cinéma français: une histoire du cinéma français parlant (1928–1978) (Paris: Éditions Alain Moreau, 1978), 182. Ciné-Mondial 41 (June 5, 1942), cited in Courtade 202. Henry Rousso, Les années noires: vivre sous l’Occupation (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 21. Christian Faure, Le projet culturel de Vichy: folklore et révolution nationale 1940–1944 (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1989), 15. Faure 16. Rousso 100. The seminal work presenting this view is Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York: Knopf, 1972). See Gérard Noiriel, Les origines républicaines de Vichy (Paris: Hachette, 1999), 42, 45. Noiriel 65. Paxton, Vichy France. Peer, France on Display, 3. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xi. François Garçon, De Blum à Pétain: cinéma et société française (1936–1944) (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1984), 196. Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Les documenteurs des années noires: les documentaires de propagande, France 1940–1944 (Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2004), 19–21. Steve Wharton, Screening Reality: French Documentary Film during the German Occupation (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 31. Cited in Bertin-Maghit 22. Wharton 34–6. Wharton 15. For a complete list of titles, see Wharton 209–28. Bertin-Maghit 25–8. The Musée Pédagogique’s budget for educational cinema dropped from 103,115 francs in 1930 to 6,000 in 1940 and zero in 1941. AN F17 13378, Note from the Musée Pédagogique to Monsieur Girardet, chef-adjoint du cabinet du Ministre de l’Éducation, November 6, 1942. Internal memo, Ministère de l’Agriculture et du Ravitaillement, May 9, 1943, which comments on the propaganda films planned for 1943. The report goes into considerable detail on one film, Les artisans du village (Artisans in the Village) aimed at “propaganda for convincing artisans to return to the earth.” CAC, 10 SDI 29. Note sur le cinéma éducatif, 1943. AN, F17 13378. Faure 256–7. Wharton 37–8. Faure 258–60. Bertin-Maghit 38–9. Bertin-Maghit 39–40.

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200 28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

Notes to pages 154–158

The congress was co-sponsored by the Ministry of Information, the General Directorate for Cinema and the Ministry of Education, along with “Arts, Sciences, Voyages,” a very successful all-documentary screening program founded by André Robert and supported by Vichy officials. Extensive information on André Robert and “Arts, Sciences, Voyages” can be found in Wharton 89–118, 185–95, 231–3. Wharton 119; AN, F42 124. While the major national film campaign proposed by this office never got off the ground, the propaganda bureau of the Secrétariat général de la Jeunesse did organize a regional film campaign in the schools of Aix-Marseilles during the 1941–42 school year. The campaign reached 120,000 students every two weeks, which represented 90 percent of the school-age population at the time. It was in part the success of this program that encouraged the bureau to propose extending it across France. “Compte-rendu sur le fonctionnement du service du cinéma éducatif en Provence,” May 21, 1942. AN, F 17 13378. Courtade 198–9. Noiriel 48–9. Faure 16; Noiriel 48–9. Faure 258. Wharton 98–9; Faure 260. Bertin-Maghit 87. Wharton 89–117. AN, F17 13378. AN, F42 130. Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 13–14. Jules Brévié, who was the governor of French West Africa from 1930 to 1936 and a strong proponent of the use of educational film in the colonies, became Vichy’s colonial secretary in 1942. Brévié pioneered an educational film program in Dakar in 1935–36. AN, F60 711, Albert Charton, “Note sur la propagande impériale par le cinéma,” December 12, 1936; Jennings 16–17. The right-wing interpretation of associationism gained new ground, and by 1944 the need to prevent a rural exodus towards colonial cities was developed in a report on the dangers of “detribalization” similar to the déracinement described by Maurice Barrès in the French context. Colonel Piriou, colonial administrators Desbordes, Lawless, and Rouvin, “Mémoire sur la condition des indigènes détribalisés,” May 1944, cited in Jennings 29. Bertin-Maghit 130. Bertin-Maghit 129. Bertin-Maghit 130. Many similarities lead me to believe that the 1943 film Wharton analyzes is nearly the same as the ca. 1931 film screened at the Exhibition, which I viewed at the CNC. The earlier film is mentioned in Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 130. The similarities include: nearly identical titles, same producer (Films de Cavaignac), same traveler (Baron Napoléon

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Notes to pages 158–163

45

46 47

48

49

50 51 52 53 54

55

56 57 58

59 60

61 62

201

Gourgaud), same travel itinerary, beginning with Djibouti and ending in St. Helena. The principal difference between the two versions is that the anti-British commentary in the 1943 version was not present in 1931. The film was written up in Ciné-Miroir 348 (December 4, 1931): 787 and Ciné-Miroir 351 (December 25, 1931): 842. The similarities are found in the titles, personalities, and travel itineraries. Alfred Chaumel and Geneviève Chaumel-Gentil, Symphonie exotique: Pour servir de préface au film “Le tour du monde” (Paris: Éditions Eugène Figuière, 1934). Wharton 178, 233. The titles were Gens et coutumes d’Armagnac (People and Customs of Armagnac, 1944), Les heures qui passent (The Hours that Pass), Naissance d’un spectacle (Birth of a Spectacle, 1943), Paperasses (Paperwork, 1942), Le tennis (Tennis), Terres vermeilles (Red Earth, 1941), and Toulouse ville inconnue (Toulouse, Unknown City, 1944). COIC, Service de presse, “Films documentaires réalisés en France depuis 1940,” July 7, 1944. BIFI, Fonds Richebé. Dates from Wharton 209–30. Ichac got approval from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for his film La France dans le monde on April 11, 1939. CAD, SOFE 464. Ichac’s other films were Le médecin des neiges (Doctor of the Snows, 1942) and Les sondeurs d’abîme (Plumbers of the Abyss, 1944). COIC, Service de presse, “Films documentaires réalisés en France depuis 1940,” July 7, 1944. BIFI, Fonds Richebé. Dates from Wharton 209–30. Wharton 178. Peer 172. Peer 172. Cited in Faure 260. André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Édition définitive (Paris: Éditions du cerf, 1975), 14. This meaning also exists in English, but tends to be found in scientific rather than general usage. Nichols 17. Bertin-Maghit 33. On the expository “mode” in documentary, see Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” in Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, ed. New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd. ed. (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 17. See also Geneviève Jacquinot, “Le documentaire pédagogique?” in Cinémas et réalités, ed. Jean-Charles Lyant (Saint-Étienne: Centre Interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherches sur l’expression contemporaine, 1984), 194. Nichols 24. For example, CAOM, INDO/GGI 42047, Le Galley, Service des affaires économiques et administratives, to the Governor General of Indochine, December 20, 1921, 1, 4. For more on this argument, see Peer 167–81. Chiffres-clés du tourisme, édition 2008 (Paris: Direction du tourisme, 2008) http://www.tourisme.gouv.fr/fr/z2/stat/chiffres/chiffres_cles.jsp, accessed January 5, 2009.

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202 63

Notes to page 163

The national statistics office, INSEE, has official census figures for “foreigners” (people born in France or elsewhere who do not have French nationality) and “immigrants” (people born non-French outside of France) but not for the descendents of immigrants. The term personnes issues de l’immigration can be found in some INSEE documents to refer to French people who have one or both of whose parents are immigrants, but it is not an official census category, and it does not include third-generation descendents of immigrants, who might be French with two French parents. http://www.insee.fr, accessed January 5, 2009.

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Bibliography

List of Archives; Key to Abbreviations Film archives CNC

Centre national de la cinématographie, Archives françaises du film, Bois d’Arcy ECPA Établissement de communication et de production audiovisuelle de la défense, Fort d’Ivry MA Ministère de l’Agriculture et de la Pêche, Paris

Print archives AN BIFI CAC CAD CAOM CNDP MNED MAAO SHAT

Archives nationales, Paris Bibliothèque du film, Paris Centre des archives contemporaines, Fontainebleau Centre des archives diplomatiques, Nantes Centre des archives d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence Centre national de documentation pédagogique, Paris Musée national de l’éducation, Rouen Musée des arts africains et océaniens, Paris Service historique de l’armée de terre, Vincennes

Published Works Ageron, Charles-Robert. France coloniale ou parti colonial? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978. —. “Les colonies devant l’opinion publique française.” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 77:1 (1990): 31–73. Aitken, Ian. Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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Stokes, Melvyn and Richard Maltby, ed. Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies. London: BFI Publishing, 1999. —, ed. Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences. London: BFI Publishing, 2001. Taillibert, Christel. L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif: regards sur le rôle du cinéma éducatif dans la politique internationale du fascisme italien. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. Talbott, John E. “The Politics of Educational Reform in France During the Third Republic, 1900–1940.” Past and Present 36 (1967): 126–30. —. “The French Left and the Ideology of Educational Reform, 1919–1939.” French Historical Studies 5:4 (1968): 465–76. Thiesse, Anne-Marie. Écrire la France: Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Époque et la Libération. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. Toulet, Emmanuelle. “Le cinéma à l’exposition universelle de 1900.” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 33 (April–June 1986): 179–209. Vaillat, Léandre. “Un portrait de la France par le cinéma.” L’Illustration 4912 (April 24, 1937): 446–7. Van, N. Viêt-Nam 1920–1945: révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale. Paris: L’Insomniaque, 1996. Véronneau, Pierre. “Le Fascinateur et la Bonne Presse: des médias catholiques pour publics francophones.” 1895 40 (July 2003): 25–40. Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Trans. Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Vieyra, Paulin. “Propos sur le cinéma africain.” Présence Africaine 22 (October– November 1958): 106–17. Vignaux, Valérie. Jean Benoit-Lévy ou le corps comme utopie: une histoire du cinéma éducateur dans l’entre-deux-guerres en France. Paris: Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 2007. Watson, D. R. “The Politics of Educational Reform in France During the Third Republic.” Past and Present 34 (1966): 81–99. Weber, Eugen. Peasants Into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. Wharton, Steve. Screening Reality: French Documentary Film During the German Occupation. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Wilder, Gary. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Williams, Alan. Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Wolgensinger, Jacques. L’aventure de la croisière noire. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2002. Wylie, Laurence. “Social Change at Grass Roots.” In In Search of France. Ed. Stanley Hoffmann et al., 159–-234. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Youngblood, Denise J. Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.

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Index

Page numbers followed by (n.xx) indicate references to Notes. Page numbers followed by (Fig.x.x) indicate illustrations.

African and the Cinema, The 62–3 African education 85–6 agences économiques des colonies 27, 64, 123–5, 175 (n.60) film collections 126 film loans 64, 126 Ageron, Charles-Robert 132, 142, 143, 144, 147 Agraives, Jean D’ 137–41, 197 (n.72, 73) agricultural film program see Ministry of Agriculture agriculture, interwar crises 38 Algeria educational film program 56–9, 63, 64, 72, 181 (n.11) influence of Egyptian cinema 79, 187 (n.92) Allégret, Marc 144 Alsace, France 115–16, 117 Annales coloniales, Les 72, 144–5 Annam, Vietnam 66, 76 Antoine, André 93 Armée, Section Cinématographique de l’ (SCA) 19–20 Art à l’Ecole, l’ 27 Art and Politics in France between the Wars 7–8, 93, 151, 190 (n.13) Arts, Sciences, Voyages 154, 155, 156–7, 200 (n.28) assimilation vs. association 87–8, 196 (n.54)

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audiences cinema attendance 15 in colonies 71–4, 86–8 perceptions 69–80 responses to government films 49–54, 74–8 in rural France 37, 49–54 spectatorship studies 15–16, 42, 76, 185 (n.59) see also Payne Fund Studies August, Thomas 2 Baecque, Antoine De 1 Bandiagara, Mali 56 Bantu Educational Film Experiment 61–2, 183 (n.21) Barthes, Roland 148 Bazin, André 160 Bellatrix, captain of 73 Benoit-Lévy, Jean 12, 21, 26–7, 34, 41–8, 84 films 42–4, 46–8, 84 interest in audiences 42, 180 (n.27) views on cinema 26–7, 33, 42–3 Bernard, Jean-Claude 99–101, 109–12, 156, 159 Bernard, Prof. Léon 48 Bertin-Maghit, Jean-Pierre 10–11, 154, 155, 157, 158, 161 Bessou, Auguste 18, 21 commission and report 21–3, 24, 26

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216

Index

Betts, Raymond 87 Bloom, Peter 118, 171 (n.3), 181 (n.10), 182 (n.17), 186 (n.69), 188 (n.98), 193 (n.8, 12, 15), 194 (n.25), 196 (n.53), 200 (n.44) Bonne Presse, La Maison de la 15, 29, 31 Borde, Raymond 30, 32 Bourdieu, Pierre 113 Brenier, Joseph 29, 30, 32, 34 Brévié, Jules 200 (n.40) British and pedagogical film 58–9 British colonies, educational film in 61–2, 86 British documentary film movement 12 Brittany, France 106–7 Brucker, M. 14 Brun, Jean-Charles 92 Bruneau, Adrien 22 Bugniet, René 124, 129–30, 144, 148 Cameroon, educational film 67–8, 82–4, 124, 125, 126, 129–31, 135–7 Carcassonne, France 108–9, 109 (Fig.5.3) Catholic film initiatives 15, 31 Le Bon Film 31 Le Fascinateur 15, 18, 32 Les Bons Cinémas 31 Cauvin, Gustave 29–31, 32–3, 176 (n.71, 75, 77), 177 (n.82) Chapman, Herrick 4, 6 Charton, Albert 78, 188 (n.105), 189 (n.107, 109) Chataigneau, Yves 33, 177 (n.97) Chaumel, Alfred 82, 131–2, 146, 158, 159, 196 (n.53) Chaumel-Gentil, Geneviève 158, 159 Ciné-Document 146 Ciné-Journal 17 Ciné-Miroir 17, 131, 145 Ciné-Spectacles 17–18 cinema advocacy cinema 12–14, 19, 31 commercial cinema see audiences

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documentary cinema see documentary/documentaire educational cinema see cinéma éducateur Cinéma colonial du Petit Journal 115–17, 116 (Fig.6.1), 120, 123, 143, 198 (n.85) cinéma éducateur 30–1, 59–60 in Algeria and colonies see individual geographical names Bessou commission report on 21–3, 24, 26 in British colonies 61–2, 86 influence of the arrival of sound 32–3, 54, 76 under the Popular Front 33–4, 78–9, 94, 98, 114, 132, 154 Cinémathèque de la ville de Paris 27 cinematograph see Lumière Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State, The 15 Cinématographie Française, La 95–6 Cinéopse, Le 17, 29–30, 32, 33, 52, 145–6 Citroën, André 124–5 civilizing mission 20, 68, 87, 118–19, 127 Claudey, M. l’abbé 31 Cochinchine province, Vietnam 66 Coissac, Guillaume-Michel 15, 18, 32, 33, 95, 123, 145–6 Colmar, France 115, 117 colonial humanism 121–2, 145 colonial idea 117, 118, 120–1, 141–2 colonial propaganda 115–49 film collections 126 films 126–41 reception and popular opinion 141–7 in schools 122 colonies, educational film in 63–9 see also agences économiques des colonies; Ministry of Colonies; individual geographical names Comité d’organisation de l’industrie cinématographique (COIC) 152, 153

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Index Conklin, Alice 59, 87, 118, 127 Cooper, Frederick 59, 168 (n.30) Cord Haddon, Alfred 14 Dakar, Compagnie marocaine cinématographique et commerciale 8–9, 67 Depression, the 54 Diawara, Manthia 58–9, 77, 86 Dinan, France 106–7 documentary/documentaire British film movement 12 origin of the term 16–17, 172 (n.22), 172–3 (n.24) power to persuade, belief in 18, 70, 170 (n.4) truth value, belief in 1, 4–5, 18, 170 (n.4) Dontucat, France 146–7 Doyen, Eugène-Louis 14, 171 (n.11) Dubet, M. A. 23 Dubreuil, Léon 24 Écho des Provinces, L’ 160 Éclair-Journal 68 economic agencies, colonial see agences économiques des colonies Édition française cinématographique see Benoit-Lévy, Jean education see also Ministry of Education adapted, in colonies 86–7 leçon de choses 22 méthode directe 87, 188 (n.106) moral 21–2, 29, 173 (n.36), 189 (n.107) secular, role of film 14, 29–32 vs. instruction 22–3, 87 effects of films on the audience see audiences Egyptian cinema, influence of, in Algeria 79, 187 (n.92) Ellis, Jack 2, 7 Empire Marketing Board 2, 12, 126, 143–4, 146, 196 (n.52) Europe Nouvelle, L’ 120–1

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exhibition, World’s Fair, Paris 1937 10, 41, 89–114 Aluminium Pavilion 96 Education Pavilion 96 film at 95–7 Hygiene Pavilion 96 International Pavilion 97 Overseas France section 91 Photo-Ciné-Photo Pavilion 96 Regional Center 91, 94, 97, 102–8, 113, 114 Rural Center 91, 97, 98–102, 113 Tourism Pavilion 90, 91, 94–5, 97, 108–112 Transportation Pavilion 97, 108 exhibitions, colonial 3, 60, 121, 125, 129, 142 farmers 7, 9, 37–8, 52–3, 155 Fédération régionaliste française 92–3, 102–3 Feo, Luciano de 32 Ferro, Marc 5, 7 Ferry, Jules 21 Figaro, Le 145 film see cinema Flaherty, Robert 17, 26, 172 (n.22, 24) France en Marche, La 153, 155 France on Display 8, 41, 94–5, 98, 102, 151, 159, 179 (n.11), 189 (n.6), 191 (n.43) French Equatorial Africa, educational film 67–8, 83, 126, 128–9, 133–5 French Imperial Nation-State, The 59 French national film archives 2, 118 French West Africa, educational film 67, 73, 86, 126 Frodon, Jean-Michel 3 Front Populaire see Popular Front Galey, Louis-Émile 150 Gamble, Harry 59, 86, 168 (n.31), 189 (n.8), 191 (n.20) Garçon, François 52, 152 Gauthier, Guy 2, 166 (n.9), 193 (n.10, 13) Gide, André 144

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Index

Giono, Jean 93, 190 (n.15) Girardet, Raoul 141–2, 147 Goebbels, Josef 150 Golan, Romy 7, 8, 93–4, 151–2 Gourget, Jean 24–5 Grands Réseaux des Chemins de Fer Français 107–8 Grémillon, Jean 93 Griaule, Marcel 8, 148, 170 (n.45), 198 (n.95) Grierson, John 2, 7, 12–13, 16, 42, 166 (n.8), 170 (n.4), 172 (n.22) Haddon, Alfred Cord 14 Hanoi, Vietnam 66 Hardy, Georges 188 (n.106) Hasmondon, M. 51 Haut comité méditerranéen 56, 79, 80 (Fig.4.2), 183 (n.27), 197 (n.73) Herriot, Senator 21, 22 Hurtt, Deborah 94, 95, 102, 191 (n.43, 44) Ichac, Marcel 159 idée coloniale see colonial idea Illustration, L’ 103 Indochina educational film 63, 65–7, 78, 126 film censorship in 75–6 film expedition 20, 64 Service photo-cinématographique 64–5, 69, 80–1 Indochine-Films, Société 64, 66 International Institute of Educational Cinema 16, 31–2, 72, 102, 172 (n.20), 185 (n.63) Jackson, Julian 141 Jamot, Eugène 82, 131–2, 135, 196–7 (n.64) Jewish population 151 Johnson, Dr. Alvin 12 Joseph, Gaston 73–4, 76 Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) 1–2 Labbé, Edmond 89, 96 Languedoc, France 105

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Latham, George C. 62–3 Laval Decree 77, 144 Le Galley 69–70 Le Myre de Villers 81 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 4 Le Somptier, René 144, 145 Lebovics, Herman 3, 8 Legros, P. 160 location shooting 93 Loisy, Xavier 116–17 Lorraine, France 115–16, 117 Lumière, Louis and Auguste 13–14 cinematograph 2, 14, 95 Lyautey, Louis-Hubert 65, 129, 183 (n.36) Lyon, France 29, 31, 32, 34 Madagascar, educational film in 68 Manceron, Gilles 122–3 Manue, Georges 115 Marchand, Paul 71 Martin, Marcel 32 Martinique, educational film in 68 McLane, Betsy 2 Medvedkin, Alexander 2 Mercanton, Louis 93 Ministry of Agriculture 9, 70, 76, 125, 153 cinémathèque centrale agricole, collections 24, 39–41 and documentary film in interwar France 15, 19, 23, 31, 35 and educational film in rural France 36–55 film loans 26, 30, 40 and filming the French regions 98, 101, 102 films 41–9 impact of film program, cultural 55 origins and goals of film program 39–41 Permanent Commission for Agricultural Cinema 39–40, 49–51, 53, 54 responses to films 49–54 subsidies of projection equipment 25–6, 37, 40

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Index Ministry of Colonies 27–8, 72–4, 77–9, 117, 132–3 see also agences économiques des colonies Ministry of Education 20–1, 23–6, 30, 33, 125, 153–4, 176 (n.78), 200 (n.28) film loans 26, 30, 49, 52 Musée Pédagogique 20, 23–4, 26, 34, 173 (n.32), 174 (n.49), 199 (n.20) subsidies of projection equipment 25–6 views on cinema 20–3 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 28, 114, 125 Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development 163 Ministry of Public Health 27 Ministry of Technical Education 27 Mission cinématographique d’Indochine 64 modernization vs. tradition see tradition vs. progress Mon Ciné 17 Montpellier, France 104–5 moral education see education Morinaud, Emile 144–5 Musée Pédagogique see Ministry of Education, Musée Pédagogique “Muslim cinema” 79, 197 (n.73) Nadoux, Étienne 113, 156 national identity, French 3, 5–6 National Peasant Corporation 154 National Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture 50 Navy, French 34–5 New History of Documentary Film, A 2 New York, World’s Fair, 1939 114 Nichols, Bill 4, 5, 160–1 Nigeria 61 Noiriel, Gérard 151 Notcutt, L.A. 62–3 Obert, M. 36, 37 Oeuvre, L’ 65

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Offices régionaux du cinéma éducateur laïque 29–31, 37, 59, 153 film collections 181 (n.11) film loans 30 screening figures 34, 182 (n.13) Pagnol, Marcel 93, 190 (n.15) Painlevé, Jean 169 (n.40, 41), 177 (n.98) Painlevé, Paul 20–1, 173 (n.35) Papeete, Tahiti [a colony of France] 73 Paris, municipal film library 27 Paris, World’s Fair exhibition, 1937 see exhibition, World’s Fair, Paris 1937 Parisian lycées 14 Pastre, Béatrice De 118, 146, 196 (n.64) Pathé, Charles 1 Paxton, Robert 38, 151 Payne Fund Studies 16, 171 (n.18) Paysans noirs, Les 86 Peer, Shanny 8, 41, 94–5, 98, 102, 151, 159, 179 (n.11), 189 (n.6), 191 (n.43) Perrin, Charles 32 Pétain, Philippe 150–2, 155, 157 Petit, Edouard 14 Ploquin, Raoul 153 Poirier, Léon 93, 124, 190 (n.14) Popular Front 33–4, 78–9, 94, 98, 114, 132, 154 presidential election, 2007 3–4 progress vs. tradition 3, 5–9, 49, 55, 92, 113, 161 Raymond, Chanoîne 32 Raymond-Millet, J.-K. 89, 108–9, 111, 123, 159 regionalism 92–5, 102–3, 106, 113, 151, 190 (n.13) Réunion, La 68 Revue du Cinéma Éducateur 34 Revue Pédagogique 57 Ricard, J. H. 39–40, 52, 179 (n.17) Riefenstahl, Leni 2, 97, 137 Riotor, Léon 27 Robert, André 154, 200 (n.28) Rouch, Jean 77

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Index

Rouergue, France 10, 111–12 Rouquier, Georges 155 Roux-Parassac, Emile 18 rural audiences, responses 49–54 rural exodus 3, 37–8, 55, 86, 98, 179 (n.13), 200 (n.40) rural film projection see audiences

tourism 94, 114, 162–3 see also exhibition, World’s Fair, Paris 1937: Tourism Pavilion Tout Cinéma, Le 145 tradition vs. progress 3, 5–9, 49, 55, 92, 113, 161 Turin, Victor 2

Saïda, Algeria 56–7, 58, 59, 64 Saint-Pierre-de-Vaise, France 34 Saint-Selve, France 51 Saintes Maries de la Mer, France 105 Salles familiales 153 Sardou, Pierre 90 Sarkozy, Nicolas 4, 163 Sarraut, Albert 20, 65, 68, 78, 117, 120–4 Screening Reality 2 Sellers, William 61 Selling of the Empire, The 2 Service des oeuvres françaises à l’étranger (SOFE) 28, 114, 125, 175 (n.61, 62, 64, 65) Service photo-cinématographique de l’Indochine see Indochina Shaka, Femi 86 Shub, Esfir 2 Siècle de documentaires français, Un 2 Simon, Marc 122 Société de l’art à l’école 57 Société de patronage de l’école d’indigènes 57 Sorlin, Pierre 149 sound, arrival of 32–3, 54, 76 Soviet Union, cinema 1–2, 12, 73, 97 Stoler, Anne 59, 168 (n.30)

UFOCEL (Union française des offices du cinéma éducateur laïque) 34, 178 (n.100) Umbdenstock, Gustave 106 United States, cinema 73–4 Urban, Charles 15 Us, France 36, 37

theaters in colonies, statistics 184–5 (n.54) Thiesse, Anne-Marie 92, 93 35-mm film format mandated by law 154–5 Thompson, Edward 63 Togo, educational film 67–8, 124, 125, 126

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Vaillat, Léandre, 103–8, 109, 111 Vaulx-en-Velin, France 34 Vertov, Dziga 1–2, 12 Vichy government 10–11, 150–60 discovery of documentary film 152–4 emphasis on rural and colonial values 155–60 Vichy in the Tropics 59 Vientiane, Laos 65–6 Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang 75 Voyage au Congo 144 Waldeck-Rousseau (prime minister) 87 Weber, Eugen 4, 5, 6, 91 Wharton, Steve 2, 10–11, 152, 154, 156 Wilder, Gary 127 World War, First 3, 16, 19, 29, 142 World War, Second 150–60 Yaounde, Cameroon 68 Yen Bay, uprising 75 Yonne, director of agricultural services 53 Zay, Jean 33–4

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Film Index

A l’assaut des aiguilles du diable [Assaulting the Devil’s Needles] 159 A travers la Guinée [Across Guinea] 131 Alerte aux champs [Alert in the Fields] 156 Alsace, France 103 Ancêtres de la bicyclette, Les [Ancestors of the Bicycle] 66 Artisanat breton, L’ [Breton Handicrafts] 106–7 Au bois de Vincennes [In the Vincennes Forest] 66 Au pays des buveurs de sang [In the Land of the BloodDrinkers] 157, 158 Au service de la terre [In the Service of the Earth] 99–102, 100 (Fig.5.1), 101 (Fig.5.2), 159 Aude, belle inconnue [Aude, Beautiful Stranger] 108–9, 109 (Fig.5.3), 154, 159 Aunis et Saintonge [Aunis and Saintonge] 106, 111 Autruche, L’ [The Ostrich] 53 Belles villes de France, Les [France’s Beautiful Cities] 66 Bon et le mauvais laitier, Le [The Good and the Bad Dairyman] 46–7, 99 Bonne Méthode, La [The Correct Method] 42–4, 43 (Fig.3.1), 44 (Fig.3.2), 70, 82, 99 Cameroun au pays Foulbé [Cameroon in Fulbe Country] 129

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Cameroun: Bamouns et Bamilékés [Cameroon: Bamuns and Bamilekes] 129–31, 130 (Fig.6.2) Cameroun, création française [Cameroon, A French Creation] 10, 115, 135–6 Caoutchouc en Indochine, Le [Rubber in Indochina] 53–4 Chanson de l’eau [The Song of the Water] 99 Chasse à l’hippopotame, La [Hippopotamus Hunting] 53 Chasse à la baleine, La [Whale Hunting] 53 Chasse au bufle en Indochine, La [Buffalo Hunting in Indochina] 53 Conte de la mille et deuxième nuit [The Story of the One Thousand and Second Night] 84–5, 85 (Fig.4.4) Continent Mystérieux, Le [The Mysterious Continent] 145 Coup d’oeil sur l’Indochine française, Un [French Indochina at a Glance] 66, 67 (Fig.4.1) Croisière noire, La [The Black Journey] 36, 124–5, 145, 146 Culture du riz en Espagne, La [Rice Growing in Spain] 54 Danses du Cameroun [Dances of Cameroon] 129 De belles images d’Annecy [Beautiful Images of Annecy] 156

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Film Index

Dernière vision de Le My, La [The Last Vision of Le My] 80–1 Deux méthodes, Les [The Two Methods] 49 École nationale des industries agricoles de Douai, L’ [The National School for Agricultural Industries in Douai] 98 Effort médical français: A.E.F./ Cameroun, L’ [The French Medical Effort: F.E.A./ Cameroon] 136–7 En Afrique noire A.E.F. [In F.E.A., Black Africa] 128–9 En Algérie [In Algeria] 66 Escales impériales [Imperial Ports of Call] 141 France dans le monde, La [France in the World] 159, 201 (n.48) France en marche, La [France on the March] 153, 155 France est un empire, La [France is an Empire] 137–41, 138 (Fig.6.3), 139 (Fig.6.4), 140 (Fig.6.5), 197 (n.73) Future maman, La [The Future Mommy] 42, 47–8, 48 (Fig.3.5), 51

Mediterranée [Mediterranean] 104–5 Missions de la France [Missions of France] 141, 159 Moana 17 Moki Land series 14 Naissance de la soie [Birth of Silk] 156 Nanook of the North 17 Olympia 136–7 Paysans noirs [Black Peasants] 157 Pélerins de la Mecque [Pilgrims to Mecca] 157 Petites inventions, Les [Small inventions] 66 Promenade en A.E.F. [A Stroll in F.E.A.] 159, 196 (n.53) Protecteur céleste de ma tante Nam, Le [The Celestial Protector of my Aunt Nam] 81–2 Pulse of the World 73

Images de Savoie [Images of Savoie] 97, 113, 156 Industries arabes, Les [Arab Industries] 53

Réveil d’une race, Le [The Awakening of a Race] 82, 84, 84 (Fig.4.3), 131–2, 145, 146, 196 (n.53), 196–7 (n.64) Révolte des betteraves, La [The Revolt of the Beets] 36, 37, 44–6, 45 (Fig.3.3), 70, 99 Rouergue, Le [The Rouergue], France 89, 109–12, 110 (Fig.5.4), 112 (Fig.5.5), 156, 159

Jeannette Bourgogne 24–5, 25 (Fig.2.1), 174 (n.51) Joies de l’eau, Les [The Joys of Water] 99

Sortilège exotique [Exotic Spell] 157, 158 Symphonie exotique [Exotic Symphony] 146, 158

Maladie du sommeil, La [Sleeping Sickness] 82–4, 84 (Fig.4.3), 188 (n.95) Man of Aran 17 Marche vers le soleil, La [March Towards the Sun] 145

Terres arrachées à la mort [Lands Snatched from Death] 133–5 Tonnelier, Le [The Cooper] 155 Traversée du Sahara, La [Crossing of the Sahara] 145

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Film Index Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the Will] 97 Tuberculose menace tout le monde, La [Tuberculosis Threatens Everyone] 46, 47 (Fig.3.4) Vallée de la Dordogne, La [The Dordogne Valley] 66

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Variétés du Ministère de l’Agriculture [Ministry of Agriculture Magazine] 54 Vie dans un village moderne, La [Life in a Modern Village] 36, 37 Visages de Savoie [Faces of Savoie] 156 Voyage au Congo [Journey to the Congo] 144

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