By Jean-Paul Paulin (1934)
With Georges Rigaud, Jeanette Ferney, Fai, Egisto Olivieri, Nur, Dig Dor
Versions :
Original French with English subtitles
In Italian Somalia in 1934, a powerful colonist is running a vast estate with many indigenous workers. He is helped in this endeavour by a young, energetic and well-liked overseer.
The daughter of the colonist arrives: she had been left in their home country ten years earlier and this beautiful, innocent young woman is now eager to get to know a romantic Africa, full of exotic animals and human beings with strange and delightfully primitive customs.
The young people soon fall in love, but the landowner vehemently rejects the misalliance.
The young overseer leaves to find consolation with a beautiful native woman, but the tribe and her husband strongly and tragically oppose this.
The film is a chronicle of colonial experience, and also one of the first to show the public something of the age of little-known lands. We can imagine ourselves in the world of the contemporary viewer, as Henri de Monfreid, the adventurer and novelist, invites us to do in the preface to the film.
The making of “L’Esclave blanc” itself is also a remarkable story, offering a cinematic experience as well as a glimpse of a chapter of colonial history.
To relate the story, a collection of exceptionally rich bonus material has been put together and released with this DVD.
Most notable among these is the animation of the screenplay and the shooting script written for the film by Carl. Th. Dreyer. The great Danish director was the first to be approached to make the film.
The project has its origins in a journey made to Somalia by Ernesto Quadrone, a journalist from La Stampa de Turin which was covering Italian colonial developments in the Horn of Africa where the Italians were preparing an offensive to reestablish their basis in the region. A French-Italian coproduction started up. Collaboration proved, however, to be intolerable for Dreyer when the society lady, Lady Abdy, was brought in in the role of the only white woman in the film. Dreyer resigned after spending four months in Somalia putting together a very thorough screenplay - “L’homme ensablé” – the filming of which had begun. (The complete story is related on the film’s website.)
In tribute to Dreyer, the screenplay is brought to life as a forty-minute animation, with more than 300 drawings and a soundtrack of the actual dialogues created by Dreyer. The drawings are by Denis Scoupe, who also supervised the filming, with meticulous respect for the Danish director as he is visible through the dialogues and hand-written annotations. The differences between Dreyer’s vision and the film in its final form are striking. In Dreyer’s version, the source of the clash is not the overseer’s love for the colonist’s daughter – indeed the colonist is fairly happy about this - but rather the overseer’s attitude to the indigenous people, too soft and sympathetic an attitude for the colonist. The overseer comes close to saying “white men, let’s go and leave the black men to their land”.
Dreyer also vividly describes “urinary sand”, a condition to which white men are susceptible, owing to the climate, the easy way of life and the lasciviousness of the native women…
“L’esclave blanc” is also rare in being a French colonial film, and it is important to consider it in the context of an unashamed colonial quest, firm in a belief in the civilising mission of Europe, the superiority of white men, and their right to control the people of Africa.
The DVD bonus features gather together interviews describing the context of the time and providing a key for understanding it:
Bonuses :
· Film trailer
· “JEAN-PAUL PAULIN” by his son Jean-Claude Paulin. An interview with Jean-Claude Paulin, who talks about the film-maker Jean-Paul Paulin, the place of the film in his work, and also relates the experience of making the film itself.
· “HENRI DE MONFREID” by his grandson Guillaume de Monfreid. An interview with Guillaume de MONFREID which places the film in the world of Henri de Monfreid, the adventurer, writer and controversial hero of France in Africa, who was a sort of patron to the film.
· “Leçons d’Oxford” by Michaël ABECASSIS and Berny SEBE. A 30 minute interview with Michaël ABECASSIS and Berny SEBE, two French researchers at the University of Oxford whose discussion dissects the film and its ideological premises.
· “L’HOMME ENSABLÉ” - Carl Th. DREYER’s version, brought to life by Denis Scoupe. Denis Scoupe has taken as his starting point Carl Th. DREYER’s original and very detailed screenplay, written in French between March and June 1934 in Italian Somalia. Denis Scoupe has hand-drawn around 350 scenes, and these have been edited, dubbed and partly animated.
· “MARCO DOLCETTA: la canzonetta à l’ère fasciste”, and four songs: “Facetta Nera”, “La Morettina”, “Africanina”, “La Piccinina”. An interview with the Italian historian, Marco DOLCETTA, who talks about songs of the fascist period: the film is also a Franco-Italian production and the original screenplay had the ulterior motive of supporting Mussolini’s colonial experiences in Somalia. The interview is illustrated with a few songs of the time (with translation), which give an idyllic picture of an enterprise which was catastrophic from both the moral and the military perspectives.