- Convenors:
-
Jacqueline Maingard
(University of Bristol)
Emma Sandon (Birkbeck)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 23 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:
This paper focuses on how colonial cinema works as precursor of postcolonial visual imagination in modern Indonesia using the visualization of the British and Dutch colonial films and Suharto’s policy in building Taman Mini Indonesia Indah's Imax cinema, Keong Emas.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the impacts of the colonial ethnographic film and travelogue to the construction of Indonesia's visual culture and its reconstruction in contemporary scenes. How colonial cinema works as precursor of postcolonial visual imagination. One of the first films ever shot in the archipelago is the 1907 A Trip through British North Borneo. Cinema, which expands Eurocentric/modernism views intended for industrialization, has placed the postcolonial subject in an oblique state of consciousness. Tendencies to see natives as natural resources linger on after the end of colonialization. In 1975, the Suharto regime built a monumental recreational park, Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, to promote Indonesia's "beautiful" cultural diversities and extend their cultural policies. One of its main attractions is the Imax cinema of Keong Emas, where the films screened focus on the ideas of western gaze: children smiling, beautiful landscape, white beaches, exotic animals, or scenes of cultural ceremonies with traditional dancing and singing. These kinds of "tourist" films present the "beautiful Indonesia" pertinent to the colonial cinema's images. The images, which today can be found easily in cinema and web-based or social-digital media video, problematized the questions of identity and representation of postcolonial subjects that are generally accepted as part of contemporary Indonesia. Understanding this complexity is an important step to open dialogue concerning Indonesia's position as one of the richest biodiversity landscapes and most populated countries in the world as film has served as part of collective experience in modern Indonesia.
Paper short abstract:
Northern Nigeria 1930s records a welcome parade for British colonial rulers, normalises domination and celebrates an ordinance the colonised must observe: "ensure the safety of their oppressors" (Davis). The #EndSARS massacre confirms colonial continuities in Nigeria, where the ordinance abides.
Paper long abstract:
A conquered people draped in rich flowing robes are on horsebacks, eagerly entertaining representatives of their colonial rulers – (re)assuring colonialism of its safety. This is the unintended subtext in this propagandist footage exaggerating the popularity of British colonial governmentality. The assurance of its safety was habitually demanded by oppressors of their colonised subjects: Clauses in 'treaties' forced upon African empires, the enforcement of English language as mode of communication, the police, military, and pseudo-Christianity - more examples exist.
In 'post-colonial' Nigeria, the colonial institutionalised extractors of this assurance of safety have been preserved by successive Nigerian governments allowing them to perpetuate their unfettered stealing. By October 2020, however, a frustrated Nigerian youth collective, under the aegis of the #EndSARS protests, organised peaceful protests across the country and in its diaspora, against police brutality and bad leadership; with complementary social media hashtags, it quickly gained global popularity. Fearing the delegitimization of the government, the Nigerian military forces soon fatally shot several unarmed protesters, drawing outrage.
This paper submits that the Nigerian apparatuses of control are colonial institutions whose operations require assurances of their "safety" from Nigerians, the breach of which is punished. Using (archival) footages, it argues that Nigeria's governments are mimic colonisers, who, in the nature of the mimicry that Homi Bhabha (2004) characterises as "grotesque" and having "partial presence", have become conveniently unrecognisable by their British model which now joins the world in its condemnation.
Tags: #EndSARS, #Sorosoke, colonialism, Nigerian military
Paper short abstract:
"Research / Souvenir (Dialogues)", combines found 8mm and Super 8mm footage from colonial Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and audio from ethnographic research gathered among Zimbabwean long-term migrant women residing in Cape Town, South Africa.
Paper long abstract:
https://vimeo.com/229443709
password: dialogues
"Research / Souvenir (Dialogues)", combines found 8mm and Super 8mm footage from colonial Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and audio from ethnographic research gathered among Zimbabwean long-term migrant women residing in Cape Town, South Africa. Part 1,"Research", reveals the personal thoughts and challenges faced by researcher/filmmaker Roger Horn in the field. Part 2, "Souvenir (Dialogues)", offers the research participants an opportunity to question Horn about his choice of souvenirs from the field, providing the political and economic backdrop to the ongoing exodus of Zimbabweans and leads up to the removal of long standing President Robert Mugabe on November 21, 2017.
Functioning as an additional layer of consideration, the found home movies follow an unknown South African woman as she travels from Cape Town to Zimbabwe, a route mimicked by Horn. This form of visual representation seeks to call attention to the ongoing ethical issues and privileges researchers / filmmakers encounter within the context of the post-colonial landscape of Southern Africa.
Screenings:
22nd Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival
38th NAFA International Ethnographic Film Festival
MICE - Mostra Internacional de Cinema Etnográfico Museo do Pobo Galego
Sjón International Anthropological Festival
International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec
SIEF2019 14th Congress (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore)
Ethnografilm
Kleinkaap Short Film Festival (KSFF)
SOTAMBE Documentary Film and Arts Festival
ULTRAcinema cine experimental y de found footage
Prospe(c)tiva/B.r.i.o.
World Film Festival
FOTOGENIA, FILM POETRY & DIVERGENT NARRATIVES FESTIVAL. VOL. 1
Paper short abstract:
Models and meditation on site-specificity in the practices of Ralph Lemon, Stephen Prina, and Renée Green.
Paper long abstract:
Models are sets of postulates that elicit particular behaviors and create discursive statements. I examine the canonical work partially buried by Renee Green by considering that work as a practice of modeling. Green interrogates an archive which has disappeared– in the absence of an original work (Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Shed,) which is a story told through what remains, the film becomes the model.
I figure how Renée Green models herself [ie.., her body, her works, & exhibitions the building or site] and the CCVA _in relation-_ to one another. What kind of transfer is created and how is the artist modeled in the encounter by doing that project? Could I write Green’s practice as a kind of “Black annotation,” to utilize the scholar Christina Sharpe’s term? Or is it one of the Moten’s ‘ensembles’ or Bhabha's ellipses? Recesses and other interstitial spaces.. vestibules, etc. that might be sites where one would encounter […] ellipses, evidential silences, or as Green says, archival “lacunae.” This emerges from the study is a complex interaction of architectural and exhbitionary or performance space and the space of the book.
The photographs in choreographer Ralph Lemon’s book Come home Charley Patton comprise a book-as-exhibition format that compliments the performances in the book. Lemon speaks of 'abstraction' in developing the pieces, by musing on the non-site and the quality of vernacular American architecture and landscapes. With the forensic quality of city streets photographed empty, the fragmentary nature of the photographs relates to Benjamin’s reading materialist histories.