Various Cinema Designs in Colonial and Post-Independence Africa Lecture by Professor Vincent Bouchard, Indiana University, Bloomington

This paper aims to define a pan-European conception of the cinematic medium through a comparison of the choices and the difficulties encountered by British and French colonizers when setting up audio-visual propaganda. Indeed, the syntheses of the propaganda systems set up in Europe and the reports on the experiments carried out in the colonies exemplify a very specific aspect of the colonial misunderstanding, but they also reveal a number of recurring preconceptions: cinema as a vector of universally decipherable messages; cinema as a form of direct access to the viewer's subconscious; cinema as a form of expression of a “European technological superiority”. In addition to expose the intrinsic inefficiency of these apparatuses, this paper will also address how these misconceptions specifically shaped the colonial message and how they have predetermined some postcolonial cultural practices.

Vincent Bouchard is Professor of Francophone Studies at Indiana University — Bloomington. He runs the Early African Cinemas Lab (Indiana University), which explores the different cinematographic practices that developed in West Africa since Independence (1960s), including the conditions of emergence of the first filmmakers and the popular reception of films. The activities of the lab are based on archival data collection, such as the rich collection of films and papers available in Bloomington. His publications include the books Cinema Van, propagande et résistance en Afrique coloniale (Ottawa UP, 2023) and Pour un cinéma léger et synchrone à Montréal ! (Septentrion UP, 2012). He also coedited a special issue of Intermédialités (Rendering (time), no. 33, 2019) and a close-up in Black Camera, Paulin Vieyra, a Postcolonial figure (vol. 13.2, 2022).