Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, 1953)
Les Maîtres fous (Jean Rouch, 1954)

“When men die, they become History. When statues die, they become Art. This botany of death is what we refer to as culture.” Chris Marker and Alain Resnais's Statues Also Die (27 mins, B&W) deals with the nature of African art-its sacred world of objects-and the efforts of Europeans to shape African art in their own image. A profoundly humanistic film, it was banned for eight years, finally appearing in a truncated version. Jean Rouch was a pioneer of direct cinema who believed that the only effective ethnological research is that to which the group being studied also contributes. He made over seventy films in West Africa. Les Maîtres fous (The Mad Priests, 36 mins, Color) documents a ceremony of the Haouka sect in Ghana whose participants enter into a trance and play out roles, not of gods, but of figures of colonial power. A dog is sacrificed, its blood is drunk. The next day, they are all back at work at the market or on city construction sites. Responding to criticism from Africans to this film, Rouch began to experiment with new forms that acknowledged his own subjectivity.