ABSTRACT
In her book Shooting War, Susan Moeller offers a useful definition of war photography, one that can be extended to war films as well:
Images of war are defined by the moral position of the individual photographer, the institutional structure of the media, the official censorship of the military, the propaganda needs of the government, and the technological advances of both the photographer's equipment and the armed forces' weaponry. 1
Moeller's multileveled view of how war photographs are made and, more importantly, used, contributes to an understanding of how one seventeen-minute French film, L'Amitié noire (1943), held a complicated role within the Free French war effort in World War II. Her model also illuminates how the film was subsequently reappropriated in the interests of peacetime French unification and colonialist policy. As Moeller points out, photographs and films such as these reflect multiple needs. In the case of L'Amitié noire, these include the roles of an idiosyncratic photographer (Germaine Krull, 1897–1985) and filmmaker (Frangois Villiers), the needs of the wartime press, the Allied military mandate, the shifts in government alliances and structure both during and after the war, and the importance of technology (in this case, the lack of it). Furthermore, the film illustrates the multiple colonialist roles that the media played in the European construction of French colonial Africans in the early and mid-1940s. Even its title, L'Amitié noire, can be variously translated to signify black friendship, black alliance, or black sexual love. All three concepts were used and distorted in the film's creation and distribution.