The Niger River on Three Screens: Visual Echoes of Colonial Film Censorship in 1950s African and French Cinema

The Niger River on Three Screens: Visual Echoes of Colonial Film Censorship in 1950s African and French Cinema
2026-04-22 21:00 - 22:00 UTC | Barker Center, Room 133
In the 1950s, strikingly similar images of children playing in the Niger River appeared in three groundbreaking films: René Vautier’s banned Afrique 50 (1950), Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Groupe Africain du Cinéma’s Afrique sur Seine (1955), and Jean Rouch’s prize-winning Moi, un Noir (1958). These recurring images reveal the influence of the 1934 Laval Decree, which strictly controlled who could film what in French West Africa. The Decree determined not only which films could be made but also shaped their form and content in unexpected ways. This talk traces how this river footage flowed between the three films, accompanied by different voice-overs that transformed its meaning depending on who narrated the images. Following these visual ripples shows how colonial censorship operated across multiple registers. Drawing on administrative archives from the Comité du film ethnographique, the filmmakers’ own writings, and close formal analysis, this talk illuminates the institutional networks and personal connections among Vautier, Vieyra, and Rouch. It demonstrates how legal restrictions shaped both African and French cinema in the decade preceding decolonization, creating the conditions for (and limits of) African self-representation while leaving traces even in films that seemed immune to colonial censorship.

About the speaker

Laure Astourian is Associate Professor of French at Bentley University and a 2025-2026 Visiting Scholar at Harvard University (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures). Her primary research focus is French and Francophone cinema and television of the 1950s and 1960s. She is the author of The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema (Indiana UP, 2024), which explores the significant ties between colonial ethnography and innovative works of 1960s French cinema. The book probes the emergence of a self-aware urban French ethnography in both fictional and documentary films during the era of decolonization and offers fresh readings of canonical films including Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch, 1958), La jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), and Muriel ou le Temps d’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963).
