In the early 1950s Présence Africaine made a rare venture into film production. Seeking to extend the journal's cultural reach, its founder Alouine Diop commissioned a short documentary about African art from two young directors who would go on to become major voices in French cinema: Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The result, Les Statues Meurent Aussi, exceeded its producer's expectations. The film pushed beyond a straightforward analysis of African sculpture to lead a wider-ranging investigation of historical and cultural difference. Ultimately, Marker and Resnais' thirty-minute film has proven to be one of the most eloquently powerful anti-colonialist statements of its time. This eloquence was the film's undoing: before Statues could be commercially released it was banned by government censors and could not be shown for over ten years. These complications and the attendant loss of revenue dissuaded Présence Africaine from engaging in similar projects; over fifty years later, the film remains extremely difficult to see.

This paper attempts to reopen the discussion of this seldom-mentioned work. More specifically, it concentrates on the ways in which Marker and Resnais' film articulates particular conceptions of history, aesthetics, and politics. I begin by examining how Statues interrogates what the term 'African art' means within the context of France's colonial empire. The film denounces Western attempts to institutionalize African sculpture and instead insists on this art's profound unreadability for contemporary European audiences. Secondly, I explore how this refusal of a conventional approach to relics of the past compels the work to forge an aesthetics of resistance. Taking its lead from an earlier collaboration between Jean Cocteau and photographer Pierre Jahan entitled La Mort et Les Statues, the film uses history to further a politically-engaged art of the present. Finally, this discussion of politics leads to the issue of censorship. I conclude by considering the cuts censors required before the film could be released. Understanding why this film was prohibited sheds light on the debates about national and cultural identity which have remained at the heart of film history and francophone studies.