- Convenors:
-
Jacqueline Maingard
(University of Bristol)
Emma Sandon (Birkbeck)
Send message to Convenors
- 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 papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 March, 2023, -Aparna Sharma (UCLA)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines photographs of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Mission that was one of the first missions to be based in the northeastern region of India (1842-1967). The paper will analyse the construction of ‘native’ subjects in missionary photographs and the uses those photographs served.
Paper long abstract:
Colonial establishments used photography as a tool for knowledge production about colonised lands and peoples. All colonial photography did not however, produce singular or homogenous knowledge. Historicising the aims, methods and uses of various colonial photographic practices facilitates in developing a more nuanced understanding of colonial visualities and the knowledge they uphold. Based on this understanding, this paper examines the photographs of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Mission that was one of the first missions to be based in the northeastern region of India (1842-1967). The paper will analyse the construction of ‘native’ subjects in missionary photographs and the uses those photographs served.
The paper commences with a brief overview of the administrative/ethnographic modality deployed by photographers and officials representative of the British Colonial State who documented the tribes of northeastern India. The administrative/ethnographic modality took the form of type and landscape photography. In contrast to this mode are the more expository missionary photographs whose principle focus was on the growth of missionary activities including conversion, education and colonial medicine in the region. As missionaries had a more sustained presence in the region, their photographs depict tribal societies undergoing deep socio-economic change that the missionaries publicised to congregations in Wales, UK. The paper builds on scholarship that recognises missionary media as an early form of advertising, publicising mission activities in India to secure financial support for an enterprise towards which the Colonial State maintained an ambiguous posture.
The paper concludes with a summary of the distinguishing features of missionary photography.
Ross Bowden
Paper short abstract:
This illustrated presentation examines some of the ways in which the celebrated ethnographic film Cannibal Tours misrepresents the impact of modernisation on village people in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea.
Paper long abstract:
When it was released in 1988, the film Cannibal Tours, by the activist Australian film maker Dennis O’Rourke, quickly became a classic in the field of visual anthropology and a key work in the growing sub-discipline of the ethnography of tourism. The film documents interaction between a group of tourists, travelling on a luxury river boat, and village people on the Sepik River in northern Papua New Guinea. The film implies that tourists are the end-product of a period of colonial interference in the lives of the local people which has destroyed their vibrant indigenous cultures and reduced them to selling debased artworks and trinkets to uncomprehending outsiders. The film is beautifully photographed but it radically misrepresents the lives of the village people and their relationship to tourists. This paper will explore both its strengths and major weaknesses ethnographically.
Debanjali Biswas (Showtown History Centre, Blackpool)
Paper short abstract:
I focus on embodied, contested, negotiated and other enduring dimensions of dance-making and dance-history in British territories while examining corporeal aesthetics and movements in film and photography archives between 1900 and 1945.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation I ask how performance cultures were recorded and documented across diverse geographies in colonial India. I focus on embodied, contested, negotiated and other enduring dimensions of dance-making and dance-history in British territories while examining corporeal aesthetics and movements in film and photography archives between 1900 and 1945. I draw my material from colonial films and private papers of colonial administrators now archived at the British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum, and India Office. In conjunction with my ethnographic research in Manipur and hinged around questions of epistemic rupture and aesthetic continuities, I examine how movements and dance continued to capture the imagination of ‘exotic Orient’. Analysing from feminist and post-colonial perspectives, this presentation offer questions, arguments, and methods for identifying and confronting archival absences and in the colonial reels.
Triwi Harjito (University of California, Los Angeles)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines dance and performance in colonial film from early 20th century Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies), focusing specifically on the representations of the dancing and performing body in the “official” documentary films produced by the Dutch colonial government from 1912-1942.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the representations of the dancing and performing body on film from colonial Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies), focusing specifically on the “official” documentary films produced by the Dutch colonial government from 1912-1942. Similar to the colonial expositions and museums that were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the films were used primarily to display the wealth, strength and scope of Dutch imperialism, a filmic inventory of the empire’s vast proprietary and economic holdings, including its colonial subjects. According to Ian Aitken and Camille Deprez in the anthology The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia, “the highest number of non-fiction films made by any colonial government was, in all probability, produced by the Dutch in the East Indies” (2016: 10). Given the size of the Dutch colonial film archive, and the ubiquity of Indonesian people in motion, dancing or otherwise, on celluloid display in the films, there has been insufficient critical inquiry and study on the corporeal dimensions and implications of documenting and representing colonized subjectivities on film. This paper seeks to address this lacunae by interrogating the ways in which cinematic technology was used by colonial systems of power to shape and control the construction of knowledge surrounding the colonial subject, performance, and embodiment. While the film format enables audiences to view the surviving colonial films even in the present day, the sharing and circulation of digitized and further decontextualized versions of the films online also produce novel implications and complications.