Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

La réforme hygiénique (mise à l’avant par la
propagande française dans la période de
l’entre-deux guerres), comme métaphore des
bienfaits de la colonisation. À partir de
quelques courts métrages didactiques
mettant en garde contre les maladies
vénériennes et vantant les vertus de la
médecine moderne, l’auteur analyse la mise
en place du discours colonialiste. Le discours
hygiéniste et l’aventure coloniale font bon
ménage. Les microbes invisibles et la
géographie sont étroitement liés.
this well-known Arab fable. French medical agency becomes not
merely the sole cure for syphilis, but it is the only way that the
fantasy of “A thousand and one nights” may live on as an imagined
state.
When Mohamed understands that the cold sore is no mere “bobo”
and walks over to the village dispensary, the film becomes the hope
that we may all return to a Rousseauesque state of nature,
uninhibited by the paralysing effects of contagious diseases produced
by “civilised life.” The arrival of French public health campaigns
implies a modernist regenerative mythology. The appearance of the
automobile, the screening of an educational film, and the
incontrovertible authority of French medical expertise all contribute
to the spectacle of modernity, which promises a form of spiritual and
social renewal as the “restoration” of a simpler life.
French interwar documentary cinema also established a vital link
between microbiological agents and geographic landscapes. Popular
demonstrations of the all-powerful microbe pioneered by the Pasteur
Institute before the First World War contributed to an emerging
visual culture of magnification and spectacle. These demonstrations
became emblems of a scientific diagnosis beyond question, justifying
a widening geographic theatre of curative action both in France and
the colonies.
Optics-of-scale
In an even shorter short-subject film entitled Trypansoma Gambiense:
Agent de la maladie du sommeil [Trypansoma Gambiense: The Agent of
Sleeping Sickness] (1924), produced by Pathé Consortium Cinéma, an
optics-of-scale demonstrates the effects and causes of sleeping
sickness. This four-minute film is composed of three basic levels of
magnification: it begins with a medium shot of an African “patient,”
followed by an extreme close-up of the tsé-tsé fly, and concludes with
a microcinematic illustration of sleeping sickness (also known as
trypanosomiases) at the cellular level, where it has infected a sample
of rat’s blood.
Within these three levels of magnification, sleeping sickness is
diagnosed as a set of typological associations. The opening shot
establishes an African context for sleeping sickness. While nothing
seems obviously wrong with an African man breathing heavily
outside of a hut, the intertitle informs us that this man is afflicted
with sleeping sickness. His medical condition is invisible, yet can be
diagnosed and even magnified. Dangling on the end of a needle, the
tsé-tsé fly is presented as a still image of glossina palpalis, a generic
entomological specimen. The film cuts from this still of the dangling
fly, to a motionless fly, superimposed on a white backdrop with its
antennae, sensor, proboscis, and stinger labelled as part of an
anatomical demonstration.
The camera then moves into the cellular universe of the microscopic
sample. At first, normal circular blood cells appear, but a further
18 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001