Art in Translation

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The Statues Also Die

Chris Marker & Lauren Ashby

To cite this article: Chris Marker & Lauren Ashby (2013) The Statues Also Die, Art in
Translation, 5:4, 429-438

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175613113X13784777319807

Published online: 28 Apr 2015.

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 Art in Translation, Volume 5, Issue 4, pp. 429–438
DOI: 10.2752/175613113X13784777319807
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2013 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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The Statues
Chris Marker Also Die
Translated by Lauren Abstract
Ashby, with reference
to existing English As a voiceover for a film commissioned by the journal Présence
subtitles1 Africaine in 1950, this text criticizes Western attitudes towards African
Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953), art and undermines colonialism in general. The piece states that
a film directed by Chris Marker and African statues put on display in Western museums lose their symbolic
Alain Resnais.
functions and “die.” The Western collector’s taste for African art, com-
bined with the influence of Western techniques and art genres (here,
specifically, portraiture), has lead to the production of an impoverished
“art of the bazaar” for Western consumption. The commentary further
alludes to the popularity of African entertainments in the West,
 430 Chris Marker

pointing out that applause for sports performances is countered by vi-

olence from policemen in protest demonstrations. An attack on colo-
nialism, the text ends by stating that there is no rupture between
African and Western civilization.

KEYWORDS: African art, French colonialism, tourist art, primitivism,

museology, film and colonialism, African culture
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Introduction by Peter Probst (Tufts University)

Chris Marker (1921–2012) was a French essayist and filmmaker. The
text is a voiceover for a commissioned film Marker started in 1950 to-
gether with Alain Resnais (co-director) and Ghislain Cloquet (camera)
for an exhibition of African art organized by the black diaspora journal
Présence Africaine. Both the text and the film have become a classic in
the history of African art history and (French) documentary film.
The opening lines set the tone. “When men die, they enter into history.
When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call
culture.” What follows is a meditation on this thesis. Distinctly poetic
in style and heavily informed by political primitivism and the notion of
Art Brut, the text/film aimed to challenge the Western/European gaze
and museal appropriation of African art and culture. Through a rapid
montage of zooms, pans, and cuts, the film, actually more a visual
essay, argued that colonialism had eradicated the living memory once em-
bodied in ritual objects. Entombed in a museum, the remainders might
still be appreciated by art connoisseurs, but this sort of appropriation is
just another form of murder; murder by ignorance and disrespect.
The sources of critique are easy to identify. The film itself credits
Tristan Tzara and Charles Ratton, the legendary art dealer and critic,
as consultants. Other less audible but still influential voices are Jean
Dubuffet and Michel Leiris. Informed by these different figures, the
text plus film comes down to a kind of anti-anti primitivism. Shot in
the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, the British Museum in London, and
the Belgian Museum of the Kongo in Tervuren, and focusing on well-
known works of so-called African “tribal art,” the work presents
African art as a counter model to the morally corrupt and aesthetically
exhausted culture of the West.
As it happened, the exhibition for which the film had been shot never
materialized and the film itself became enmeshed in a series of delays.
First there were problems with the production company; then, when it
was finally finished, the French censorship board demanded changes
and refused to release it. The first public screening eventually took
place in 1965, during the film festival at Cannes. By then, the context
had changed radically. Not only had colonialism been superseded by in-
dependence, but a new art scene had emerged. A postcolonial modernism
created new images that echoed the fluid, open, and still undetermined
 The Statues Also Die 431

phase that the new African society was going through. Many of these
images stemmed from art schools initiated by Western expatriates who
were determined to counter the effects of Marker’s and Resnais’ diagno-
sis of the death of African art by revitalizing it.
While the text has its own literary merits it should ideally be studied
in conjunction with the film. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz
FeuiZKHcg
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The Statues Also Die

Chris Marker

When men die, they enter into history. When statues die, they enter art.
This botany of death is what we call culture.

This is because the society of statues is mortal. One day their faces of
stone crumble and fall to earth. A civilization leaves behind itself
these mutilated traces like the pebbles dropped by Le Petit Poucet.
But history has devoured everything.
An object dies when the living gaze trained upon it has disappeared.
And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where
we send those of the blacks: to the museum.
Black art: we look at it as if it has its raison d’être in the pleasure it
gives us. The intentions of the black who created it, the emotions of the
black who looks at it: all of that escapes us. Because they are written on
wood, we take their thoughts for statues. We find the picturesque there,
where a member of the black community sees the face of a culture.
3′ 10″ It is its Smile of Reims that she gazes upon. It is the sign of a lost
unity where art was the guarantee of an agreement between man and
world. It is the sign of this gravity, which delivers her, beyond métissage
and slave ships, that ancient land of the ancestors: Africa.

Figure 1
Still from Les Statues Meurent Aussi,
film by Chris Marker and Alain
Resnais, 1953.
 432 Chris Marker

This is the first division of the Earth. These are the fetus of the
world. Here is Africa of the eleventh century, the twelfth, the fifteenth,
the seventeenth. From age to age, as its shape slowly unraveled, Africa
was already the land of enigmas; black was already the color of sin.
Travelers’ tales spoke of monsters, flames, diabolical apparitions. The
whites already projected onto the blacks their own demons as a way
to purge themselves of them. And yet, once beyond deserts and
forests, which he believed to be bordering on the kingdom of Satan,
the traveler discovered nations, palaces.
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8′ 04″ Which song cradled this little princess? This little orange ripened
in the caves of Benin? Which cult presided over this little republic of
night? We don’t know anymore. These great empires are now the
deadest kingdoms of history. Contemporaries of Saint Louis, Joan of
Arc, they are less known to us than those of Sumer and Babylon. In
the last century, the flames of conquerors turned this whole past into
an absolute enigma. Black upon black, black battles in the night of
time, the sinking has left us with this beautiful striped wreckage
which we interrogate.
8′ 40″ But if their history is an enigma, their shapes are not foreign to us.
After the Frisians, the monsters, the helmeted Atrides of Benin, all the
vestments of Greece over a people of a sect [sic], here are their
Apollos of Ife, who also strike us with a familiar language.
And it is fair that the black feel pride about a civilization which is as
old as ours. Our ancestors can look at each other face to face without
looking down with empty eyes. But this brotherhood in death is not
enough for us. It is much closer to us that we are going to find the
true black art, that which puzzles us.
9′ 19″ The enigma begins right now, here, with this poor art, this art of
hard wood, with this plate for divination, for example. It is not very
useful for us to call it a religious object in a world where everything
is religion, nor to speak of an art object in a world where everything is
art. Art here begins in the spoon and ends up in the statue. And it is
the same art. The wisdom in art and the ornament of a useful object
like a headrest, and the useless beauty of a statue, belong to two dif-
ferent orders. Here this difference falls apart when we look closer.
A chalice is not an art object, it is a cult object. This wooden cup is a
chalice. Here everything is about cult, cult of the world. When he
makes the chair rest upon feet, the black creates a nature in his own
image. Hence, every object is sacred because every creation is sacred.
It recalls the creation of the world and continues it. The broadest activ-
ity contributes to a world where everything is fine, where man affirms
his reign over things by imprinting his mark and sometimes his counte-
nance upon them.
10′ 30″ Animal shapes like the one over this weaving bobbin, plant shapes
like the ones on these ornamental boxes: all of creation moves in
formation under the fingers of the black artist. God showed him
 The Statues Also Die 433

the way: he imitates God. And this is the way in which he invents
man.
Guardians of graves, sentinels of the dead, watchdogs of the invisi-
ble: these ancestors’ statues are not made for the cemetery. We put
stones over our dead in order to prevent them from escaping; the
black keeps them nearby to honor them and benefit from their
power, in a basket overflowing with their bones. It is the dead who
own all the wisdom and all the security. They are the roots of the
living. And their eternal countenance takes, sometimes, the shape of a
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root.
11′ 42″ These roots flourish. The involuntary beauty of animals and plants
shines in a young girl’s face. We can take its light for a smile, or even
its glow for a tear, and feel touched, on the condition of knowing
that these images ignore us, that they are from another world, that
we have nothing to do in this gathering of ancestors, who are not our
ancestors.
We want to see suffering, serenity, humor [in them], when we know
nothing. Colonizers of the world, we want everything to speak to us:
the beasts, the dead, the statues. These statues are mute. They have
mouths and do not speak. They have eyes and do not see us. And
they are not so much idols as toys, serious toys, which have no value
except for what they represent. There is less idolatry here than in our
saints’ statues. Nobody worships these severe dolls. The black statue
is not the god: it is the prayer.
12′ 44″ A prayer for motherhood, for the fertility of women, for the chil-
dren’s beauty, it can be covered with ornaments which have the value
of illuminations. It can also be rough, like this ball of earth protecting
the harvest, or still connected to the earth, to the dead, by means of
shape and by means of matter.
This is the world of rigor. Each thing has its place within it. These
heads do not have to be frightening, they have to be fair. Look carefully
at their scars, this magnetic field where every shape from sky to earth
comes into being. There is no need for the object to exist and to
serve. This overflow of creation, which deposits its signs like shells
upon the smooth wall of the statue, is an overflow of imagination: it
is freedom, turning of the sun, flower knot, water curve, fork of the
trees, one after the other. The techniques are mixed, the wood subtly
imitates the fabric, and the fabric takes its motifs from earth. One real-
izes that this creation has no limits, that everything communicates and
that, from its planets to its atoms, this world of rigor comprises in its
turn the world of beauty.
15′ 09″ A god made these gestures. The god who wove this flesh taught
them to weave the cloth, and their gesture refers every second to the
weaving of the world. And the world is the cloth of the gods where
they received man. Try to distinguish here which one is the Earth and
which one is the cloth; what is the black skin and which one is the
 434 Chris Marker

Earth seen from an aeroplane; which one is the bark of the tree and that
of the statue. Here man is never separated from the world, the same
force nourishes every fiber, these fibers, among which the foremost
sacrilege, lifting the skirt of the Earth, has discovered death.

Beast’s masks.
Man’s masks.

Mask combining both beast and man.

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House mask.

Face mask.
Pierrot of the rivers.

Harlequin of the forest.

16′ 29″ These masks fight against death. They unveil what it wants to hide.
Because familiarity with the dead leads to the domestication of
death, to the government of death by means of spells, to the transmis-
sion of death, to the charming of death by the magic of shells; and the
sorcerer captures in his mirror the images of this country of death where
one goes by losing one’s memory.
But, winner of the body, death cannot do anything against the vital
strength spread through every being, and which composes its double.
Through life, this double takes, sometimes, the form of the shadow
or of the reflection in the water, and more than one man gets angry
for being hit right there. But death is not only something one bears, it
is something one gives.
17′ 29″ Here is the death of an animal. Where has the strength which inhab-
ited this hand gone? It is free now, it wanders, it will torment the living
until it has taken on its former appearance. It is to this appearance that
the blood of sacrifice is addressed. And it is this appearance that is fixed

Figure 2
Still from Les Statues Meurent Aussi, film
by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, 1953.
 The Statues Also Die 435

in these legendary metamorphoses in order to appease it until these

winning faces are done repairing the fabric of the world.
19′ 39″ And then they die in their turn. Classified, labeled, conserved in the
ice of showcase and collections, they enter into the history of art. Par-
adise of shapes where the most mysterious relations are established: we
recognize Greece in an old African head of 2,000 years; Japan in a mask
from Logoué; and still India; Sumerian idols; our Roman Christ, or our
modern art.
20′ 21″ But at the same time that it receives this title of glory, black art
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becomes a dead language. And what follows in its footsteps is the

jargon of decadence. Its religious requirements are followed by com-
mercial requirements. And given that the white is the buyer, given
that demand outstrips supply, given that it is necessary to go quickly,
black art becomes indigenous handicraft. Each time, even more de-
graded replicas of the beautiful pictures invented by African culture
are fabricated. Here, the village is vulgarized, the technique is impov-
erished. In the country where every form had its signification, where
the gracefulness of a curve was a declaration of love to the world,
one becomes accustomed to an art of the bazaar. These fake jewels,
which the explorers offer to the savages in order to please them, end
up being sent back to us by the blacks. The particular beauty of
black art is substituted by a general ugliness. An art where the
objects become bibelots, a cosmopolitan art, an art of the flowerpot,
the paperweight, and the souvenir pen-rack, where one sees, transpar-
ently, the Tower of Babel.
21′ 17″ Also an art of portraits. No longer capable of expressing the essen-
tial, the sculptor seeks resemblance. We taught him not to carve farther
than the tip of his nose.
But that which we make disappear from Africa does not count for
much among us compared to what we have in store.
That is because we are the Martians of Africa. We disembark from
our planet, with our ways of seeing, with our white magic, and with our
machines. We cure the black of his diseases—that is certain. He catches

Figure 3
Still from Les Statues Meurent Aussi, film
by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, 1953.
 436 Chris Marker

ours—that is certain as well. Whoever loses or wins in this exchange,

his art can never survive. The magic devised to protect them when
they die on their own account is powerless when they die on our
account. Against the Christian paradise and lay immortality, the cult
of ancestors evaporates. The monument to the dead substitutes for
the funeral statue. All of this is dominated by the whites, who see
things from their height, which rises above the contradictions of reality.
22′ 29″ From this height, Africa seems to be orderly, rich, covered with
model villages, filled with its concrete igloos like white blood cells of
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civilization. From such heights, Africa is a wonderful laboratory

where it is possible to patiently prefabricate—despite small episodes
of bloodletting—the kind of good black dreamt up by the good
whites.
Then all this protective apparatus, which gave sense and form to
black art, dissolves and disappears. It is the whites who pretend to
take on the role of the ancestors. The true statue for protection, exor-
cism, and fertility henceforth is his silhouette.
23′ 14″ Everything unites against black art. Caught in a pass between Islam,
enemy of the image, and Christianity, which burns idols, African
culture collapses. In order to lift it up again, the Church attempts a mé-
tissage: black Christian art. But the two influences destroy each other,
and this flawed marriage makes Catholicism in Africa lose its exuber-
ance, its glow, precisely its black side which can be identified in
Europe.
Temporal power practices the same austerity. Everything that was a
pretext for works of art is replaced, be it by clothing, symbolic gestures,
amulets or talk. One says “yes, yes, yes….” Sometimes, one says “no.”
24′ 15″ It is the black artist who says it. Then a new form of art shows up:
the art of fighting. Art of transition for a period of transition. Art of the
present time, [caught] between a lost grandeur and another grandeur
still to be conquered. Art of the provisional, whose ambition is not to
last but to witness. Here the problem of the subject is not an issue.

Figure 4
Still from Les Statues Meurent Aussi, film
by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, 1953.
 The Statues Also Die 437

The subject is this naturally ungrateful earth, this naturally troublesome

climate, and inside work at an unfathomable scale, the rhythm of the
factory confronting the rhythm of nature. Ford meets Tarzan.
25′ 06″ The subject is this black man mutilated from his culture, and
without contact with our culture. His work is able to provide neither
spiritual nor social sustenance. He works for nothing; his reward is
nothing but a derisory salary. Into this country of gift and exchange,
we have introduced money. We buy the black’s work, and we
degrade it. We buy their art and we degrade it. The religious dance
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becomes spectacle. We pay the black to give us the comedy of their

joy and their fervor. And 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 the side, but serves us as well. Nations which
are endowed with racist traditions find it all the more natural to trust
to men of color concern for the nation’s Olympic glories. But a black
in motion is still black art. And in sport the black can find, hoping
for the best, a good terrain for mystifying the white’s pride.
26′ 34″ The white does not always appreciate the joke. It happens that he
cries “foul” when things are turning out bad. When a black boxer
manages to defeat a white one in a country marked by Hitlerian
racism, they try to break him down with blows of menacing insults
and projectiles: he had better stay in his place. And when it is no
longer for play, when the blacks, for instance, join the labor struggle,
it is with blows of guns and batons that demonstrations are broken
up. This climate of premeditated threats drives the black artist into a
new metamorphosis, and in the ring or in an orchestra, his role consists
of returning the blows that his brother has received in the street.
28′ 00″ And witness here, far from the appearances of black art. For what
does the art of communion, the art of invention, have in common
with this world of loneliness and the machine? The man who had im-
pressed his mark upon things accomplishes now-empty gestures.
What we have is this; it is from the bottom of this loneliness that a
new community will be created. Black art was the instrument of a
will to grasp the world, and also of the will which undertook to
change its form.
Look well at this technique, which frees man from magic: it presents,
sometimes with magic, a strange relationship of gestures. It is always
against death which one fights. Science, as magic, admits the necessity
of the sacrifice of the animal, the virtue of blood, the harnessing of ma-
levolent forces. The sorcerer captures images every day, and death is
always a country where one goes forth at the cost of one’s memories.
29′ 00″ No, we are not redeemed by shutting off the blacks within their own
celebrity. There would be nothing to prevent us from being, together,
the inheritors of two pasts, if that equality could be recovered in the
present. At least it is prefigured by the only equality denied to no
one: that of repression.
 438 Chris Marker

There is no rupture between African civilization and ours. The faces

of black art fell off from the same human face, like the snake’s skin.
Beyond their dead forms, we recognize this promise, common to all
great cultures, of a man who is victorious over the world. And, white
or black, our future is made of this promise.

Note
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1. See also Matthias de Groof, “Statues Also Die—But their Death is

not the Final Word,” Image & Narrative 11, no. 1 (2010). Avail-
able online: http://ojs.arts.kuleuven.be/index.php/imagenarrative/issue/
view/4 (accessed August 2013)

Useful Sources for Contextualizing the Text/Film

Beier, Ulli, Contemporary Art in Africa (London: Praeger, 1968).

Leighton, Patricia, “The White Peril and L’Art Nègre: Picasso, Primitiv-
ism, and Anticolonialism,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (1990): 609–30.
Lupton, Catherine, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London:
Reaktion Books, 2005).
Sherman, Daniel, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–
1975 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).