Hunting images: sub-Saharan Africa in early French cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholars of French cinema have paid little attention to early non-fiction films, particularly those shot in colonised spaces. Yet cameramen sponsored by major French cinema companies appeared in North Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century and south of the Sahara as early as 1906, eager to record images of newly conquered lands. This essay examines the first French films shot in West and Central Africa, from panoramas and views to travel to hunting narratives, with a particular focus on the career of self-proclaimed chasseur d’images [‘image-hunter’] Alfred Machin. Early cinema advertised France’s colonies to the metropole as, within a decade, sensationalised ethnography became tightly bound to propaganda for empire.