Acting as solemn witnesses before history, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, together with cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet give us an almost erotic and impertinent take on ‘l’Art nègre’ (Negro Art); on the beauty of the pieces and their place in African culture as it spins into decline in face of French colonial policies and irresponsible European influence in general. The film was censored for ten years on account of the overt criticism of French colonial attitudes which comes in the last part. Les Statues meurent aussi is also a montage film of unparalleled elegance, that benefits from remarkable film lighting and offers a hypnotic and formal approach to filmmaking. The directors film the dark, carved wood of intriguing African artworks, the last relics of forgotten civilizations and traditions, in shadow, as they will come to film men’s faces and flesh later on.

Présence Africaine, a collective established by Alioune Diop, commissioned Alain Resnais and Chris Marker to make a documentary film about ‘L’Art nègre’, a relatively new and scandalous concept in the early 1950s. For years, imperial powers had considered that African peoples had shown themselves incapable of entering into a creative process. […]

Alain Resnais, who had already made Van Gogh and Guernica, observed that, in Paris,‘L’Art nègre’ was relegated to the Musée de l’Homme and not shown at the Louvre, thus underlining its ethnographic rather than its artistic status. Clearly, even where conservation and promotion are concerned, traces of racism and contempt categorize artforms according to origin. In this context, there could be no way of understanding and truly valuing African sculpture, that embodied complex and uncertain oral traditions.

The two directors raise precisely these issues, the nature of African art and the place of art in museums. […] African art sits in a particular space between life and death. Their film focuses on this idea, which comes to haunt our vision, for formal, historical and indeed political reasons. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker choose to consider what they call ‘the botany of death’ in order to make us understand our responsibility as members of a colonial order that holds men, land and culture for nothing. The film sounds the alarm about our irretrievable blindness and urges a raising of consciousness by speaking, with considerable optimism for its time, of equality between black people and white people.

Hervé Pichard