At the beginning of the 1960s, in Salisbury (now Harare), in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the government of Ian Smith hanged three black revolutionaries who had nevertheless been pardoned by the Queen of England. René Vautier, with ZAPU (Zimbabwe African Party for Unity), denounces this killing.

Expelled by the Rhodesian police (informed by the French secret services), the filmmaker shoots a film in Algeria in the form of an indictment against colonial savagery. The film was first banned in France, then authorized in 1965.

A poem written by René Vautier (under the Algerian pseudonym Férid Dendeni), read by the future Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, paintings by the South African painter Gerard Sekoto, a soundtrack offered by members of the Black Panthers in exile in Algiers (a slow funeral march composed to accompany the burial of a black man murdered during the struggle for civil rights in the United States), masks and statuettes of Negro art.

Prevented from shooting his usual direct action film, Vautier cobbles together a magnificent film poem. For once, his pan-African cinema cannot intervene in reality to try to change it: the absence of images pushes the director to re-invent and politicize the collage film of surrealist origin (for example "The Invention of world" by Michel Zimbacca, 1951). Close to the works of Santiago Álvarez, S. Sukhdev, Heynowski and Scheumann, "Le Glas" is both the logical continuation and the militant overcoming of "Statues also die" (1953, by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais).

Federico Rossin
Film historian, independent programmer


Le Glas
Algeria, 1964, 6mn, NB,
Director: René Vautier (pseudonym Ferid Dendeni)
Camera: Ali Marok
Voice Over: Djibril Diop Mambety
Painting / Illustrations: Sesoto

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11368960