Broken View

The colonial wound inflicted on the Congo by Leopold’s Belgian rule and the missionary activity of the Catholic Church is transformed into an evocative filmic essay, hauntingly endowed with the almost metaphysical power borne by early still and moving image devices. The stereoscope, the magical lantern, the slide, all sorts of phantasmagoric devices of cinematic prehistory that became propaganda tools for the violent civilizing of the native population according to the European model, and through which Church and State promoted to the Belgians their “noble” mission in the Congo, restore here something of the reciprocally distorted big picture. A surgically precise meditation on the most shadowy point of contact between historical event and narrative, a pertinent reminder of the power and the often unseen violence of the image and, by extension, of the ethical dimension of filmmaking.