Dodge Automobiles Across Africa Armand Denis & Leila Roosevelt (1935)

Synopsis

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's niece Leila Roosevelt Denis and her husband Armand Denis, embarked on a journey across Africa in a Dodge car, starting in Belgium, driving across France and Spain, to Spanish Morocco, and then driving the full length of the continent southward. Leila Roosevelt had previously driven 24,000 miles around the world in 1933-34. The trip was made with Dodge trucks carrying cameras and Dodge cars. "Wheels Across Africa" is a record of that trip, released by Dodge as a promotion in 1936. The pair also made "Wheels Across India" which is also part of the Periscope Film archive. This film includes rare footage of the French Foreign Legion. Armand Georges Denis (2 December 1896 – 15 April 1971) was a Belgian-born documentary filmmaker. After several decades of pioneering work in filming and presenting the ethnology and wildlife of remote parts of Africa and Asia, he became best known in Britain as the director and co-presenter of natural history programmes on television in the 1950s and 1960s, with his second wife Michaela. Denis married André Roosevelt’s daughter Leila (1906-1976) who was fourteeen years younger than him; they went on to have four children (Rene, David, Armand & Heidi Ann). In 1934-35, sponsored by the Belgian government, the couple travelled to the (then) Belgian Congo with the cinematographer Leroy G. Phelps, to record sound film material suitable for use in African movies. They recorded a wide variety of footage, including the…

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Details

Running time

34 minutes

Collection

Ephemeral Films

Subjects on the Internet Archive

• Stock Footage