Le cinéma au village : les beaux jours du cinéma ambulant dans les années 1950

Authors

Odile Goerg, Université de Paris

Abstract

Travelling by cart, but more often by train and later by automobile, films reached small towns and large villages alike. Travelling pictures were the first - and often the only - means of access to cinema for much of the African continent. They made it possible to reach the countryside, albeit randomly and sporadically.

To analyse the development of travelling pictures during the late colonial period, this article emphasises commercial, for-profit ventures rather than official, government-sponsored tours playing educational and propaganda films - though the line between the two was often blurred. Whether they functioned autonomously or were tied to brick-and-mortar cinemas, travelling pictures drew from the same pool of films that were offered by distributors. How could moviegoers, in such conditions of scarcity, express their desires? How did they become an audience and promote their own tastes in cinema and social practices tied to this new mode of leisure that transported them out of their everyday world? The sources used to answer these questions are sparse but sometimes rich: official archives, oral testimonies, private documents, iconography ... This article is partly based on the private archives of Jean-Paul Sivadier, a travelling entrepreneur between 1956 and 1959 based out of Bamako.

Recommended Citation

Goerg, Odile (2020) "Le cinéma au village : les beaux jours du cinéma ambulant dans les années 1950," Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature: Vol. 95: No. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://crossworks.holycross.edu/pf/vol95/iss1/4