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.

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