‘Things’

This chapter focuses on the 1953 film Les Statues meurent aussi by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The film was commissioned by Présence Africaine, the publisher and academic journal, which would radically transform France’s post-war intellectual landscape and pave the way for a wholesale reassessment of the relationship between Africa and the West in the arts, literature, the human sciences and philosophy. Les Statues, which is analysed here to ascertain how, in a given present, the temporal dimensions of past and future are related, resonates with the main concerns of this period: it embraces its ethno-philosophical mood, bemoans the commodification of African art in European museums, calls for the establishment of a new humanism but also militates for a more equitable and post-racial world order. The documentary, and the mournful discussion that it conducts on the imminent death of African art, is appraised against a set of viewpoints by Placide Tempels (La Philosophie bantoue) Cheikh Anta Diop (L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire), Georges Balandier (‘Arts perdus’), and VY Mudimbe (‘Reprendre’). The chapter also examines the long-term legacy of Les Statues and considers the response to it by the Irish video artist Duncan Campbell in It for Others.