Salle de Cinema – Rokhaya Diallo

Cinema at its beginning was of course an incredible way of creating, but it was also a tool of propaganda. It was settled on the basis of white supremacy. The history of cinema and film is deeply rooted in the history of the colonial expansion of Europe. It really happened at the time when it was very important for Europe to settle its supremacy and to display it with images and film. And it was shared in the collective imagination of the Europeans that they had that superiority over the other continents. So it was very natural to the people that made the first images of cinema to display the world the way they thought about it. Many of the first images of films were images that were meant—even if it was not consciously—to feed the propaganda of Europe, the colonial propaganda, being the center of the world and being the only continent able to see the others as being inferior.

Cinema is intertwined with the history of theater in France. Since the 16th century, there has been a representation of non-white people on stage. This shows that there’s been an interest of French people for the world, of course, but also for this subject matter of race and politics. It’s not something new and it continued after and with the history of theater, with the arrival of cinema.

As a French Black actress of West African origin, I’ve often heard that we have to be patient. We have to wait until the French society is ready to have a representation that is not only white. And when I look back to this time, I have the feeling that we, as French people, no matter where we come from, we have the same legacy. And this legacy is made of métissage. It’s made of this multiplicity of the French society. We didn’t arrive two decades ago with the waves of immigration. We’ve been there for a long time. Métissage is not only about mixed races. It’s not biological only. To me, it’s about a new culture that is constantly evolving because there’s such a mix of different people, different cultures that it doesn’t become one culture forever

What is interesting is that in the history of film, and the amount of films from the 20th century and from the 19th century that are available today tell a one-sided history. There is a whole part of humanity that is not given the opportunity to see themselves in film, and who cannot understand their own history through cinema, because they weren’t given the opportunity to make the images themselves. They see themselves and their ancestors and their grandparents depicted as savages, as people who don’t have a voice, people who are filmed like animals, people who are exoticized and who are part of the colonial narratives. Once there have been filmmakers from other countries, from the colonial countries, we have been able to start seeing people from the colonies owning their own narrative. It was, for example, very important during the Algerian revolution, when people from Algeria fought the French who colonized them, because they were supported by French filmmakers who gave them the tools to tell about their revolutions from their perspectives.

Cinema is intertwined with the history of theater in France. Since the 16th century, there has been a representation of non-white people on stage. This shows that there’s been an interest of French people for the world, of course, but also for this subject matter of race and politics. It’s not something new and it continued after and with the history of theater, with the arrival of cinema.

As a French Black actress of West African origin, I’ve often heard that we have to be patient. We have to wait until the French society is ready to have a representation that is not only white. And when I look back to this time, I have the feeling that we, as French people, no matter where we come from, we have the same legacy. And this legacy is made of métissage. It’s made of this multiplicity of the French society. We didn’t arrive two decades ago with the waves of immigration. We’ve been there for a long time. Métissage is not only about mixed races. It’s not biological only. To me, it’s about a new culture that is constantly evolving because there’s such a mix of different people, different cultures that it doesn’t become one culture forever

It’s very interesting as a filmmaker to work on the lighting of skins that are not white. So as a filmmaker, for me, it’s very important to make sure I work with people who will be able to film all the ranges of skin tones.

My work as a filmmaker is also to put the margins into the center and just to displace the camera, to film people that you don’t usually see, to have them voice their concerns in their own terms. Not filming them as someone who is above them and who is trying to translate what they say for people who are in positions of dominance, but to tell their story with their voices and actually have them teach people who usually look down to them.

Cinema is intertwined with the history of theater in France. Since the 16th century, there has been a representation of non-white people on stage. This shows that there’s been an interest of French people for the world, of course, but also for this subject matter of race and politics. It’s not something new and it continued after and with the history of theater, with the arrival of cinema.

As a French Black actress of West African origin, I’ve often heard that we have to be patient. We have to wait until the French society is ready to have a representation that is not only white. And when I look back to this time, I have the feeling that we, as French people, no matter where we come from, we have the same legacy. And this legacy is made of métissage. It’s made of this multiplicity of the French society. We didn’t arrive two decades ago with the waves of immigration. We’ve been there for a long time. Métissage is not only about mixed races. It’s not biological only. To me, it’s about a new culture that is constantly evolving because there’s such a mix of different people, different cultures that it doesn’t become one culture forever