“We want to see their suffering, serenity, humour, even though we don’t know anything about them.”

Directors: Alain Resnais & Chris Marker
Narrator – Jean Négroni
Music – Guy Bernard

A collaborative work by Resnais and Marker, this is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. The film was banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism, and is now only available to watch in the shortened version I’ve posted here (turn on the subtitles on Youtube if you want English subtitling).

Statues Also Die traces the devastating impact of French colonialism on African art. As Resnais’ co-director, Chris Marker, stated, “We want to see their suffering, serenity, humor, even though we don’t know anything about them.” Their film shows what happens when art loses its connection to its cultural context of production. Witty, thoughtful commentary is combined with images of stark formal beauty in this outcry against the fate of an art once integral to communal life that became debased as it fell victim to the demands of a different system of knowledge and values.

From Wikipedia:

Statues Also Die (French: Les Statues meurent aussi) is a 1953 French essay film directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, about historical African art and the effects colonialism has had on how it is perceived. The film won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo. Because of its criticism of colonialism, the second half of the film was censored in France until the 1960s.

Synopsis

The film exhibits a series of sculptures, masks and other traditional art from Sub-Saharan Africa. The images are frequently set to music and cut to the music’s pace. The narrator focuses on the emotional qualities of the objects, and discusses the perception of African sculptures from a historical and contemporary European perspective. Only occasionally does the film provide the geographical origin, time period or other contextual information about the objects. The idea of a dead statue is explained as a statue which has lost its original significance and become reduced to a museum object, similarly to a dead person who can be found in history books. Interweaved with the objects are a few scenes of Africans performing traditional music and dances, as well as the death of a disemboweled gorilla.

During the last third of the film, the modern commercialisation of African culture is problematised. The film argues that colonial presence has compelled African art to lose much of its idiosyncratic expression, in order to appeal to Western consumers. A mention is made of how African currencies previously had been replaced by European. In the final segment, the film comments on the position of black Africans themselves in contemporary Europe and North America. Footage is seen from a Harlem Globetrotters basketball show, of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, and a jazz drummer intercut with scenes from a confrontation between police and labour demonstrators. Lastly the narrator argues that we should regard African and European art history as one inseparable human culture.