Monday, January 31, 2011

L'Esclave blanc

Brigitte Berg, a special guest at the DocPoint festival last week, left a valuable gift of dvd's published by Les Documents Cinématographiques.

L'Esclave blanc / Jungla nera / [not released in Finland]. FR/IT 1934. D: Jean-Paul Paulin. 77 min. English subtitles. - Bonus: - Bande annonce du film. - Jean-Paul Paulin, par son fils Jean-Claude Paulin. - Henri de Monfreid, par son petit-fils Guillaume de Monfreid. - Leçons d'Oxford, par Michaël Abecassis et Berny Sèbe. - L'Homme ensablé / Stranded, la version de Carl Th. Dreyer mise en images par Denis Scoupe, 38 min. - Marco Dolcetta: La canzonetta à l'ère fasciste, et quatre chansons: Facetta nera, La morettina, Africanina, La piccinina. - Avec le soutien du CNC et de DFI. © 2005 Les Documents Cinématographiques. Dvd viewed at home, in Helsinki, 31 Jan 2011
A colonial film shot in the Italian Somalia. The daughter of the plantation owner falls in love with the young farm manager, but papa is against it. The young man escapes with a Somali woman, who works her magic spell to make him her "white slave". - Beautiful definition of light in this colonial story, certainly offensive, and now a document of the attitudes of the time. - Fascinatingly, Carl Th. Dreyer worked with an early version of the story, L'Homme ensablé, here reconstructed via animated and sonorized drawings. - The attraction of this film may have been the sense of earthly paradise in the escapade of the young lovers (the black woman and the white man).

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