Matthias De Groof, ‘Statues Also Die - But Their Death is not the Final Word’, Image [&] Narrative, 11:1 (2010) (special issue on Chris Marker)
'The spectator’s gaze is further altered as he becomes a traveller into a voyage, "to a country where one goes by losing one’s memory" (vo). When he, the traveller-spectator, leaves European shrines of African statues deprived from their cultual context and assimilated through museologization, he is firstly brought in touch with different maps of Africa. The variety of maps depicting each in a different way the very same continent does not only show the relativity of all representation and hence the historicity of them (and also of the film). It also gives back what Africa is deprived of; namely history. To counter the idea in which – according to for instance Hegel in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte – Africa is a continent without history, Les Statues gives a graphic insight of Africa’s evolution by showing its shape on the map slowly unravelling through the 11th, 12th, 15th and 17th century. This all proceeds from a map depicting Africa as "the fetus of the world" (vo) or "le nombril du monde" as Sartre puts it, the origin of the homo sapiens and archè of culture, which constitutes a ‘common ground’ for humanism to which Marker refers at the dénouement of the film.'
Matthias De Groof, ‘Statues Also Die - But Their Death is not the Final Word’, Image [&] Narrative, 11:1 (2010) (special issue on Chris Marker)
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