Documentary Objectives

For over a century, filmmakers have been shooting documentaries in West and Central Africa, a region that included the colonies of French West and Equatorial Africa and now encompasses fourteen nations and nearly 200 million people. Their work merits consideration for its contribution not only to global cinema but also to our understanding of documentary itself, yet it has been largely ignored by scholars of both nonfiction film and African film. Documentary Objectives addresses this neglect by offering a rich history of documentary in this region from its beginnings in 1906 to the present. Relying on extensive archival research, author Rachel Gabara provides an overview of French colonial documentary shot in sub-Saharan Africa, tracing fifty years of propaganda-infused travel, hunting, expedition, and ethnographic films. Following independence, African directors worked to reclaim their cinematic image from their former colonizers by challenging outsider claims to authenticity and developing new models for nonfiction film. Starting with the innovations of the early decades that have now been virtually forgotten, Gabara concludes with those of a new generation of documentarists whose work has gained greater attention from audiences and critics on the continent and internationally. Across a dynamic range of modes, from essays to observational films and in French and a range of African languages, they continue to transform the simplistic language of realism on which colonial documentary relied. By recounting a history of nonfiction film in which Europe and Africa were inextricably linked, Documentary Objectives brings together traditions that have been both marginalized and kept apart, charting new ground in the disciplines of Film Studies, African Studies, and French and Francophone Studies.