Les Statues Meurent Aussi - A Multi-Stable Image of Animism

“An object dies when the living glance placed upon it disappears.”

Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die)(1953)is a film essay by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais featured in the exhibition Animism at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt of 2012, curated by Anselm Franke. Marker and Resnais explore the shifted identity of ‘Tribal Art’ from Africa once it is removed from its context- spiritual, cultural, geographic – and placed in the mausoleum of the museum. It also charts the trajectory of African artifacts to their new origin as products created for (and by) the colonial gaze.

Statues Also Die is an early example of Marker’s use of montage that would come to characterize his filmmaking in later works such as La Jetee and Sans Soleil.  The first two-thirds of the film mainly alternate between still footage of mask, sculptures, etc. in dramatic chiaroscuro and slow panning across the surfaces of various African objects. The drifting, meditative transitions contrast with quick jump cuts, moving in concert with the score and non-diagetic narration. These scenes serve to fix the viewer’s gaze for prescribed durations, providing an alternative way of seeing through the animation of objects provided by film. With this apparatus in mind, in the final third of the film Marker and Resnais bring the colonial critique to full tilt. After twenty minutes of conditioned observation, the viewer is confronted with images of the colonial landscape, populated by European influence in both the shaping of culture and the production of objects for western consumption, perverting the integrity of both. “Black Art becomes a dead language and that which is born over its death is the jargon of decadence.”  The location of the film then shifts from Africa back to the west by way of an elegant equivalence – footage of a camel race cuts to an Olympic hurdling competition. “We pay the blacks to give us the comedy of their joy and their fervor. In this way, by the side of the black slave, appears a second figure, the black puppet. His strength serves us, his prowess amuses us, on this side he serves us as well. Nations which are endowed with racist traditions find it all the more natural to trust to men of color the concern for the nation’s Olympic games. But a moving black is still black art.” Footage of the Harlem Globe Trotters moves to a woven montage of boxing, street demonstrations and jazz drumming. The film closes by coming full circle to an exhibition of African masks. “…there is no rupture between black civilization and ours. The faces of black art fell off from the same human face, like the serpent’s skin.”

In Animism: Notes on an Exhibition, Anselm Franke asserts, “[…]Treat animism not as a matter of belief, but rather as a boundary-making practice. […]Animism was always imagined in terms of the absence of those distinctions on which modernity rests.” The final scene of Statues Also Die evokes this definition of animism when the narrator states that all art is shed from the same source. The film also posits that statues die when they are classified and catalogued in the history of art “where the most mysterious relationships are established.” Greece, Japan, and India can all be found in the form and visage of ancient African artifacts. This visual ‘un-mapping’ of objects within the institution functions as life after the death inflicted by the museum – the ‘phantasy [sic] of re-animation’.

                  Franke’s Notes underscore and expand on many of the aims of Resnais and Marker, hence the inclusion of Statues Also Die in the exhibition. Note the mise-en-abyme of this film in the context of the museum as a catalogue within a catalogue. The colonial implications of both the film and the exhibition itself should be expanded upon as well. Further correlations are to be found between the film, Animism: Notes, while bringing Kader Attia’s The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures installation (2012) into the fray. Thus more will be written on the matter of the object, the museum, and the repositioning of the colonial imaginary through Franke’s multi-stable frame of animism. What I'm saying is, this will likely continue as the topic of my final paper. 

-Andy