From a Renouncement of Colour to a Poetics and Ethics of Black and White: Averty in His Works

When he arrived in television, Averty was gripped by a sense of greyness: shows were filmed in black and white, even though they were shot on colour sets. Rebelling against what he saw as an absurdity, he went on to found his aesthetic on the contrast between these two colours. The groundwork was laid by Uburoi, drawing on Jarry's idea of "the uselessness of theatre to theatre" and on a conception of the image which blended Braque's art of cut-up paper with the "perspective of importance" of the Middle Ages. The result was a conception of television which turned its back on cinema by following the prescriptions of Ubu's author to the letter. But black and white was not just an aesthetic position. Averty would make of it a "question of morality." On December 24, 1964, he offered viewers his adaptation of The Green Pastures, in which the traditional roles were inverted: God was black, along with Jesus and the first man, born in Africa. This show scandalized some, not only because it went against the Bible, but also because its production, based on the systematic use of electronic special effects, called into question the style of variety programs of the previous ten years while at the same time founding a video art.