Sometimes opportunities and their significance sneak up on you. I was merely doing my job, but this summer my work contributed to revelatory cultural, and scholarly impact on the field of Black film and on me: I got to help process the papers and materials of a pioneering Francophone African filmmaker. These papers can change the narrative of African cinema.
I’d been prepared to support this endeavor as an archival assistant for the Black Film Center & Archive (BFCA) but I had no idea of how critical this process would be in the years and decades to come until about a week before we were to head to the Auxiliary Library Facility (ALF) to unpack, sort, and process Paulin Vieyra’s materials. Not long after we were notified that the collection had been received at the ALF from France, I, along with two other members of the BFCA staff, Amber and Dan, headed over to the facility to begin unpacking, sorting, organizing, and processing the collection.
Vieyra’s materials were contained in rectangular metal canteens of varying colors and upon opening each one, we found the materials tightly bound with plastic saran wrap. Each bundle was carefully removed from its canteen, placed on the table, and photographed. After we’d uploaded the photo to its respective folder in the BFCA OneDrive, with great care, we unwrapped the bundle. With Amber and Dan, I began processing the documents, papers, and photographs in the collection. As I sorted through the various papers and documents, I logged our findings onto a spreadsheet to properly account for the items contained in the collection.
Once the first saran wrapped items were removed from their respective canteens, unwrapped and carefully arranged on the processing table, and once I held letters, photographs, screenplays, and various manuscripts in my own hands, it didn’t take long for me to feel overcome by wonder and disbelief that I was having the immense privilege of having a hand in making this transformative collection available to passionate and erudite scholars of African cinema. I was overwhelmed by the possibility of the stories that could be told and shaped out of these materials and by the idea that the lens through which African cinema has been seen might be entirely reframed because of this indispensable donation. As I beheld the patchwork beauty of Vieyra’s life and work, I was stunned by what it revealed about his commitment to and advocacy of African filmmakers reshaping the narrative of Africa in his own time and stewarding the subjectivity of its people through the gaze and stories of its own native sons and daughters.
As we sorted through the materials and documented the findings in our spreadsheet, I couldn’t help but linger and take a moment to feel and review the letters and manuscripts. Despite their being written mostly in French, they spoke to me. I studied some of the stunning photos with the most interesting tableaus and some of the most beautiful faces evincing a panorama of emotions and illustrating an arresting interiority. Other materials such as Vieyra’s original screenplays and, particularly, a signed French language manuscript of Aimé Césaire’s “King Christophe” stopped me in my tracks as an admirer of Césaire and his work. As an emerging archivist, I’ve had some previous experience sorting and processing material collections that were immeasurably significant in their singular way but I felt that this moment, an opportunity of this magnitude, needed to be savored and demanded my full presence of focus. Working through the collection felt like communing with the spirit of Paulin Vieyra, as if over the course of a few weeks he generously guided me through his mind, his purpose, his life, his world, his art.
Through my brief encounter with Vieyra’s materials, I feel just as transformed as the landscape of world cinema and the resulting scholarship will be. Being able to play an active role in helping to expand the research and scholarship around African cinema strongly imbued me with a desire to more deeply engage films by African filmmakers and the resulting research and scholarship that provides perspectives and angles through which these works and the artists that produce them can be interpreted and seen. It was a privilege and honor to be given a chance to contribute to an introduction to this seminal figure in African and, ultimately, world cinema.
MarQuis Bullock currently works as an archival assistant with the Black Film Center & Archive and is pursuing a Master’s in Library Science with a specialization in archives and records management at Indiana University-Bloomington. He spent seven years working in Interpretation with the National Park Service where he researched and developed public programming spanning the subjects of school desegregation in the South, enslavement in the South Carolina Lowcountry, and the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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