THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
A young man, barefoot and camera in hand, sound boom stuck upright in his backpack, walks the streets of his city, asks his mother for a final blessing and goes across the country to pursue his quest. It is under the invocation of a novel of modern chivalry, both naive and humorous, that the Guinean documentary filmmaker Thierno Souleymane Diallo will therefore crisscross his country, in search of the first film ever made by a French-speaking African in 1953 in Paris, black legend muramaniof his compatriot Mamadou Touré.
As the archives describe it, this twenty-three minute film evokes the story of Abdouramane Kaba, from Mali, who settled in 1690 in Upper Guinea, to create the Muslim kingdom of Baté there. Looking further, one can even find traces of it in an article of March 31, 1955 by Jean de Baroncelli, film critic at the Worldwho discovered him in a program of African short films.
Aware of its existence during his film studies, we can reasonably expect that Diallo, this Indiana Jones of the seventh art, is not unaware that the film is now considered lost.
sacrificed art
If he doesn’t say anything about it, it’s because the object of his quest is a kind of detective novel that allows him to draw up a rather bitter assessment of the situation of cinema in his country, and more generally of cinema African. Abandoned rooms, looted warehouses, cameras and projectors stolen to be resold to pot makers, burnt and buried film, desperate curators, nostalgic counter clerks: here is the sad picture of an art sacrificed to political earthquakes, to the inconsistency of rulers and in the throes of poverty.
At the Higher Institute of the Arts of Guinea, a film professor explains to his former student that the Republic of Guinea, which won its independence in 1958, was nevertheless, in the 1960s, the capital of African cinema. A former civil servant, member of the Guinean government’s censorship committee, deplores the absence of a culture of archives in his country and advises the young investigator to go to Paris, the only country that could have a copy of the film, in the Film Archive. After a short detour to the Parisian cinema La Clef, struggling for its survival – a sign that even in France all is not well for the seventh art – the filmmaker arrives at the warehouses of Bois-d’Arcy, in the Yvelines . The rest is to be discovered on your screens.
You have 3.05% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.