French Colonial Documentary. Mythologies of Humanitarianism

by Peter J. Bloom
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, USA/UK, 2008
280 pp. illus 67 b/w. Trade, $75; paper, $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4628-9; ISBN: 978-0-8166-4629-6.

Martha Blassnigg
University of Plymouth

martha.blassnigg@gmail.com

Peter J. Bloom, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, takes a broad interdisciplinary perspective on the subject of French colonial documentary film in this book. Very well informed by first hand readings and archival research, he draws a complex network of the competing knowledge practices, ideologies and image technologies of the late 19th, early 20th century aiming to uncover some of the myths around humanitarianism in French colonial visual representations.

The overall scope of the book is to discuss a broad range of colonial imagery and myths of France’s Third Republic (1870-1940) in a continuous recycling of media representations “that enact the structure of distorted political objectives, encoded otherness as new forms of technological illusionism” (p. 198). Bloom elaborates on the techniques of the visual media apparatus through that difference served for transformation of French national identity and the reinvention of ‘natural man’ in relation to French masculinity during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) until the end of the interwar period (1918-1940). His attempt is to unravel some of the historiographical knots around what he calls the “French colonial media apparatus” that simultaneously displayed and distanced the increasingly assimilated colonial subject. He bases the term ‘apparatus’ on the French Marxist/psychoanalytical understanding as “a machine that produces meaning and an overdetermined political and social context that forms the basis for ideology” (p. ix).

Bloom begins with a contextualisation of early chronophotographic documents and early colonial film footage as the ultimate mise-en-scene for the masquerade of ‘civilized techniques’ in relation to the concept of the ‘natural man’ set in the fields of physiology and gymnastic training techniques and policies as part of the project of the French national reform at the late 19th century at the backdrop of the prevailing evolutionist anthropological investigations. In his view, visual technologies ultimately promoted the symbolic order of ‘natural men’ to remake the social fabric of the new political colonial landscape imbued with French national ideology. In the second chapter he discusses the myths associated with the African soldier, in particular the Tirailleurs Sénégalais (Senegalese Sharpshooters) in the context of the collective imaginary of French imperialism with revealing references to early treatments of shell shock effects in relation to ethnopsychiatric approaches to mental health. Bloom then moves from the technologies of the body to a wider geographical mise-en-scene of the colonial imaginary and explores the trans-Saharan crossings sponsored by Citroën and their interconnection to the movement over time with the camera and the railroad. Chapter four explores instead a more ‘invisible’ discourse: that of medical imagery and hygiene reforms and the scientific authority of photography and its relevance for the colonial medical discourse. From this the discussion further explores the emergence of the so-called educational cinema as the basis for the colonial documentary in the interwar period in the context of ‘colonial consciousness’ among the French and the discourse of ‘crowd psychology’. The last chapter moves into the domain of ethnography and global image archives, and focuses on the humanitarian ambitions of Albert Kahn’s Les Archives de la Planète (Archive of the Planet) and the initiatives of the League of the Nations’ International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (CIC). There seemed many possibilities for how to conclude this ambitious research project, which seems to open up a great amount of further questions to elaborate. Bloom decided to turn back to the discussion of the ‘natural man’ situated in a discourse of the body and gender in an intercultural connection and negotiation between France and the United States, manifest in African American performances, boxing ‘rituals’ and the ethnographic spectacle as in the case of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition led by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule.

Bloom very elegantly combines a great variety of discourses in his explorations, in details and depth, and interweaves them seamlessly in his discussions of the identified complex intersecting imperatives, for example issues relating to gender, economics, popular culture, the social and cultural construction of technology, the collective imaginary, medical perspectives, national and international politics, etc. In this he moves closely between archival and other empirical resources and data, and a close analysis of documentary films and other colonial visual imagery, often conducted first hand in archives. In doing so Bloom evokes powerful images of, and critical reflections on, the dynamics and controversies of a historical period in great shifts and ruptures, not least due to conflicts, wars, violence and the hopes in relation to progress, economic and spiritual power, as well as global utopias. Throughout he critiques one of the most significant myths at this nexus: that of humanitarianism, which he lays bare as a rhetorical construction founded on security, human catastrophe, and civilization.

The book, it could be added, is at its weakest when it moves away from empirical data and resources in its attempts in the last chapter to introduce a philosophical framework to support its core argument. Bloom rightly recognises the significance of Henri Bergson’s philosophy in the political arena of the interwar period, during which he acted as diplomat and first president of the CIC (which served as predecessor to UNESCO), following the huge success in the professional as well as popular reception of his philosophy. However, Bloom adopts some misinterpretations of Bergson’s philosophy to suit his argument around the CIC, which he critiques for their propagation of educational film and their endeavours to provide technical means to manage and distribute Western ideological imperatives around “civilization” and “enlightenment” under the pretence of internationalism and humanitarianism. Bloom’s misconception of Bergson’s philosophical endeavours crystallizes in his interpretation of a quote from Bergson (p. 174), in which it is evident that he did not claim a universal concept of time, but merely proposed a harmonious analogy to this notion in his treatment of durée as a universal ontological approach to a quality of experience. He certainly did not proclaim a regulatory mechanism of a ‘master clock’, as Bloom suggests, as a predetermining agency that could be compared to colonialism. Instead Bergson critiqued the predisposition of ancient as well as modern science to operate with a universal concept of time as measurable quantity which excluded the qualitative experience of time from its scope — a critique that seems to segue some of Bloom’s own critical reflections on the Western hegemony and imperialism through the scientific paradigm as it was operated in the colonies.

Furthermore Bergson understood memory precisely not as a trace imprinted in the mind. Most importantly Bergson referred to the ‘cinematographical method’ metaphorically as one particular modus of the mind, the intellect alone. This gets confused in Bloom’s general references to the mind which also do not take intuition into account as the opposed movement of the mind, both intrinsically and necessarily entangled in the processes of a creative evolution that gives agency to its subjects and indeterminacy to the future. This may be an erroneous reading or the repetition of a general (an misleading) trend in media studies. By subverting Bergson’s philosophy to the master narrative of the book, despite the inherent contradictions of this attempt, his philosophy is once more turned into a misunderstood curiosity situated in the customary uncritically cited Einstein-Bergson controversy (despite a recent critical reopening of the discussion), and also situated in the later phenomenological approaches like a baton race where in Bloom’s treatment Heidegger seems to take the lead. Even though Bloom in brevity recognises Bergson’s core intervention with respect to free will and indeterminism in action, the liberating potential of his philosophy for the prevailing colonial and evolutionary discourse of the time has not yet fully been recognised. Through this oversight, Bloom does not give enough space for the inherent contradictory forces that continuously shaped the cinematic dispositif in its own right and rather holds on to the cinema as kind of a universal object in its execution, evolving alongside the colonial discourse and politics of the time.

Although Bloom’s — in principle significant yet slightly unfortunate — sidestep into philosophy may seem as merely a small portion condensed in the last chapter, it is important to highlight it, since it threatens to undermine the very criticism that the book sets out to achieve so elegantly in the previous chapters: to uncover the establishment of first a physiology then a geography of difference which served through a time-based evolutionary framework as the basis for a transformation into a colonial humanitarian interventionism. One of the great outcomes of the book is that it shows how fruitful an investigation from the core of film and media studies can be when the discussion moves away from the singularity of its subject matter, discipline and textual investigation by opening up interdisciplinary fields or interconnection and hidden dimensions often lost in translation between disciplinary boundaries and safeguards. In this way ‘French Colonial Documentary’ is a significant contribution to a more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of a period with concise case studies in a well informed and critical new historicist manner. It can only be emphasised that one hopes that several strands of Bloom’s insightful intervention will be picked up and continued in future research and publication — and in its heuristic and method also transferred to other disciplinary contexts — to thicken the understanding of a period that bear such relevance for contemporary research in the context of related issues and problematics on an inter-national and global scale.