Black and White in Color

This films gives voice to a re-articulation of the critique of French colonialism at a time when there was fairly wide-scale disillusionment with some of the failed aspects of the Fifth Republic; namely, the failure of integration of diverse ethnic groups from former colonies and the break in economic progress after the Trente Glorieuses.


The most interesting figure in this is arguably Hubert, the young geographer.  He still marches forward in the spirit of post-enlightenment humanistic positivism yet he breaks the code in how "the natives" are viewed. There is more into it than that, I think.  Is he, perhaps, a projection of the director who clearly has sympathies for the Cameroonians?   Is he a model of a new Frenchman (more enlightened in a modern context of post-colonial globalization)?  Or, is he only a supporting character for someone else who is more crucial to the main point of the filmaker? 

The following is a blurb from the director talking about the inspiration for the film: 

JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD 20 YEARS LATER...

“How a craze for soap changed my life…”

In the 60's, France gave to sub-Saharan Africa an important quantity of household soap made in Marseille. People loved that new product so much that it became the essential ingredient for many recipes. The donor country felt touched, and decided to warn people about the dangers of such a use through a “basic education” movie. The economic production had to be given to someone doing voluntary service overseas. Three years later, I was in Yaoundé, in Cameroon. As the budget allocated to the protection of soap consumers had also been eaten up, I was appointed to the “Department of Art, Trade and Movie Industry of the Federal Republic of Cameroon”, with a brief to create, develop and follow up the visible profile given to the three notions announced in the title. My greatest success was to obtain from the National Furniture Office the granting of fourteen chairs made of  okoumé wood for my associates because there were seventeen civil servants in the Department but only 3 seats. I loved Cameroon.

I loved Africa.

At the end of my stay, I spent the best part of my time rummaging in the shelves of the National Archives. I found a passage in the manuscript “The General History of Cameroon” by the Reverend Father Mveng that stirred my curiosity. It was about the “heroic resistance, against the allied forces, of Major von Rabben who immortalised the famous battle of Mora peak, during the First World War.” I managed to get myself sent on a mission to the scene, in a far-off region, on the borders of Chad.

The head of the village and the survivors of the event were waiting for me. They had an urgent question to ask me that had remained unanswered for 50 years. “Why had German and French people not fought at home but chosen Mora as a setting for the First World War?”

Africa was not only a daily delight for me but also the trigger of a personal cataclysm. My system of values - the venerable Sorbonne, the “Cahiers du Cinema”, the self-important men of IDHEC, the cosy Greek classes - suddenly collapsed.

I converted back to the unsuspected Negro in me, to my inner Africa, to the primary origins of my emotions.

I was introduced to feelings, instinct and various simple things far removed from French genius.

Africa changed my life, “Black and White in Color” turned my professional life upside down in a determining way.

Its unmitigated failure and then its miraculous resurrection confirmed to me that I had to maintain a distance from the tastes and the verdicts of the moment and that only the projects born of a stubborn passion had any chance of overcoming the obstacle of indifference.

I did not forget the merits of the French production system, the advance payment, television co-production, the irreplaceable enthusiasm of a producer like Jacques Perrin capable of giving his money to a beginner and trusting him.

Neither did I forget that it was America that held out a hand to me when I going under. I try to stay balanced and free between those two contradictory sides, between those two ways of thinking and making films.

I am disturbed to realise that all the following feature films are descendants of this paradoxical victory over fate.

The anthropo-biological African line with its two direct offspring: “Quest for Fire” in which I was pursuing the discovery of my primeval jungle, and then, “The Bear” that provided me with an excuse for coming closer, a genetic step further, to the founding mammal.

The other line is the one drawn by the character of Fresnoy created by Georges Conchon and played by Jacques Spiesser. Its is about a young graduate who is sure of his knowledge facing his first experience outside the library walls.

He led me to “The name of the rose” in which I wanted to make others share his fascination for things written, for knowledge, the conflict between reason and passion, culture and nature.

“The Lover”, “meeting between the instinct of monsoon countries and literature”, gave me the pleasure to go and discover another Africa, Asia and find myself once more in the colonial world, with my favourite theme: gaining experience of oneself in the face of difference. The two lines, the same haunting themes are at the centre of my next movie “Seven Years in Tibet”. This is the adventure of a young, cold hearted Austrian who, during the Second World War, becomes lost in the high valleys of Himalayas but finds his soul.

Jean-Jacques Annaud, June 1996

Un Prophete

This coming of age, or coming into oneself, film is perhaps simply a mechanism whereby the film creators could give some critiques of French society by showing the epitomy of deviance--a prison.  Simply put, Malik is a prophet in the sense that he is the precurser of the kind of invididuals who will succeed in a system that is not intended for him to succeed in the way he did. In other words, he learned how to be a  good, effective deviant in French society, and he taps into a larger network of deviants who are predominantly Muslim (or from traditionally muslim areas). 

Pepe le Moko and Casque D'Or

In "Pépé le Moko or the Impossibility of being French in the 1930's, Martin O'Shaughnessy uses an interesting analytical framework to show how the film Pépé le Moko helps remind us that, "A forward and outward-looking, civilizing, modern, virile power and an ageing, decrepit, introspective and xenophobic nation just would not gel"  In particular, he says the tensions are worked out in the arenas of national identity, the formation and/or sense of community, and in gender.  

Nowhere is this seen clearer than in the figure of Slimane--the potential antagonist or protagonist of the film, depending on how one might see the right way to work out the French empire (even if it was in the Third Republic, the colonial agenda was strong and running in Algeria).

The Inspector Slimane proves his value as an good French national loyalist by patiently working to capture a clear enemy of the state--a bank robber.   Similarly, his style of integration in the Casbah might suggest the French national apparatus can work with diverse cultural players in diverse settings to bring these diverse communities in line with French national principles. Finally, his recognition that females (Inés and Gaby) held more power than they were formally granted tilts the balance toward including women within "The Republic" (i.e. French national identity).

Of course, another side (with some supporting points brought out in O'Shaughnessy's piece) is that he was devisive and took advantage of characters stuck in a liminal state (no fixed identity).

The popularity of the movie is because he can conveniently serve both audiences (those that see him as a protaganist and those who  seem him as an antagonist).