- Convenors:
-
Jacqueline Maingard
(University of Bristol)
Emma Sandon (Birkbeck)
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- Format:
- Partner Event
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions from film scholars, researchers, artists, archivists and creative practitioners, who are researching and working with colonial film, to investigate colonial film imaginaries and to consider critical propositions through film towards 21st century counter-futures.
Long Abstract:
This panel takes 'colonial film' as its primary subject, based on a broad definition of 'colonial film' - filmed in the colonies of Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, and incorporating a variety of modes or forms that include documentary, instructional and educational film, ethnographic film, domestic home movies and 'amateur' films, missionary and medical films, in the 20th century. The panel investigates a) the imaginaries that colonial films project; the colonial futures their makers sought, produced and indeed celebrated; what the shape of these were and their continuities in the present. It also considers b) critical propositions and interventions that we might seek to evoke in the present day through film and the moving image, towards 21st century counter-futures. We invite contributions from film and audio-visual scholars, researchers and artists, archivists and creative practitioners, who are researching and working with colonial film. Questions we hope to discuss include: how does colonial film and how do colonial film's projections represent colonial histories of the 20th century? what contours of the relations between colonised and coloniser are evident? how are human lives envisioned? how are the traces, tracks and trails of modernity represented? how is the wide range of extraction of the colonial period conveyed? Looking to 'reel time' in the present, how do scholars and artists engage the medium of film to re-draft the legacies of colonial histories? how can and how do film and the moving image project and shape transformative 21st century futures?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Thursday 9 March, 2023, -Contribution short abstract:
This paper looks at how medical professionals were entangled in power asymmetries. Persistent narrative tropes of “White-Men-in-a-Room- Making-Decisions” and the ‘triumph’ of Western medicine created mythical exchanges and cloud the factual record. How do we ethically historicise these narratives?
Contribution long abstract:
This paper focusses on films created for different audiences in the Global North (UK and USA) illustrating the power asymmetries which came with colonisation. Looking at the way these ‘colonial’ narratives are constructed provides opportunities for how archive collections could be framed in the future. Critical engagements with films and archives can help us understand the impact of past history on the world in which we live now.
The Global South became a free-for-all for colonial powers to prospect for new medicines, supporting its colonisation by creating new markets by producing medicines to enable the colonisers to survive. Closely aligned to this is the medical profession itself; medics and doctors have been in a privileged position historically as their profession is borderless and in the vanguard of colonial influence.
Looking at archive collections forensically, through a decolonising lens, film (whether documentary or fictional) reveals persistent narrative tropes. One of colonial entanglements or “White-Men-in-a-Room- Making-Decisions”, will be shared from Entebbe Encounter (1989) which redramatises the circumstances behind an outbreak of sleeping sickness in Uganda in 1901. Another, showing the ‘triumph’ of Western medicine over traditional medicine being reframed as a pivotal cultural exchange from DDT Versus Malaria (1946) and Jivaro and his drugs (1957).
Considering our understanding of colonial history, we can critique the credibility of these colonial encounters as they are presented on film; are they fact or myth? Their legacy leaves us with questions about how we ethically historicise these narratives.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper studies two Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company films in Sumatra during the 1920s. It aims to understand the imagination made by industrial power in the colonial era that lingers to this day—peculiar imaginations and, simultaneously, crucial markers of people's lives.
Contribution long abstract:
What can we learn from films made under the notions of capitalism in a location colonized by a European power and later transferred to the hand of a sovereign and modern nation-state? This paper hinges on two different poles of colonial imaginaries by examining the film made by an industrial power during colonial times: the imagination of the maker and the imaginaries transplanted to the colonized. To the people that never considered existed in the first place when the industrial power made the imaginations. In this case, it is the people of Sumatra island, which today is part of the Republic of Indonesia. This paper focuses on Island of Yesterday and Conquering the Jungle, produced by Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and released in the 1920s. These films tell stories of the modern achievement of a United States company on a far east island which also showcased the life and custom of the people. By studying the archives of Goodyear’s operation in Sumatra, the Dutch East Indies colonial, and modern Indonesia, this paper aims to understand the kind of imagination that lingers after the end of the colonial era. The imaginations relate to how the people in a young nation such as Indonesia constructs and sees themselves as part of a globalized world. A part reality, a part imagination. Both are peculiar as they are not rooted in the tangible facts the people know and have. Yet, their lives depend upon that imagination; however strange and foreign those imaginations are.
Contribution short abstract:
Focusing on the film productions of the White Fathers in Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi (1948-1967), this paper will discuss contemporary colonial missionary discourses about supposed African film literacy, and chart evidences of local experiences of missionary cinematographic practices.
Contribution long abstract:
The film collection of the Belgian White Fathers consists of 80 mission films dated between 1948-1967, and mainly shot in today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Providing a rich tapestry of missionary perceptions and representations of Central Africa, the White Fathers’ film production should primarily be seen as an exponent of postwar Belgian colonial cinematographic practices and ideas. Whereas during the interwar period attendance to film screening was structurally prohibitive, postwar Belgian colonial policies became more lenient regarding local film consumption, leading to the emergence of film productions that specifically addressed local audiences across the colony. This paper aims to bring the immediate context of their creation and application into sharper focus. It will do so by, first, examining contemporary colonial missionary discourses about supposed African film literacy, at the time imbued with the idea that ‘Africans’ needed films tailored to their supposed ‘capacities’ as a film audience. Secondly, it will present fragmentary evidences of how communities and individuals participated in, reacted or opposed to missionary filming activities and film screenings, as represented in non-filmic sources such as missionary periodicals, scripts, correspondences and photographic archives. By connecting these traces, this paper will shed light on the underexposed yet revealing encounters that took place behind the scenes and during screenings, and doing so will attempt to chart local experiences of colonial missionary cinematographic practices.