Afrique sur Seine + Little by Little (15*) + introduction by Dr Barbara Knorpp Returning the Colonial Gaze

15 May 2018, 18:15 ,Barbican Cinema 3

In the films in this double-bill black Africans,

not white Europeans, are the explorers and the country being ‘discovered’ is France.

After decades of French filmmakers making films about African nations depicting Africans as the exotic ‘other’. here are two films in which the perspective is reversed. Black Africans lead us on a tour of Paris and investigate the bizarre customs of that strange local tribe, Parisians.

Credited as the first film made by Senegalese filmmakers, Afrique sur Seine adopts the style of contemporary ethnographic documentaries. Little by Little is a trickier proposition: a comedy, a documentary-fiction hybrid, and the work of a white French filmmaker, Jean Rouch, in collaboration with his two Nigerien stars, Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahim.

Rouch is celebrated as a revolutionary force in the field of ethnographic film, but some have argued that even the ‘shared anthropology’ he innovated cannot be extricated from colonialist assumptions and practices. We welcome Dr Barbara Knorpp to introduce the film and his legacy.