Statues also Die (Les Statues meurent aussi)

Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953, 30 min.
In French with English Subtitles
Discussion with Zoë Strother and Sam Di Iorio

Les Statues meurent aussi is a groundbreaking essay film that confronts the cultural violence of colonialism by examining 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. The final reel, containing the film’s most explicit anti-colonial critique, was banned and remained suppressed in the Arab world for nearly four decades.

Speakers

Zoë Strother is Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia University. 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 PhD 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.

The film series presents films that were censored upon their release in France, Lebanon, or the United States – and often banned in other countries as well. Produced between 1943 and 1985, these films were suppressed by state authorities who considered them searing indictments of the prevailing social and political order. The full festival program can be found here.