West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty: Torrents of Fire, Torrents of Blood

The film is a genuinely unique work. On paper, its premise seems, quite frankly, hard to believe. Is it really possible for one film—specifically, a satirical song-and-dance affair confined to a single set: a giant mock slave ship—to effectively address nearly four centuries of French colonial aggression, the enslavement of African peoples and their subsequent liberation struggles, and the contemporary immigration issues and economic exploitation suffered by Caribbean people? The answer, as proffered by the industrious and inspired hands of Hondo, is a resounding “yes.”

In freely adapting Boukman’s text, Hondo’s first masterstroke was to transpose the entirety of the action onto a setting of his own invention, the slave ship, which he saw as rich in symbolic potential. The film’s opening-credits sequence features a long, sinuous tracking shot that begins outside its shooting location—a cavernous disused Citroën factory in Paris. (“Why shoot in a factory? Because since [slavery], the wealth of Africa and the Caribbean—whether people or raw materials—has ended up in factories,” Hondo told journalist Catherine Ruelle in 1979.) The camera then slowly pulls inside to reveal the painstakingly constructed ship, which instantly offers a stark visual shorthand for viewers to interpret how the class system functions. The upper levels are inhabited by the modern bureaucratic administration and the wealthy colonizers of yore; the middle belongs to the bourgeoisie, who help their superiors to maintain control; and the subjugated and dispossessed are mostly confined to the hold, where they plot rebellion. There was a crucial autobiographical aspect to Hondo’s staging decision: he never forgot that, as he embarked on his very first sea voyage—from Dakar to Marseille via Casablanca—he found himself in the ship’s hold.

As West Indies unfolds in a blaze of vivacious color, it’s astonishing to behold the successful realization of a project so ambitious. It glides along, vignette to vignette, on thrilling waves of contrasting yet somehow complementary tones: abrasive and seductive, didactic and balletic, joyous and despairing. West Indies is distinguished by spirited and expressive performances from a large cast of actors who often inhabit multiple roles, a creative decision that helps to underscore Hondo’s linkage of slavery to the conditions driving migration in the postwar era.

“Today, there are no more chains, no more dogs, no more animal fangs or slave ships,” Hondo told Ruelle, “but there are planes, departures, and thousands of African people outside Africa.” One of the film’s most striking and bitterly humorous musical dance sequences depicts the jazzy efforts of sharp-suited West Indians recruited by the government to tempt locals away from their island (unnamed but said by Hondo to be based on Guadeloupe and Martinique). Their revue is interrupted by the arrival of wealthy white holidaymakers, to whom they promptly turn their attention. “No niggers around,” they trill, “except, of course, to cook, clean the toilets, run elevators, haul garbage . . . and provide a wild time.” West Indies takes repeated aim at the French governmental Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer (BUMIDOM), which, from 1963 to 1982, oversaw the migration of around 160,000 people in search of employment from the Caribbean to France, where menial labor, cultural alienation, and impoverished conditions often awaited them. Amid the formal potpourri, Hondo even finds time for a brief, colorful animated sequence depicting patterns of migration.

The film is further elevated by the artistry of Hondo’s collaborators behind the camera, who blend theatrical and cinematic styles to consistently surprising and exciting effect. François Catonné’s fluid cinematography seamlessly transports the action from one historical era to another, and Jacques Saulnier’s production design provides the backdrop for myriad elaborate widescreen tableaux populated by elegantly blocked actors striking confrontational poses. The choreography—including contributions from Linda Dingwall, an African American graduate of the School of Pennsylvania Ballet—is a dazzlingly unpredictable buffet of diasporic styles. Ingenious sonic interventions foster an unsettlingly immersive atmosphere, such as the eerily amplified heavy breathing of an enslaved African man that provides the aural background to one lengthy sequence.

Hondo’s heart is clearly with the rebels of the film’s subtitle—the fugitive slaves who stand their ground, and would rather die than be oppressed—and he reserves his greatest ire for Black people who participate in the subjugation of other Black people. This dynamic is personified most clearly by the character of Justin, an ambitious, blithely venal politician who saunters to victory in a blatantly rigged election and expends his energy helping the film’s core cast of modern colonial villains—the abbot, the social worker, the representative of Employers United, and death incarnate, none of whom mask their indifference to the obsequious Justin—to achieve their stated goal: “that those tiny little people on those tiny little islands vanish from the map.” The last we see of Justin is a photograph of his face taped to a flaming effigy that is carried aloft, mid-uprising, as the camera rotates around and around at increasing velocity until the image becomes an ecstatic blur.

Justin is embodied with stiff-backed, odious smarm by the French West Indian actor Robert Liensol, a longtime friend and associate of Hondo’s. Liensol had played the lead role in Soleil Ô, and he was a founding member of Les Griots, a pivotal Afro-Caribbean theater company that formed in Paris in 1953 and later merged with Hondo’s Shango outfit. Future trailblazers among Les Griots’ ranks included directors Timité Bassori (The Woman with the Knife, 1969) and Sarah Maldoror (Sambizanga, 1972), and the Haitian actress and singer Toto Bissainthe, who is memorably chilly in West Indies as a prim and pompous missionary officer. Another notable French West Indian actor who appears in Hondo’s film, Gabriel Glissant, also directed The Machete and the Hammer (1975), a Marxist documentary about striking sugarcane workers in Guadeloupe that, in a neat metatextual flourish, the colonial administration is watching on a projector screen in West Indies’ opening.

Unfortunately, the film’s original French release was compromised, reportedly because the Gaumont Film Company reneged on a distribution agreement. West Indies was never especially widely seen, yet it gradually developed a cult reputation. In a moving instance of artistic-diasporic solidarity—the type of which politically engaged, antiestablishment Black and African filmmakers have needed to pursue in order to get their work seen—the Ethiopian American filmmaker Haile Gerima arranged a limited American release in 1986 through his independent distribution company, Mypheduh Films. Hondo’s own institution, Comité Africain des Cinéastes (CAC)—a subgroup of the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI)—arranged the belated French release of Ousmane Sembène’s harrowing Camp de Thiaroye (1988), a dramatization of the 1944 massacre of Black African soldiers by the French army.

Hondo, who was best known in his later years as a voice actor—he provided the French-language dubbing of Eddie Murphy characters in films like The Nutty Professor and Shrek—died in Paris in 2019 at the age of eighty-two. Blessedly, though, he lived to see a major reappraisal of his work. At a 2017 retrospective at Bologna, Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, Hondo was reportedly unable to stem the tears during introductions to his films, so overwhelmed was he by the fact that his long-underseen work was at last being presented to grateful crowds. West Indies, which had been particularly difficult to see, was restored in 2021 (alongside Hondo’s anticolonial epic Sarraounia) by Ciné-Archives in Paris—under the supervision of Annabelle Aventurin, Hondo’s archivist there—and the Harvard Film Archive. Now returned to its full glory, this vital, blazing, one-of-a-kind triumph can, and should, be enjoyed by a new generation of film lovers.