Six Films of Early Exploration
Introduced from the Royal Geographical Society by Duncan Carse 2 : Across Darkest Africa (1924)
This historic film is a record of the first motorised crossing of the African continent by the French Citroen Expedition of 1924. The vehicles were specially fitted with caterpillar half-tracks, and eight of these Citroen Specials laboured their way 13,000 miles across Africa from Algeria to Mozambique. The journey took over eight months, and started with a crossing of the Sahara.
On its way, the expedition was greeted by a horde of 3,000 horse-men and dromedary riders. After crossing Lake Chad and the country of the plate-lipped women, the explorers went big-game hunting for elephant, lion and hippopotamus. They floated the cars across rivers on pontoons made of canoes lashed together; visited the pygmies in their forest stronghold; and finally forced their way across hundreds of miles of trackless swamps and savannah to reach
Mozambique.
The pith-helmeted explorers, the labouring vehicles, and the country and people of Africa in the 1920s are all vividly captured in this film of one of the greatest early mechanised expeditions. Narrator PIERRE VALMER
Film editor RICKARD seale
Assistant producer bawn A. SWERLING Producer RICHARD ROBINSON Brookes On ... page 77