A festive crowd of revellers appears as a grainy image, their movements static and strange. The tortured fluidity of this parade interrupts itself, inserting shards of immobility into the flow of collective movement. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon anatomized the colonial world order as “compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues.” He also named its counterpoint, the visions of the colonized, as “muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality.” A revision of this opposition between the rigidly carceral containment of colonization and the kinetic transformation of decolonizing efforts plays out in Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s short experimental documentary Moune Ô (2022). From his position in the French Guyanese diaspora, Jean-Baptiste approaches filmmaking and performance as multiform studies in displaced geographies, colonial memory, embodied knowledge, and the histories of Black peoples.

Moune Ô eases into itself with a black screen, a choral soundtrack, and a title card setting the scene in 1990 on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris, for the première of Jean Galmot, aventurier (1990). This rather forgettable film participated in the larger project of European, colonialist memory work, generating celebratory narratives that reduced the scale and reality of imperial horrors to fanciful tales of innocent heroes. Spilling over with stereotypes, this biographical movie was based on the life of Jean Galmot, a French writer whose time in Guyana in the 1910s involved running a gold mine and amassing political power, yet who was self-styled as a “defender” of Guyanese colonial subjects. Galmot fulfilled the formula of the intrepid (white, Western, male) adventurer, in a film saturated with clichés and fetishistic colonial imagery of triumphant conquest.

Jean-Baptiste’s video emerges from a recuperated cinematic family history, as his father was an extra in Jean Galmot, aventurier and appeared in a televised segment of the première. The carnival at the beginning of Moune Ô was part of the première festivities and organized by the actors/extras who were part of the local Guyanese diaspora, as well as the French film crew. The fanfare presented a contradiction of sorts: on the one hand, it did emerge from the Guyanese diasporic community and expressed a communal spirit. On the other hand, the première displaced the carnival from its roots in Caribbean practices with particular social, religious, and political functions by making it do double duty as a convenient promotional tool for the production of Jean Galmot, aventurier. In its opening seconds, Jean-Baptiste’s experimental documentary introduces a form of commodified cultural slippage intimately tied to cinema’s complicity in the machinery of colonization.

Moune Ô begins, then, with a charged disarticulation of movement, disrupting the temporal and spatial order of the première footage. Many in the crowd wear red, black, or white masks that conceal their faces, turning them into a swell of semi-anonymized, brightly coloured hats and costumes. The procession is bathed in a cold, abrasive, too-bright light that emphasizes the conditions of display and exposure. The footage seems to be glitching, their forward momentum stalled, their gestures stiff, slow, and almost artificial. This is in stark contrast to the smooth continuation of the accompanying song, “Mouvement d’avion” (1922) by Edgar Nibul, which was the introductory soundtrack to Jean Galmot, aventurier. By applying these disruptive modifications to the première footage, Jean-Baptiste complicates the encounter between the colonial containers of the older film and its soundtrack, and still active colonial dynamics. Thinking back to Fanon, the artist’s irresolvable mash-up up of colonial petrification and decolonial animation threatens the sanctity of the former’s smooth narratives without assuming an oversimplified antidote in the latter. This broken gestural language of Moune Ô is leveraged to offer a dissenting way out for the visual trace of people whose bodies were managed and displayed in Jean Galmot, aventurier.

Jean-Baptiste’s formal manipulations accentuate the sinister glean surrounding the première footage, and the representational violence of Jean Galmot, aventurier’s portrayal of Guyanese peoples. The dry tone of the title cards that recur throughout Moune Ô make the link explicit by referring to those who made the 1990 film as “these new adventurers, whom we called filmmakers, who would come from France, armed with their cameras, and remake everything, burn everything, rebuild everything, capture everything, for the film.” This efficiently draws a line to the ethnographic and anthropological impulses of European photographers and filmmakers in the 19th and 20th centuries, who used these visual tools as an addendum to their political and economic domination of the African continent, determining a form of optic invasion that migrated to its diasporas in the Caribbean. Cinema offered another way to classify, regulate, exoticize, and dehumanize a lesser “Other,” and ideologically supported imperialist projects. Moune Ô has a place in the arc of cinema by Caribbean and African descendent filmmakers whose lineage began by developing avenues of representational correction and historical intervention, offering oppositional counter-images to the stranglehold of white-supremacist and colonialist domination over the visual.

The sonic leads the way as the film takes a subtle tonal shift. “Mouvement d’avion” fades away, and is replaced by the chilly, wordless ambient sounds of kwajbasket’s “The Only Thing Left” (2014). A title card names the stakes of colonial subjects appearing in the dominant visual terrain: “Our bodies seem to have been used in this film, like puppets, like wordless beings, like extras.” The image cuts to a medium close-up of two young Black boys in matching green and blue jackets. The boy on the left looks up in adorably inquisitive interest, while the boy on the right smiles widely in delight. This transition is effective in indicating the intergenerational continuations of visual exploitation, from the Guyanese peoples featured in Jean Galmot, aventurier to the imperilled future indexed by the two kids. The more reserved child on the left is also wrapped in the arms of a woman (perhaps a mother or an auntie) who guides his hands in a little dance—a gentle but still compelled performance. Later, Moune Ô shows dark silhouettes moving around a fire, followed by a title card reading, “The crowd pushes me towards the explosion, and now the smile I put on tears my face off.” Uneasily recalling the boy made to dance, this language points to the danger of performing for or in view of the colonial gaze that threatens the identity of the colonized person as anything other than a being constantly surveilled and controlled.

Moune Ô stages a counter-narrative, summoning the counter-public who sees themselves not in the heroic adventuring of Jean Galmot, aventurier, but in the peoples whose worlds were invaded by these conquering ideologies. Through a formal and political rewind, Jean-Baptiste’s technologized modifications of the première footage create a retroactive challenge to colonial memory. Images of Jean Galmot, aventurier return as a materially haunted and broken travelogue. The jagged tempos of the phantom pantomimes in Moune Ô recall another kernel from Fanon in Les damnés de la terre: that decolonization would entail a “program of complete disorder.” There is a transformative necromancy to this incendiary work: a resurrection on amended terms of power.