Ceremonial Dahomey: The Cinema of Francis Aupiais.
Maisonneuve & Larose/Hemispheres| N° d'inventaire | 30961 |
| Format | 15.7 x 23.7 |
| Détails | 184 p., numerous black and white photographs, paperback. |
| Publication | Paris, 2024 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782377011803 |
Filmed in Dahomey (present-day Benin) in 1930 by missionary and ethnologist Francis Aupiais with his cameraman Frédéric Gadmer, as part of the Archives de la Planète program created by businessman Albert Kahn, the two film collections "Christian Dahomey" and "Religious Dahomey" clearly distinguish between the rituals of a "pagan" world and those of a world in the process of Christianization. By bringing these two bodies of work into dialogue, Gaetano Ciarcia examines a history of African conversion in a colonial situation.
For Aupiais, Vodun ceremonies are the traces of a lost monotheistic revelation that the evangelizing enterprise aims to regenerate. His cinematic depictions of local religious life and the festivals of Saint Joan of Arc or Epiphany are analyzed here as archives of power relations, but also of the utopia of a "new ancient world," both "traditional" and a Catholic territory of the French empire.
Through its ambiguous recognition of the moral and aesthetic qualities of Dahomean folk customs, Aupiais's work presages the advent of a heritage imaginary of vodun in Benin. Following ethnographic research carried out between 2005 and 2012, the last part of this book is devoted to the "post-Aupiais": a genealogy ranging from the writings and images authored by the missionary and other ethnologists to the contemporary institution of vodun cults as supports of a cultural memory.
Filmed in Dahomey (present-day Benin) in 1930 by missionary and ethnologist Francis Aupiais with his cameraman Frédéric Gadmer, as part of the Archives de la Planète program created by businessman Albert Kahn, the two film collections "Christian Dahomey" and "Religious Dahomey" clearly distinguish between the rituals of a "pagan" world and those of a world in the process of Christianization. By bringing these two bodies of work into dialogue, Gaetano Ciarcia examines a history of African conversion in a colonial situation.
For Aupiais, Vodun ceremonies are the traces of a lost monotheistic revelation that the evangelizing enterprise aims to regenerate. His cinematic depictions of local religious life and the festivals of Saint Joan of Arc or Epiphany are analyzed here as archives of power relations, but also of the utopia of a "new ancient world," both "traditional" and a Catholic territory of the French empire.
Through its ambiguous recognition of the moral and aesthetic qualities of Dahomean folk customs, Aupiais's work presages the advent of a heritage imaginary of vodun in Benin. Following ethnographic research carried out between 2005 and 2012, the last part of this book is devoted to the "post-Aupiais": a genealogy ranging from the writings and images authored by the missionary and other ethnologists to the contemporary institution of vodun cults as supports of a cultural memory.