The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences presents
“Cinema in the Age of Decolonization: Activism and Aesthetics”
An Homage to René Vautier (1928-2015)
with Dr. Nicole Brenez, Professor of Film Studies, University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and Programmer, Cinémathèque Française
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences invites you to a weeklong (January 18-22, 2016) meditation on the theme “Cinema in the Age of Decolonization: Activism and Aesthetics” to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the passing of René Vautier (January 4, 2015), France’s first and most important anti-colonialist filmmaker who was also arguably one of the most censored film directors in the history of cinema. This series of events will involve the very first Canadian retrospective of the cinema of René Vautier, featuring four of his most important films, Afrique 50 (1950), Le Glas (1969/70), Frontline (1976) and Avoir Vingt Ans dans les Aurès (1972), along with Salut et Fraternité (2015), a recent documentary exploring the significance and resonance of his work. The retrospective will be opened by a public lecture on “The Cinema of René Vautier,” by FASS Visiting Scholar Dr. Nicole Brenez, Professor of Film Studies at Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and Programmer at the Cinémathèque Française. Dr. Brenez will also introduce the screenings throughout the week.
During her weeklong stay at Carleton, Professor Brenez will also lead an interdisciplinary workshop entitled “Internationalism or Transnationalism? Questions and Directions for Contemporary Political Cinema” and offer two master classes entitled “A Formal Love Story: Henri Langlois and Jean-Luc Godard” and “Avant-Gardes and Documentary Forms.” You are all cordially invited to attend. Please find details below.
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Citizen Vautier! A Retrospective of the Cinema of René Vautier
Tuesday, January 19, 6:00 p.m. – 2200 River Building Theatre
Public Lecture: The Cinema of René Vautier
Each of René Vautier’s films is a pamphlet, a shield for the oppressed and the victims of history, a little war machine in the service of justice. And like weapons in a resistance movement, they are used, exchanged, lent, discarded, destroyed, lost or hidden away and sometimes long forgotten. In that respect, each of Vautier’s films is an individual case, an episode in what is probably the noblest and most romantic story in the history of cinema. We will consider how René Vautier’s images are arguments in an endless visual debate whose ultimate horizon is a more just state of the world. (Nicole Brenez)
Afrique 50 (1950) (Documentary, black and white, 17 min)
Afrique 50 is René Vautier’s first masterpiece and is considered by Nicole Brenez as the “most important film in the history of cinema.” It marks one of the first cinematic instantiations of the director’s motto, which he adapted from Paul Eluard (co-founder of the Surrealist movement) and which underpins the entirety of his work: “I film what I see, what I know, what is true.” Shot in colonial French West Africa, Afrique 50 was a film commissioned by the Ligue de l’Enseignement, which hoped it would demonstrate the greatness of colonialism to French students. Instead, Vautier offers a very trenchant critique of French colonialism by revealing the mechanisms through which it maintains its dominance in Africa, that is, through massacres, labour exploitation and resource extraction. A tour de force of montage cinema, the film was censored for over forty years and cost René Vautier a thirteen-count indictment and a one-year prison sentence along with the confiscation of half of his exposed film stock. The story of the making of Afrique 50 is itself a film waiting to be made.
Introduced and discussed by Dr. Nicole Brenez
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Wednesday, Jan 20, 7:00 p.m. – 435 St. Patrick’s Building
Le glas (1969) (A documentary poem, black and white, 5 min)
In this five-minute black and white documentary poem made in collaboration with the Zimbabwean African Party for Unity (ZAPU), René Vautier pays homage to three African revolutionaries hanged in Salisbury (contemporary Harare) by the notorious Ian Smith government of Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe). Initially censored in France, the film was later released in the director’s country of origin, following its release in England. In his book entitled Caméra Citoyenne(The Citizen Camera), René Vautier recounts receiving the music he would later use as the film’s soundtrack from the Black Panthers during the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Algiers. The film’s voice-over is that of legendary Senegalese film director Djibril Diop Mambety.
English subtitles by Peter and Françoise Kirkpatrick.
Frontline (1976) (Documentary, color, 73 min)
Co-directed with Brigitte Criton and Buana Kabue and with assistance from Oliver Tambo, then-President of the African National Congress (ANC), Frontline was shot during the heyday of the anti-apartheid struggle. The film deconstructs the mechanisms of the apartheid system on the eve of the Soweto uprising through a masterful examination of the repressive system’s strategies of confinement, mobility control, and its relentless extractive economy, which frame the lives of the majority Black population. Deconstructing the codes of the travelogue, the film includes a soundtrack from the late Miriam Makeba.
English subtitles by Peter and Françoise Kirkpatrick.
Both films will be introduced and discussed by Dr. Nicole Brenez
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Thursday, Jan 21, 7:00 p.m. – 100 St. Patrick’s Building
Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès (1972) (Fiction, colour, 100 min)
Alongside Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Le Vent des Aurès (1966) and Chronique des années de braise (1975) and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), René Vautier’s Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès is among the most important films on the Algerian independence war. Shot on the Tunisian-Algerian border and based on 800 hours of interviews with former French conscripts involved in the war, the film focuses on a group of young pacifist Bretons who are turned into killing machines by the colonial military apparatus. The film marks the culmination of Vautier’s longstanding involvement with the Algerian liberation project, which also included playing a pioneering role in the emergence of Algerian national cinema. French author and film critic Michel Capdenac wrote of this film: “I would trade ten films by Chabrol and ten films by Truffaut for this film by Vautier.”
Introduced and discussed by Dr. Nicole Brenez
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Friday, January 22, 7:00 p.m. – 100 St. Patrick’s Building
Salut et fraternité: les images selon René Vautier (2015) by Oriane Brun-Moschetti (HD-Colour and black and white, 67 min, France)
How to bring into existence a cinema that counters power? How can cinema be made by the people for the people? This documentary portrait of René Vautier explores the filmmaker’s impact on society using interviews by Nicole Brenez and Oriane Brun-Moschetti and featuring such major directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Yann Le Masson and Bruno Muel. The film also includes rare images of Vautier, in particular the two opening scenes, the second of which gives the director a quasi-prophetic stature, aptly illustrating both his vanguardist lucidity and his primarily lonesome itinerary which was paradoxically also one of relentless solidarity.
Screened with English subtitles
Introduced and discussed by Dr. Nicole Brenez
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On-Campus Workshop
Wednesday, January 20, 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. – 2017 Dunton Tower
“Internationalism or Transnationalism? Questions and Directions for Contemporary Political Cinema.”
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Master Classes
Thursday, January 21, 11:30 am – 100 St. Patrick’s Building
Lecture: “A Formal Love Story: Henri Langlois and Jean-Luc Godard”
The relationship of mutual admiration between Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, and Jean-Luc Godard was one of the most enduring and creative in the history of cinema. For Henri Langlois, the director of Breathless was a “poetic genius” who marked a caesura in film history: “there was cinema before and cinema after Godard” (“BG” and “AG”). Langlois organized an “Homage to Godard” as early as 1964 at the Cinémathèque, and devoted an episode of his film series Anti Cours (1976) (one of his last projects), to a comparison between Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard.
Conversely, the Godardian “idea/l” of cinema is inscribed in and continuously nourished by the speculative framework elaborated by Langlois, while also drawing inspiration from the latter’s inventive and joyfully illegal practices. We will examine some of the ways in which Godard’s stylistic choices both in his films and his exhibition entitled “Collage(s) de France” are informed by Henri Langlois. (Nicole Brenez).
Friday, January 22, 9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. – 472 St. Patrick’s Building
Seminar: “Avant-Gardes and Documentary Forms”
Wherever there is a situation of oppression, there is also a forefront to resist it, to counter-attack, to find ways and paths to fight power. This is the concrete or imaginary model for any avant-garde, struggling against political, economic, ideological and symbolic dominance, developing its own tools, its own codes, its own perspectives. What would be the forefronts for contemporary documentary? In this seminar, we will consider some of the challenges faced by contemporary documentary cinema as well as some of the responses to them via three very practical questions:
1. With whom and for whom (do we make documentaries)? The deontological situation
2. Why and to what ends? The historical situation
3. With what kinds of images? The aesthetical material
Admission is Free. No registration required. All are welcome