Diario Africano begins with an arrival. A man is standing on a dock, and with his back to the camera he looks at a sailboat. Perhaps he´s the anonymously travelling Frenchman who filmed the images we are about to see. This film is based on the sequences filmed in 1930 in Algeria. The traveller, who was part of the colonial power, is no stranger to insistence. He films an androgynous man with a naked torso and has women, who first shake their heads in rejection of his commands, dance in front of this camera. While dancing, however, they refuse to show their faces. Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi make it clear in their film that this camera, in the hands of the colonial rulers, is an instrument of power. In the show-motion sequences, they allow the footage of this traveler from 1930 to acknowledge how is camera forces people to pose.