Silent Africa: Narrative, Power, and Invisibility in French Colonial Cinema

This article shows how French colonial cinema, by concealing its civilizing mission or evoking a humanist discourse, contributed to the imaginary of racialized Africa within a hierarchical configuration. Although these productions claim to be educational, they perpetuate a distorted portrait of the continent in which Africa is reduced to an immobile backdrop and Africans to voiceless and inactive roles. Drawing on a documentary content analysis of colonial cinematographic works from the 1920s to the 1960s and semi-structured interviews with sixteen art doctoral students at the Félix Houphouët-Boigny University, this qualitative sophrological communication has an educational perspective. The thematic content analysis, illustrated to the point of saturation, reveals three transversal logics: the dramatization of otherness, the description of the colonial hierarchy, and the actantialization of the subaltern voice. The article aims to promote a manipulated reading of these visual works to foster a racialized historical consciousness.