The thought for this movie started when a good friend was planning an exhibition that includes Congolese paintings. She was contemplating together with the documentary “Underneath the Black Masks” (1958), by the Belgian filmmaker Paul Haesaerts, however was not sure methods to current the piece, which comprises voice-over and pictures that stereotype and exoticize Congolese tradition. How might we adequately contextualize a piece by a filmmaker from Belgium created within the ultimate years of that nation’s decades-long, brutal colonial occupation of what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo?
Even when the unique movie have been introduced with commentary, such critique usually seems offscreen, solely obtainable to those that select to or are capable of search it out. I steered that we as a substitute create a brand new movie that will reframe the unique imagery.
I started by deciding on photographs from “Underneath the Black Masks” that gave me the sensation that the masks confronted me straight, permitting them to momentarily escape Haesaerts’ body. What would these photographs have mentioned if they’d a voice? We determined to interchange the narration with excerpts from Aimé Césaire’s seminal work “Discourse on Colonialism,” which argued that colonization dehumanizes the colonizer and was printed lower than a decade earlier than the unique movie was made. It was a textual content I had carried near my coronary heart for a few years.
We translated Césaire’s textual content into Lingala, a language spoken in Congo, and the brand new voice-over was carried out by Maravilha Munto, a younger slam poet who spontaneously linked with the phrases written three generations earlier. The result’s this brief documentary, which I discuss with as “the movie that Haesaerts might have made.”
