Diario Africano

«It is a film diary of a French traveller, in Europe, North Africa, Tunisia and Algeria. We report here only the film notes concerning Algeria, in the years 1927 and 1928.

He recorded the images with an amateur camera. Images of a few frames taken suddenly. Sometimes he edits in his diaries ‘professional’ sequences reduced to his own format, for a comparison of places and people encountered. On the outer band of the films he writes short notes of impressions by hand, as well as places and dates. Of the author we know neither his identity nor his face. He travels alone. He has no family. The newly found materials cover a period of ten years, from 1927 to 1936. These travel ‘impressions’ form an unprecedented picture of social life, as opposed to the official documentary images of the time. They are sketches, quick arabesques, moments from the ‘life as it is’ of an enchanted traveller. He retraces the ‘cultured’ itineraries of the Orientalist painters of the 19th century... Matisse, Flaubert: ‘Soon the Orient will no longer exist. We are perhaps the last contemplators'.

In May 1927 in Bou-Saada, a young mother caught with her little son in her room, placed one hand on his head and the other on her heart, frightened. In Constantina in 1928, a group of prostitutes danced around the room, in front of their house, there was a pact that their faces would not be filmed. Against a wall, in the shadows, an androgyne offers himself to the camera. From May 1928, the date on the Algiers casbah, the social, private portrait, was fixed in a day. 

The room is haunted by the veiled figures that walk through it, the ascents and descents of the steps. Everything picturesque is described there, in the movement of the clothes, the draperies à la Delacroix. The traveller's interest in the veiled women the camera tries to reveal».

(Y. Gianikian and A. Ricci Lucchi)