Roger Leenhardt’s world, viewed: rethinking colonial film and realist film theory in 1930s France

Of his mentor Roger Leenhardt, André Bazin once stated, ‘There is in all phenomena a primary level, that of basic understanding. There is a second level, where the subtleties lay. And the third level, that belongs to Roger Leenhardt’ (cited in Roger Leenhardt ou le dernier des humanistes, André Labarthe, 1965). Though the influence of Leenhardt’s realist film theory on the Cahiers du cinéma generation of filmmakers and theorists is widely acknowledged, the contexts that served to germinate his ideas about cinematic realism remain understudied. This article links Leenhardt’s theories pertaining to film’s indirect or understated interpretation of reality, first articulated in his pioneering ‘Petite école du spectateur’ (1935–1936) series, to his search for a subtle approach to ethics, politics and colonial documentary within the same era. If scholars have tended to account for sparse cinema in France by turning to aesthetic traditions, Leenhardt’s 1930s career reveals that the conceptualisation and reinvention of cinema as a medium of subtle suggestion also arose within a political setting, namely nonconformist, Popular Front-era thought, which encouraged Leenhardt to embrace a Personalist-humanist stance towards the ‘other’. His film L’Orient qui vient (Roger Leenhardt and René Zuber, 1937) puts these ideas into practice, endeavouring to restrain the excesses of pro-colonial ideology and media.