Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

(1) Mohamed ben Chegir with a syphilitic cold sore in Conte de
la mille et une nuits [The story of a thousand and one nights],
Jean Benoît-Lévy (1929). © Comité Français d’éducation pour
la santé.
(2) The arrival of the roulette d’hygiène [hygiene caravan] from
the Office Nationale de l’hygiène sociale [National Social
Hygiene Bureau] ibid
(3) The screening of Les maladies vénériennes [Venereal
Disease] ibid
better-known feature documentary made on another Citroën
expedition, La Traversée du Sahara en autochenilles [Crossing the Sahara
in Half-Track vehicles] (1923). The half-track vehicle (a.k.a. caterpillartread
vehicle), equipped with communications equipment and
running water for campsites, appeared as an engineering marvel of
speed and geometric efficiency to interwar audiences. In films such
as La Traversée du Sahara, La Croisière noire, and La Croisière jaune
[The Yellow Journey] (1932), the movement of these half-tracks
presents topological and geological formations analogous to
that of a patient’s body under medical observation. Their
movement across the Sahara in La Traversée du Sahara
illustrates the contours of an assimilated French geographic
body, and charts the historical itinerary of French involvement
in Algeria. The continuous imprint of the half-track treads
unifies a geographic surface while also demonstrating the
accessibility of the colonies to metropolitan France. The
presentation of La Traversée du Sahara and Le Continent
mystérieux marked the beginning of a popularised feature
documentary cinema about the French colonial presence in
Africa for French metropolitan audiences.
Educational cinema of the interwar period was a pastiche of
public health initiatives that came to depend on an emerging
spatial aesthetics, analogous to the layered quality of Pathé’s
Trypansoma Gambiense. National and regional film-lending
institutions supported the integration of cinema into the
public education system as well as public health and
agricultural assistance campaigns. The flourishing of the
educational cinema movement in France led to the creation of
a series of interdependent educational film-lending libraries,
which used variations of the same short-subject films.
Witnesses the “the geometric and mechanical splendour of
mechanical destruction” during the First World War now
became spectators to an emerging hygienic spectacle staged in
a microscopic and geographic theatre of action. As the spectre
of vast mechanical destruction lies beyond the scope of
individual casualties, the microbiological realm defines a
world beyond the mental and physical state of the patient.
From a patient’s body to a microscopic sample or a geographic
landscape, curative agency is precisely the capacity to
penetrate the body, to see beyond the limitations of human
sight, to interpret and define parameters for action.
Itto as educational demonstration
Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein produced roughly 300
short-subject films serving the cause of public health during the
interwar period. Marie Epstein’s collaboration with Benoît-Lévy began
when he commissioned her brother, Jean Epstein, to direct his first
film, Pasteur (1922), commemorating the centenary of Louis Pasteur’s
birth. Benoît-Lévy was part of a cadre of medical activists committed
20 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001