Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953, 30 min.
In French with English Subtitles
Discussion with Professor Zoë Strother and Sam Di Iorio
Les Statues meurent aussi is a groundbreaking essay film that examines how African art has been stripped of its meaning and reduced to museum objects in the West.
Upon its completion, Les Statues meurent aussi was swiftly censored in France. Because of its sharp criticism of colonialism, the French CNC censored the second half of the film until 1963. The first time the full version was publicly screened in France was in November 1968.
Zoë Strother is Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia. She has published books and essays on iconoclasm and the politics of restitution, on colonial and postcolonial art history. She has also studied European “primitivism” and its ongoing legacy. Her books include: Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art (2016) and African Masks and Emotions: In Theory and In Practice(forthcoming 2025). Her current research concentrates on African-centric models of creativity in Congo-Kinshasa.
Sam Di Iorio is Associate Professor of French at Hunter College and Deputy Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in French at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work on Les statues meurent aussi has appeared in the French film journal Trafic and in South Central Review. His most recent essay, “Unreconciled Representation:Operai, Contadini and Documentary History,” will appear in an upcoming special issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.
This screening is part of Columbia Maison Française CENSORED FILM SERIES - FALL 2025.
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