Here, the story is nothing more than a pretext for fascinating the audience with the lively scenery of an enchanted land. Starring local artists, this film offers a series of typical scenes and curious, intimate details of life in the Indies and is guaranteed to delight documentary lovers.

Catalogue Pathé

Where do the Tuareg live? In the Bois de Boulogne of course (Chez les Touaregs, 1908), and there are other families from all over the world camped up with the Tuaregs and their camels and dromedaries. They are the “circus of races”, groups of people who are not dissimilar to Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Circus”, all forms of show which are brought before the enthusiastic public, those races which, like the American Indians, are no longer dangerous for the colonial armies. While encyclopaedias and magazines dedicated to geography and geographical discoveries are filled up with “typical indigenous faces”, cinema follows the “marvel” type form, going after the exotism of faces, without disregarding, however, the “home-type” exotism in a world which – above all for the proletarian cinema audience – a few kilometres distance was another planet. So L’Auvergne pitoresque or Casalmaggiore, places which are only a few kilometres from the public to whom the films were destined, and the way in which they are represented are absolutely identical to those of Tirailleurs anamites or to Minah fait son marché, a rare example of an attempt at transpositioning a genre – comedy – into a colonial context.