Les Statues meurent aussi (1953)
Directed by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais

Film Review

Les Statues meurent aussi (a.k.a. Statues Also Die) is an early example of the 'essay film' which serves as both a critique of colonialism (at a time when French colonialism was already unravelling) and a discussion as to whether art (principally African sculpture) continues to have meaning once the civilisation that created it has ceased to be.  On the face of it, it seems odd that two such seemingly unrelated themes as these should be brought together in one short (thirty minute long) film and one of the objections that can legitimately be made against the film is that it fails to accomplish this.  What begins as a considered piece about the durability of art concludes as a somewhat vague assault on colonialism and western capitalism.  The film was critically acclaimed on its initial release, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1954, but the anti-colonialist tone of its final reel inflamed the state censors and led it to be excised.  The film was not seen in France in its full version until 1963.

For a short film, Les Statues meurent aussi had an unusually long production period - in fact it took over three years to complete.   It was in 1950 that Alain Resnais was first approached by Alioune Diop, the founding director of the African cultural magazine Présence Africaine, to make a film about African sculpture.  Resnais was some years away from making his first feature but had already garnered considerable critical acclaim for a series of much-lauded short films, including Guernica (1950), a meditation on the most famous atrocity of the Spanish Civil War.  Having secured additional funding from the small film company Tadié Cinéma Production, Resnais invited Chris Marker, another up-and-coming filmmaker, to collaborate with him on their first film together, along with Ghislain Cloquet, a distinguished cinematographer who worked on many notable films, including Jacques Becker's Le Trou (1960) and Louis Malle's Le Feu follet (1963). 

It was conceivably through the influence of the politically active Marker that Resnais extended the scope of the film to include anti-colonialist themes.  This was both an artistic and a commercial error of judgement.  Artistically, the anti-colonialist tirade which makes up the third reel of the film sits ill alongside the considered philosophical musings of the first two reels.  Les Statues meurent aussi feels like two disparate films that have been spliced together - it just does not gel as a single film.  Commercially, by playing the anti-colonialist card so strongly the film's authors were inviting trouble.  With France struggling to hold onto its remaining colonies, the French government had a zero-tolerance approach to criticism of this kind and any film that had so much as a whisper of a hint of an anti-colonialist subtext was summarily censored. 

By insisting on the removal of the third reel of the film, the censors were actually doing Resnais and Marker a favour, restoring some measure of coherence to a film which they had botched by going off at a platitudinous tangent to pillory the West's evil exploitation of Africa.  It is hard to watch this final part of the film today without cringing all the way through.  The greedy, philistinic West is lambasted for the way it has impoverished African culture and exploited its people.  Resnais and Marker's arguments are broadly valid but require far more space than they give them to make anything resembling a coherent thesis.  Viewed today, their supposedly pro-Africa stance comes across as intellectually hollow and a tad paternalistic.  Nothing dates faster than the political posturing of the morally indignant bourgeois intellectual.

By contrast, the first two reels of Les Statues meurent aussi are as beguiling as anything else which Resnais and Marker put their names to.  A haunting montage of African cultural artefacts pass before our eyes, inviting us, even daring us, to make an emotional connection with them as the voiceover narration questions the extent to which these objects can have any intrinsic value when the societies that created them no longer exist.  The meaning attached to these artefacts is no longer known to us, and without meaning they are surely dead, the crumbling detritus of a past civilisation,  The failure of memory to withstand the ravages of time is a theme that would become central to the oeuvre of Alain Resnais, memory being the thing that defines who we are and our relationship with the world.  As the camera lens caresses the weird and wonderful relics of bygone centuries we cannot help but experience a profound sense of loss, an awareness of not only our own mortality but also the transience of entire civilisations.  Nothing endures.

Film Synopsis

Today when we see an African sculpture made in a previous century we are likely to be fascinated by it, perhaps mesmerised by its unfamiliar exotic beauty.  We naturally regard it as a work of art, and if it has any deeper cultural significance this is lost to us.  Those who created these amazing objects have long departed, and with their passing all knowledge of the objects' purpose has ceased to be.  The sculptures are, in this sense, as dead as the people who created them.  They may once have had a profound religious or social significance, but this we can no longer divine.  All we have is a relic of the past.  Like the fossil of a prehistoric animal, its nature as a living entity is something we can never know, only speculate about.

Maybe our inability to correctly interpret African sculpture is just one more symptom of the divide that still exists between the materialistic West and ancient cultures of Africa?  The countries of Europe have imposed themselves on the underdeveloped regions of the Dark Continent for centuries, but in return they have learned nothing of the traditions that are surely as old as Man.  All that we have left are the flesh-stripped bones of a forgotten culture.  At one time these enigmatic statues were alive, but now they are dead.  We - blind, ignorant scavengers - look upon them as mere art, ornaments to adorn our soulless museums and the cluttered apartments of the pretentious rich...