Paper short abstract:

In working with archive footage produced in South Africa's colonial and apartheid eras, filmmakers working on historical topics are confronted with raw materials that are highly dubious and seemingly irredeemable. Are there ways to work with the settler archive - or should it just be jettisoned?

Paper long abstract:

South Africa's National Film, Video and Sound Archives (rather poorly curated by the Department of Arts and Culture) contains a rich but tainted repository of film footage of South African history. The big question for documentary filmmakers is, how to use it.The creative part of this question has to do with the representational politics of imagery that was fundamentally interested in 'ideological stability' - presenting a picture of the Union (and then the 'Republic' of South Africa as a stable, 'settled' land, in both senses of the word. The logistical part of the question has to do with how to access and use footage from archival system in steady decline.

The Archives were established in 1964, yet house reels that date back to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. One of the most fascinating collections is the 'African Mirror' newsreel series - these newsreels were screened in South African cinemas from 1913 for decades prior to the advent of television. Comprising a series of news inserts, presumably deemed of interest to white citizens, they occasionally also offer glimpses of black life.

As a filmmaker having worked on documentary feature films a decade apart, I have had two enlightening engagements with finding and repurposing footage from this archive. I would like to present a paper on how these colonial representations were recycled to subvert their original ideological functions. Various techniques such as slow motion, using contemporary music, and reframing the footage can introduce an ironic tone to the excerpts.

Paper Download (170 KB)

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers black diaspora film and filmmaking practice as mechanisms for the radical transformation of education. It examines how oppositional cinematic representations can spark critical consciousness and how filmmaking practice can put emotional intelligence at the center of learning.

Paper long abstract:

At the first Third World Film-makers Meeting held in Algiers in 1973, participants resolved that cinema could be influential, "because its essential importance is at one and the same time artistic, esthetic, economic, and sociological, affecting to a major degree the training of the mind" (1995 p.1-21); It continues indigenous and African storytelling traditions. Today, there are robust canons of African, black diaspora, and third cinema, which should be preserved and archived. Yet when coupled with filmmaking practice, they can become living history as tools in the application of critical pedagogy.

Critical pedagogy supposes that individuals are not merely spectators but also participants in their education and thus able to become critically conscious. Visual scholars explicate the element of choice in filmmaking practice. Filmmakers make choices around the film's narrative and aesthetic, working with actors and crew, working responsibly in communities and environments, and the ideological impact of their films. These choices are a form of agency; they are a process of social-emotional learning.

As we work to transform education, so that it may undo oppressive systems and promote self-realization for all, we must discuss the value of representation through artistic practice. Cinematographic language should not only be used to create oppositional representations of the black diaspora but also involve those that they're intended to liberate.

Please note: My presentation will integrate short film clips - to be determined - to support arguments raised in the paper. 


1. "Resolutions". Third World Filmmakers Meeting. New York: Cineaste Publishers, 1973. Print.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I compare the years following 1969 and 2011 as privileged periods for the dialectical production and archiving of Libyan popular culture. How have these post-revolution archives affected normative conceptions of archive and documentary practice for Libyan(ist) scholars?

Paper long abstract:

Both the year in which Muammar Gaddafi took power in Libya and that in which he lost it have been narrated as moments of revolution. In the decade after the 1969 coup which deposed Idris Sanussi, the Gaddafi regime sought to naturalize its power by supporting cultural productions that narrated the emerging Jamahiriya as both outcome and engine of ongoing popular revolution. Its cultural policy thus produced archives of the ostensible popular in the form of musical recordings, television productions, literature, and the documentation of oral histories. These objects laid claim to a particular past and future, marking the borders of who and what lay in and outside the national popular. During the uprising of 2011 and after the fall of Gaddafi, digital archives of ongoing change were made and shared widely. These also made claims on who and what counted as popular, who and what was worthy of archival preservation. In this presentation, I compare the years following 1969 and 2011 as privileged periods for the dialectical production and archiving of Libyan popular culture. How did revolutionary popular culture, the notion of the popular, and the notion of revolution, as produced in and after 2011, revise the meanings those ideas carried in and after 1969? How did the necessarily differing forms of the archives produced during these periods shape their politics? In a context where "conventional" archives are scant, how have these post-revolution archives affected normative conceptions of archive and documentary practice in Libyan institutions and for Libyan(ist) scholars?

Paper short abstract:

The key to the future lies in the past. The archive of the past is our immediate future. The question is not that we merely take and place the archive. We are not merely inheritors of a culture but its inherent makers.

Paper long abstract:

The key to the future lies in the past and so the archive of the past is our immediate future. As we negotiate the role of material for visual storytelling in various ways, filmed, imagined, memory, sound, story, we are accessing the past for the mapping of new worlds. The question is not that we merely take and place the archive but how it is used.

How do we use archive to our advantages in Africa? How do we access archival material? How do we confront the neo colonial project of 'extraction' and 'preservation'? How do we build and preserve our stories within our own contexts so that the documents they become stay true to us?

We are not merely inheritors of a culture but its inherent makers.