- 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:
This paper will interrogate a selection from the ‘colonial film archives’, which offers a record of the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 and 1925.The discussion will engage with this ‘performance’ of Empire, as an attempted to frame an enactment of Africa and Africans for the British public.
Paper long abstract:
The British Empire Exhibition marked the first international event staged in London at the venue, later to be known as Wembley Stadium. On the occasion of the official opening the exhibition, 23 April 1924, the then monarch, King George V, spoke to the ‘nation’ on radio for the first time. Official histories record that over its duration, at annual intervals between 1924 and 25, the exhibition at the new ‘stadium’, was the centre-piece for showcasing the produce and manufactured goods, arts and crafts, as well as historical artefacts, from each of the Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State), ‘British India’, and Britain’s African and Caribbean Colonies. Along with the accompanying cultural programmes and conferences, the event attracted at least 17 million visitors in the first year. Africa and Africans were arguably the defining feature. In this regard, the context of a post-1919 British and world history within which, the ‘British Empire’ was at the fulcrum, will be considered. From a postcolonial perspective, the presentation of Africa and the incorporation of individuals from designated territories of West Africa in particular, will be interrogated. The aim will be to focus on the archive images of record, in relation to other material, including photographs, brochures, flyers, maps, and newspaper reports; and to engage with the ways in which the event, as a ‘performance’ of the Empire, framed an enactment of Africa and Africans for the British public, as part of an international audience.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates missionary films in British colonial film archives and assesses their ethnographic value as documents of missionary activities in the colonies. It explores how these films complicate our historical understanding of the missionary encounter within British colonial enterprise.
Paper long abstract:
Missionary films form a significant part of the colonial film archive. They mainly comprise of 16mm films made by single denominations for non-theatrical distribution and some 35 mm films made by interdenominational collaborations for theatrical release, produced throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They document life at Christian missions in the colonies, their churches, hospitals and schools, and portray the everyday activities of missionaries and of the subjects who frequented their missions. The films were made mainly in order to appeal for funds from their home-based congregations and to justify their Christian mission of conversion and salvation. These films are often evangelical in tone and point of view and they construct narratives of racial difference and European superiority towards the inhabitants of the colonies where the missions were based. The films’ visual and textual rhetoric ranges from humanistic condescension to dehumanising attitudes that make these films often difficult to view.
Many of these collections now languish in film archives, their content incongruent with present-day beliefs and times. This paper asks what we might learn from studying these films and how we can interrogate and intervene in this visual archive in order to contribute to decolonising histories of colonial power. It assesses the films’ ethnographic value as documents of missionary activities in the colonies and explores how these films might complicate our historical understanding of the missionary encounter and the missions’ relationship with British colonial enterprise and governance.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses a non-fiction film made by Dutch-Indo filmmaker G.E.A. Krugers in 1928, detailing a journey undertaken by Haji Jawa pilgrims from the Netherlands East Indies to the Hedjaz to perform the hajj.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses a non-fiction film made by Dutch-Indo filmmaker G.E.A. Krugers in 1928, detailing a journey undertaken by Haji Jawa pilgrims from the Netherlands East Indies to the Hedjaz to perform the hajj. In addressing this unique primary source, the article scrutinises how the film complements and corroborates accounts of the hajj from the early twentieth century and elaborates on how it provides the viewer with a experiential sense of travel as was encountered by the pilgrims. Acknowledging the access of digital source material now offered by many archives, this rich visual document is both discussed within the existing literature, and set apart from it, in an attempt to exhume it from early non-fiction film archives of colonial Indonesia relegated to the slow lane of historical and ethnographic research.
Paper short abstract:
I examine fourteen photographs, taken by reverend. James Williams and held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, of Makushi and Patamona girls who attended the mission's school. The images also show material objects, the landscape, and a chief -- John Bull, and escape easy description.
Paper long abstract:
I carry these photographs with me to Surama, a Makushi village in the same region as Eupukari, where I hope they'll find their way eventually to Yupukari. I look too at a text, Makushi Grammar written by the same reverend, and read aloud one letter he pens and translates from a Makushi chief.
I take note of the responses these images prompt when I take them there, by the family I stay with, and listen to how they make them remember things. (Like, about how their mother had gone there -- to learn to sign their name and read the bible, and then gone home again.) The reverend James William's correspondence with the Royal Anthropological Society are held within their archives, and point to the process of his becoming a published specialized author on these otherwise obscure languages.
I have reformed the colonial missionary photographs into a film, that reveal how I look at the photographs with others. This is a work in process I hope to expand by looking more closely at some of the oral histories I collected during my last trip to the field and that direct me to a wider interest in British colonial missionary archives.
This work scrutinizes archives as a means of interrogating colonial histories, and I will show a short selected sequence (from the archives I have discussed above). This sequence will attempt to trace connections between mission photographs, oral histories, letters, and their circulations.