Both in advertising and in cinema, washing powder washes away the black. The opposition between the savage or dirty Black and the civilized White has subsequently been taken over in advertisements – with the use, for example, of symbolic contrasts between white and black cats – or in Michael Jackson videos. Today the colonial image of the black man continues to characterize white mental projections, revealing a profoundly racist unconscious that began in colonial films and survives in current advertisements. Africa is merely a backdrop and the African is an animal. An exotic approach is inevitably superior and reductive. I also recognize myself in him and accept myself the more’.įor 35 years, African filmmakers have rejected the dual Western gaze with its opposing components of abject poverty and exoticism.Ĭolonial cinema fed the European audience’s appetite for fantasy, escape and exoticism with picturesque, sensational material. However, in order for solidarity to be able to assert itself, writes Claude Liauzu, ‘not only do you have to recognize part of yourself in the Other, but you have to recognize a part of the Other in yourself.’įor the Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, this is what is fundamental in the cineaste’s gaze: ‘When I approach the people I want to film, I have in me a confusion which is gradually cleared up: what I lack I find in the Other, and I take it. Upon what imaged, what gaze, is solidarity to be established? If the Other is wretched, troubling or exotic, he remains external to me – alien. Yet an excess of footage which is too painful to watch in the end breeds indifference. With no camera to film it, suffering does not become a media phenomenon. It was only when they were integrated, and therefore less threatening, that black people were able to acquire a more familiar image: they gradually came to be regarded as a decorative element of folklore. The requisite imagery for enslaving Blacks was in place. The great majority of literature in this early period of discovery associated these men with darkness and evil, with the forces of the night and the underworld. On its southern fringe, in Africa, Ethiopia was the general name given to the land of the ‘men with burnt faces’. Before the great fifteenth century voyages of discovery, Europe regarded itself as the centre of the world. The rejection of the Black goes back to the Middle Ages, and forms the basis of the current dual Western mode of seeing. The following summarizes the discussion of the Western Gaze and its influence in and on Africa in Olivier Bartlet in “African Cinemas – Decolonizing the Gaze” (Zed Books, London, 2000). They film wild animals with more respect! This White cinema shows Africans as not belong to the human community. We know the camera can give a positive image of human beings. They came to show us to their audiences as though we were animals. Those who came to film us never showed the people here as human beings. The Malian film director Souleymane Cisse made the following statement about Western filmmakers and Africa: Decolonizing the Gaze: Human Beings, Not Ants!