In 2002, CNRS Images released a short film for its Science en cours strand built entirely around a conversation with ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp about a problem every outside researcher documenting Senufo religious life eventually meets: what a camera is and is not allowed to see.
Zemp had spent years among the Senufo of Cote d'Ivoire filming funeral rites governed by the Poro initiation society, work that became four films collectively known as Les Maitres du Balafon. In Filmer les masques, la musique et la danse, he sets that footage aside and instead explains the boundary itself. The funeral rites are regulated by a sacred wood mask that women must leave when it appears. Certain rites performed over the wrapped body of the dead, he says, absolutely must not be seen, let alone filmed or photographed, by anyone not initiated into the society that keeps them.
The film never shows the mask, and it does not describe its carving or markings. What it offers instead is a researcher's own account of learning where the line sits and choosing to stay on the permitted side of it, a decision this record makes in the same spirit: that the Poro society exists, that its masks are graded property whose sight is restricted to initiates, and that a keeper holds them, without drawing or inventing what only a keeper may reveal.
A second segment turns to the Dan, Senufo neighbors whose masks speak entirely through sound rather than sight, a different answer to the same underlying question of who a mask is for and who may witness it.