Vita nova (2009) dir. Vincent Meessen

Every time a history gets told, events and those involved get new life breathed into them. A new point of view can shed new light on everything. Take, for example, the African child soldier saluting the French flag in a 1955 Paris Match photo, completely awestruck -- the flag that was the very symbol of the repressor. In a famous analysis published in his 1957 collection entitled Mythologies, Roland Barthes writes that the photo says nothing about the little boy himself, but conveys a self-evident colonial message of devotion to the great French Empire. In Vita nova, Vincent Meessen rereads this analysis. He visits the little boy from the picture and finds an old African who has forgotten almost all of the French national anthem. It’s a touching scene, one that places the photo without any explanation in a contemporary, post-colonial perspective. With his critical outlook, surprising historical research, and sharp selection of the material, Meessen brings into question the intellectual and political values of an entire generation of students who were raised on Roland Barthes’s analyses of hidden meaning in popular media images. Barthes turns out to have been family (on the sly, no less) of the important Captain Louis-Gustave Binger, who “gave“ Côte d’Ivoire to France. Was a vicarious feeling of guilt the inspiration for his anti-colonial texts?