univ of minnesota press french colonial documentary mythologies of humanitarianism mar 2008

[...]... Interrogating the relationship between French documentary realism and the colonial enterprise is the central focus of this book While Le Roy’s useful filmographic categorization of colonial cinema addresses, among others,7 films that were filmed in the French colonies, I extend the parameters of colonial documentary as archive, myth, and visual index to the discourse of humanitarianism This page intentionally... redefined by the 1931 Parisian Colonial Exhibition, as I discuss in chapter 5 Instilling colonial consciousness among French citizens during the interwar period was directly integrated into a series of French colonial documentary initiatives In addition to several films commissioned expressly for the 1931 exhibition, educational cinema was the basis for colonial documentary Some of the earliest and best-developed... earliest and best-developed efforts began in French Indochina under the tutelage of Albert Sarraut, the well-known architect of French colonial policy during the interwar period Initiatives to produce colonial documentary films drew on advertising techniques and the discourse of crowd psychology in order to promote an ethic of colonial consciousness The title of chapter 5, “Infiltrate the Crowd with an... end of the interwar period (1918–40) of the Third Republic (1870–1940) The transformation of “natural man” as a recurring figure beginning with JeanJacques Rousseau’s De l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755) was grounded in the history of physiology and gymnastic training and incorporated into the project of French colonial reform The title of this book, French Colonial. .. successive generations of nineteenth-century French hygienic reformers claimed that “civilization” improves health conditions and the general quality of life In this chapter I trace successive representations of “natural man” as they pertain to the legacy of ideology and the origins of French colonial documentary cinema As an emergent mode of perception, the cinema drew on the legacy of the human sciences... movement, pioneered by Marey’s graphic method of inscription.36 The study of fatigue can be localized more generally within a German physiological tradition of scientific materialism that grew out of the defeat of liberal ideas in the public sphere following the revolution of 1848.37 A number of Marey’s inventions were simply improvements on devices developed within this tradition One of Marey’s earliest... define French colonial documentary as an experience and genre of masculine adventure Making the colonies visible was focused not merely on a network of sites within the French colonial domain, but, as I illustrate in chapter 4, on diagnosing invisible agents that can be detected only by technologies of vision and know-how Techniques of magnification and rendering the invisible visible as part of a medical... development of a cinematographic instrument used to measure and visually reproduce movement in time It is this Sensationalist legacy of cinema that became a source of colonial knowledge about the world in the register of cinematic realism In the archive of Sensationalist thought, narrative fragments foregrounding a differential hierarchy of sensation formed the basis for French colonial documentary. .. themselves, like the mechanisms of a watch, were cued to the temporal structuring of the motion picture camera in their kinematic functionality French colonial documentary is typically associated with the archive of Citroën films because of the way in which Introduction — xi colonial geography became the ultimate vanishing point for a myth of humanitarian values in the machine aesthetics of modernity The automobile... different forms of locomotion The black African, for example, would be prone to engage in more extended movements and could be associated with distinctly marked articulations of the muscles to the bone structure; more precisely, Marey specified that the heel bone of the African tended to be longer on average than that of the European by a ratio of seven to five.45 Marey’s explanation of a Lamarckian anatomical . w0 h1" alt="" French Colonial Documentary