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Presents... |
Paris – Rome – Dakar 1956-1966
A decade of liberation
(working title)
ENTRACTE PRODUCTION 21 rue Kléber 92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux France Tel. + 33 1 41 46 09 90 / fax. +33 1 41 46 97 70 S.A.R.L ou capital de 60 980€R.C.S. Paris B 326 566 023 SIRET 326 566 023 00031- © Entracte 2005-2006 |
A film by Bob Swaim Written by Bob Swaim, Sebastian Danchin, and Daniel Maximin Based on an idea by Daniel Maximin |
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Paris, 19 September 1956... At the end of a chaotic summer that saw the signs of war emerge on the banks of the Suez canal, violence intensify in Algeria and the civil rights movement gather momentum in the United States, barely months after the Bandung Conference signaled the sudden emergence of the Third World and on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Budapest, intellectuals and artists hailing from all parts of the Black world gathered in the Sorbonne—one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities, the very location where Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights eight years earlier. Symbolically, the Black delegates had chosen to meet in a lecture hall bearing the name of one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, René Descartes. |
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| Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the venerable Dr. Price- Mars, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Hampaté Bâ and George Lamming, Mercer Cook and James Ivy, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant and René Depestre, Cheikh Anta Diop, Abdoulaye Wadé and Josephine Baker, but also Claude Levy- Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso… On the initiative of Alioune Diop, founder of the Présence Africaine publishing house, several dozen delagates from twenty-four countries—Haiti and Cuba, the French Antilles and the West Indies, Frenchspeaking and English-speaking Black Africa, Madagascar, the United States and Brazil— officially convened to make an“inventory” of Black culture in all its diversity. |
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The outcome of this First Conference of Black Writers and Artists rapidly turned out to be quite different, as internal disputes distracted the participants’ attention from the lofty goals of this gathering during the day. And at night, political intrigues, fueled by the CIA and the KGB, sparked off heated discussions and personal feuds in the cafés of the Quartier Latin and the jazz-playing clubs of Saint-Germain-des- Prés. This was the first time that most of the participants were meeting face to face with intellectuals from other parts of the Black world. This abrupt confrontation with the reality of Black heterogeneity was both devastating and exhilarating for many delegates. |
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| As the naive dream of a universal Black Brotherhood abruptly lost much of its relevance with the rifts and chasms that came to light between Africans, Carribeans and African-Americans, Anglophonesand Francophones, Communists and Capitalists, Pan-Africanists, partisans of Independence and supporters of the status quo, Christians and Muslims over issues as diverse as race and racism, colonialism, cultural relevance and ethnocentricity, the delegates were soon compelled to magine a new course for international Black relations. |  |
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In the aftermath of this ground-breaking event, and of the conference that followed in Rome three years later, many Black citizens throughout Africa and the Caribbean islands chose to sever their ties with former colonial empires, when others in other parts of the world opted instead for an integration process. In both cases, the shadow of both meetings would hang over the political future of the Black world for many years to come. The impact of the heated Paris and Rome debates was all the more blatant as a conspicuous number of the intellectuals involved became heads of state and political activists, making it the first time in the history of humanity when writers and artists altered the course of history by taking hold of their own political destinies. |
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By 1966, a page had been turned in the history of the Black world. Africans, Caribbeans and African-Americans, knowing and understanding each other at long last, had finally come to grip with the fact that their unity lied more in the humanistic acceptance of their disparities and the acknowledgment of their differences, than in the artificial unicity and racist ethnicity long imposed by slavery and colonialism. Ten years after the Paris Conference, this awareness was rightly celebrated on the occasion of the First World Festival of Negro Arts that took place in Dakar, where the jazz of Duke Ellington was confronted for the first time with the music of Western Africa, where dance, literature and arts from various parts of the Black sphere intermingled, where President of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor and French Minister of Culture André Malraux, in their respective inaugural speeches, officially vouched for tolerance and mutual respect in the name of men of all cultures and creeds. Paris 1956 – Rome 1959 – Dakar 1966… Three seminal but largely unrecognized events the history of the 20th-century history that filmmaker Bob Swaim has chosen to relate through a pictorial narration of never seen before archival footage, punctuated by original testimonies of participants and historians. |
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