Colonial Cinema in Africa: Origins, Images, Audiences

Cinéma colonial portugais et belge. La filmographie de deux importants petits pays en Afrique

“…Ernest Genval (1884Genval ( -1945 represented the first period, while André Cauvin (1907Cauvin ( -2004 and Gérard De Boe (1904Boe ( -1960 made the transition and shot most of their films during the second period . The three of them, according to Glenn Reynolds (2015), made up the triumvirate of the Belgian colonial cinema.…”

“…Remarkably, these cinematographic productions constitute a double source of information: what is visible (images) but also what is not visible (the background of production and screening). The importance of this last aspect is particularly evident since the 1990s, and more systematically since 2000, when several authors examined the ideology and constraints in the production of colonial cinema, and the audiences, mainly the African audience (Ambler 2001;Cowans 2015;Fair 2018;Fuhrmann 2015;Goerg 2015;Reynolds 2015;Tomaselli 2013). Those studies have shown, for example, that as a result of the changes in the post-World War ii colonial narrative, colonial documentaries began to focus essentially on the socio-economic progress of both European and African populations, and that in the 1950s censorship sought to remove racist explicit contents, which was a sign that the colonial authorities no longer regarded the African public as purely passive (Goerg 2015).…”