白色面具下

Under the white mask is a remake of a 1958 art film by Paul Haesaerts (1901-1974), known for his work on Picasso and art documentaries. Our remake of his Sous le masque noir (Under the black mask) – in the style of Gayatri Spivak’s affirmative sabotage – imagines what the masks (which are objectified in Haesaerts’s film) would say. In Under the white mask, the sculptures are not spoken about, rather they themselves look and speak back. They do this using the words by the poet, thinker, and politician Aimé Césaire. It was the occasion to translate for the first time Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” into Lingala. Césaire’s words form a confrontational and still extremely topical mirror for Europe. Moreover, by limiting our remake only to elements (text, music, images) that were already there when Haesaerts made his film in 1958, our film becomes the film Haesaerts could have made. The film refutes the often heard claim that Haesearts was a “child of this time.” In fact, he was really running behind. The film, in a way, is thus a correction, a reparation. (Matthias De Groof)