David Henry Slavin,
Colonial Cinema and Imperial France: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths.
Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 2001.
ISBN: 0 8018 6616 2
288pp
US$42.00 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by John Hopkins University Press)

Uploaded 20 September 2002

This is a book which aims to relate a number of French colonial films of the period 1919-1939 to the social and political movements and ideologies which they mobilise or challenge. The linkage is often made by way of key figures in the production process whose social and racial attitudes are readable in the resultant films. This is a task well worth undertaking, though it should be said firstly that the balance of information throughout is weighted in favour of the socio-political rather than the filmic, and secondly that the coverage is not as broad as the title implies, since rather than dealing with the whole of imperial France the book focuses almost entirely on Morocco and Algeria. This focus is defensible, since most of the relevant films were set and/or filmed in those two countries, though the core of ten films which Slavin selects to comment on at length results in the marginalisation or suppression of a number of crucial films which were at least as popular at the time. Moreover, attitudes towards empire and towards other races might equally well have been tracked through French films set in such areas as Malaya, China, Mongolia.

Nevertheless a vast amount of reading and research informs the sections dealing with socio-political commentary on French North Africa, and those interested in the historical context to which French colonial films of the period implicitly refer will certainly find material of importance here. One of the main problems with the book is that they will probably find it several times, under different headings. Essentially the films are used as pretexts for a series of mini-essays on the politics of the period, and each mini-essay reorganises material found elsewhere in the book, sometimes but not always giving it a different slant. At best, a number of little known figures, events and movements are foregrounded in ways that improve our understanding of the factors conditioning the production of these films. At worst, the same material recurs several times over, with the same commentary, and even supported by the same citations from other commentators. This is most apparent in the first half, where discussion constantly circles around the production of three films – L’Atlantide (1921 and 1932) and Itto (1934) – but it is to some extent a weakness throughout, which better editing could and should have eliminated.

A related problem is the almost total disregard for chronology in the sequencing of the socio-political sections, leading to a loss of continuity in the argument, which is odd in a text where history and causality play such a key role. Equally odd is the tendency towards broad generalisations unsubstantiated by evidence. Pages are littered with collective nouns (“Catholics said”, “The French press promised…, “White filmmakers declared…”). At times a search will turn up some of the required substantiation in endnotes, with the result that the endnotes come to constitute a more useful and confidence-inspiring text than the body of the book itself. At other times, when each paragraph of the book is supported by a dozen global references to sources, the endnotes are as laboured as the body of the book, and demonstrate its origins in a university thesis that condenses endless reading of other texts, uncritically reproduced even when, as happens on occasion, they contradict one another.

A more worrying problem is the ambivalence shown towards film-as-evidence. The impression is conveyed throughout that films are secondary, even incidental. Sometimes they seem merely to serve as a means to add “relevance” to the discussion of socio-political material, with which the author is clearly more at home. For instance the brief history of the French silent cinema given here shows little first-hand knowledge; there is no reference to debates about the social function of film genres; a lengthy re-telling of each film’s story (up to 3 pages) is not necessarily the best way to identify what a film is “about”; the (typical) statement that “After all is said and done, colonial films are melodramas, simple stories of individual lives and loves..” is not a promising critical conclusion; there are some distinctly odd readings of well-known films; it is a little far-fetched to blame World War One for the absence of romantic leads in the 20s and 30s; and the generalisations about poetic realist films are simply not valid. The secondary nature of all filmic discussion in the book is nowhere better evidenced than in the Conclusion, which doesn’t mention a single film or a single principle relating films or genres to society, but concentrates exclusively on the socio-political aftermath of the inter-war period.

One admirable aspect of the book is the weight it gives to Arab as well as to French commentaries on the period; though in a book on the French cinema, which cites so many French sources, it is surprising to find such a high proportion of gender and spelling errors – I noted 15 in film and other titles, including La Petit Illustration, Le Grande Palais, Une soeur blanc, Le Grande Jeu, La Voile blanche, Le Courbeau, Marie Chapdelaine, Vivian Romance and Quai des brumes translated as Quay of frogs. Such errors do not inspire confidence, and represent yet another instance where closer authorial and editorial monitoring of the final text would have improved the book enormously. Nevertheless, as a summary of material written about a settler society plagued by white suprematism, anti-semitism and misogyny, and a cinema at least in part complicit in these ideologies, the book is, if used cautiously, a useful reference work.

Colin Crisp