- Convenors:
-
Jacqueline Maingard
(University of Bristol)
Emma Sandon (Birkbeck)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 22 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions from film and audio-visual scholars, researchers, creative practitioners and archivists working in and with colonial film archives as a means of interrogating colonial histories.
Long Abstract:
In recent years, powerful interventions from scholars and artists using colonial film archives, have opened up these collections to renewed scrutiny (for example, Akomfrah, Allen and Basu, Beerends, Igwe, Kentridge/Miller). A growing body of work is excavating colonial histories that further extends earlier scholarly research, such as the ‘Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire’ research project (www.colonialfilm.org.uk). This panel is convened by two scholars who are part of an international research network on colonial film archives. We invite contributions from film and audio-visual scholars, researchers, creative practitioners and archivists working in and with colonial film archives as a means of interrogating colonial histories. We envisage a panel that both draws on and ‘speaks to’ colonial film from a postcolonial perspective and that includes screenings of short selected sequences from collections that panel participants are working on, and/or from their own films that use archival footage. We are especially keen to include international exemplars of research and scholarship including practice-based research. Contributors might consider the following questions: What can colonial film archives reveal about colonial histories and their complexities? What kinds of relationships and entanglements do these archives proffer across different film forms, for example, amateur, documentary, educational, ethnographic, instructional, medical? What connections can be made across moving image and other archival repositories such as oral histories, photographs and other forms of documentation? How can we track the networks, circuits and circulations of colonial power through these film archives? What kinds of fresh, critical engagements with colonial film archives do we envisage in order to contend with the impact of past history on the world in which we live?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Historically travelling doctors have accessed remote peoples and places; when these "narratives of discovery" have been conceptualised on film, how problematic are they in light of our understanding of colonial encounters?
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on three films shot in the Americas 1930-50s from Wellcome Collection [Introduction (5'), edited montage of films (10') and Q&A (5')]. It questions the fidelity of three filmed 'colonial' encounters. [Rough edit here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXAu4-YhH76ZJNmgessBCQ9vn-1GyfxQa .]
1.BMA World Tour,1935: Hundreds of members of the British Medical Association travelled via North America/Canada and by sea to Melbourne, Australia, for an annual meeting. Heartily endorsed as a wonderful example of 'colonial medicine' in action, itineraries took the travelling doctors fleetingly through a remote 'Indian' village at Isleta, New Mexico.
2. D-tubercurine,1947: In the 1870s Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome travelled to South East Ecuador on plant hunting expeditions for quinine used to treat malaria. Later, he published an account of his encounter with the Amazonian people. He secured a supply of quinine and obtained samples of curare derived from tree bark, used in arrow poison by indigenous hunters. Curare was later developed into a drug used as a muscle relaxant for surgery and ECT.
3. The Jivaro and his drugs, 1957: Ecuador was the location of Dr Wilburn Henry Ferguson's anthropological medical research. Ferguson, an American, sought the secret behind the shrinking of human heads because, he believed this would reduce cancerous tumours. Seeking funding, he co-opted the Jivaro in re-creating their initial encounter. His oral account of the many layered interactions with the Jivaro is significantly compressed on this film.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the physical type photographic portraits made by Government Anthropologist, N. W. Thomas, in West Africa in the early 20th century, this presentation discusses our filmic interventions addressing the 'absent voices' and 'silences' in the colonial anthropological archive.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past four years the [Re:]Entanglements project has been interrogating and intervening in the archival legacies of a series of surveys undertaken by the Government Anthropologist, Northcote Thomas, in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. This vast archive, including photographs, wax cylinder sound recordings, artefact collections, botanical specimens, fieldnotes and publications, was dispersed to different institutions and has lain dormant for over a century. Among these archives are thousands of physical type photographic portraits of men, women and children. Such photographs epitomize the violences of colonial race science, objectifying people, and treating them as specimens to be collected (vicariously, through photography) to be compared and classified. Some of those photographed are named, others represented merely by numbers. Their voices appear to be absent: silences in the archive. In this presentation I draw upon Tina Campt's proposition that such photographs have the capacity 'to rupture the sovereign gaze of the regimes that created them', and that if we 'listen to' them, rather than simply 'look at' them, we may discover that they are not silent at all. In the light of Campt's arguments, I discuss some of the filmic interventions we have conducted as part of the [Re:]Entanglements project as we have sought to 'unsilence' and 'voice' the colonial photographic archive through different collaborative strategies. Further details of the project can be found at https://re-entanglements.net
Paper short abstract:
Building on my experience of making a short film using film footage held in the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, Bristol Archives, I will discuss the challenges of working with colonial film footage and the value of practice-based methods for interrogating the meanings it produces.
Paper long abstract:
The first part of this paper is based on a short film I am making from footage in the colonial film archive held in the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, with the working title Weights and Measures. It takes this title from an educational film made in 1959 by the Central African Film Unit that epitomises British colonial power and control. My film cuts together sequences from the colonial film footage found in donated family collections held in the archives. It is the outcome of two short periods, working in an editing suite and looking through many hours of footage. The primary purpose of doing so was to think through methodologies for interrogating colonial film footage and intervening in the representations of the colonial imaginaries that shape it. The paper will discuss the challenges of this research and its practice-based outputs and will identify approaches and methods including the relationship between the visual image and the absence or presence of the sonic. The second part of the paper provides wider context and discusses some of the varied approaches that practice-research scholars and artists are taking to colonial film, the films being made and the debates being aired. The paper will include slides and/or short sequences as a means of framing the discussion of matters such as: subjectivity and identity; aesthetics and ethics; and the vexed, overarching question of decolonising the colonial archive.
Paper short abstract:
Base of ‘Unhoming’ Home Movies is the creation of an online archive of colonial family films. The research project investigates how an experimental handling of such material from the Belgian colonial period can contribute, by artistic means, to a critical perception of these images of the past.
Paper long abstract:
Unhoming is a notion by Homi Bhaba, who literally translates Freud’s term “das Unheimliche” (the Uncanny) into English. Freud uses it to name the estrangement that accompanies an experience of something familiar as threatening within the sphere of the intimate. Bhaba suggests the unhomely as a category to undermine binary oppositions that any kind of postcolonial project inherits from the colonial dispositif particularly as gestures of ‘othering’. It appears when lines between the private and the public, the home and the world are breaking down (Bhaba 1992).
At the centre of ‘Unhoming’ Home Movies is the creation of an online archive of colonial family films. The research project investigates how an experimental handling of family film material from the Belgian colonial period can contribute, by artistic means, to a critical perception of these historical images of the past.
This research started with the official belgian colonial archive initiating with the Armand Hutereau expedition in northern Congo (1911-1913) to 1960 with the advent of Independence and opened up to family films shouted in the same period, in the former colony.
Taking our point of departure from Alexander Schellow's approach to animation as a memory practice, we went on to develop scores in order to detach the images from their discourse and to apprehend them as objects of memory (Schellow-Seiderer 2017, 2020).
The artistic project is yet working on an online archive of belgian colonial film archives which opens up critical frames by which to apprehend those historical and personal images.