VERDICT: Siblings Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste mine the archive to visualise the transformation of 1960s French Guiana by a new space center in this poetic documentary.
As a result of their withdrawal from the region after the Algerian War, France lost access to its first space launch site near Hammaguir in the mid-1960s. The French government subsequently identified an area to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana as the location for their replacement facility, evicting the local people from their land in the process. Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s short documentary Listen to the Beat of Our Images is an expressive study of that dislocation, made from the combination of a fictionalised narration read by Rose Martine and audiovisual materials from the library of the National Center for Space Studies (CNES).
The film’s visual and audio tracks act as counterpoints. Images radiate the hopeful advancement of the space race while the voice-over reacts to what is lost in the process – not least in the attempt to recreate the metropole in the stacked apartments of a gleaming new concrete city. In utilising the found footage that they do, the filmmakers adopt the artefacts of what came after as a way of visualising the disappearance of what had come before.
In a touching reflection, the narrator refers to a mental image of the Kourour her grandfather knew as now ‘just an image…as if it never actually existed.’ This audio is played with a completely black screen for accompaniment, drawing attention to the lack of visual archive for those memories. It’s a reminder both that history is compiled by the victors and of the cost, beyond the immediate devastation of displacement, that such colonial manoeuvring has as its reach stretches out into the future. Listen to the Beat of Our Images is like the grasping of collective memory for a place that, as the narrator attests, no longer exists.
Directors, editing: Audrey Jean-Baptiste, Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Narrator: Rose Martine
Producer: Gérard Azoulay
Music: Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Sound: Clément Laforce
Production company: Observatoire de l’Espace du CNES (France)
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Short Film Program)
In French
15 minutes
