Between apahty and greed: Guinea in spanish documentaries

Abstract

A turning-point in the history of Spanish colonial cinema, the 32 short-films shot between 1944 and 1946 in the then so-called Spanish Guinea by a Hermic Films crew led by the producer, cameraman, photographer, and film director Manuel Hernández Sanjuán, have become the most important film corpus ever shot in Tropical Africa by Spanish filmmakers. A painstaking record of the day-to-day live at the colony from the colonialists’ point of view, through these short films we can trace the filmmakers’ interests in several topics that range from the wood extraction processes in the Equatorian jungle to the coffee and cacao cropping system, the education of the natives and the ceremonies that extolled power’s servants: governors, priests, companies’ rulers. But these films also make visible the colonialists’ implicit racism through the comments they make, how they stress their racial superiority over the «backwards» indigenous population and even through some traces of «ethnography» they aim to do through their filming. All these issues make this corpus a perfect example to analyse how the overseas imaginary was created.