Afrique sur Seine is our prologue. Because it allows us to remember, thirty years after his death, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, the first African graduate of Sadoul and Mitry’s IDHEC, a film history pioneer and enlightened documentarist.

Because it was the first film by a Sub-Saharan director that explores the diaspora and ‘African presence’ in Paris, a decade before Sembène and Hondo brought the damnation of the French Riviera and the alienation of the French capital to the screen.

Because Afrique sur Seine, this ‘small inverted ethnographic essay film’, was the first to have prodded African cinema into more difficult and contentious terrain. As Manthia Diawara reminds us, it was a time when the French government directly implemented for the first time the Laval Decree, which had been issued in 1934 to prevent the creation of African cinema and stifle perspectives on colonialism. The first film that paid the price was Afrique 50, clandestinely shot in Ivory Coast by René Vautier. Almost at the same time that Vieyra was denied authorization for filming in Senegal, Les Statues meurent aussi was censored. Resnais and Marker’s film fiercely denounced the alteration of African artistic and cultural heritage. “Cinema has enormous responsibilities in our land”, wrote Vieyra, “it is the blackboard for writing the visible signs of our knowledge. The illustrated book of entertainment. The journey that will make us understand the world. It will preserve our arts when its initiates will no longer be an extension of a living museum, it will be our library. Cinema will be our everyday journal”.

Cecilia Cenciarelli