- Convenors:
-
Jacqueline Maingard
(University of Bristol)
Emma Sandon (Birkbeck)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Partner Event
- Sessions:
- Friday 10 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 Friday 10 March, 2023, -Contribution short abstract:
This paper discusses the difficulties of excavating the colonial archive, the problems of inadvertently reproducing the colonial gaze, its dehumanising of the subjects of colonialism, and the structures of racism and power embedded in the filming.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper discusses the difficulties of excavating the colonial archive, the problems of inadvertently reproducing the colonial gaze, its dehumanising of the subjects of colonialism, and the structures of racism and power embedded in the filming.
Contribution short abstract:
In Africa, colonialism deployed cinema for its advance and for indoctrination; to these ends, it “mystified” cinema operations. Subsequently, neo-colonialism perpetuated filmmaking-discourse dependency; however, rising decolonisation movements, subvert these dominations.
Contribution long abstract:
In the wake of the screen-decolonisation movement, I am writing a Routledge-commissioned monograph, An Introduction to Inclusive and Critical Film Directing (2024). It initiates, to the discourse of film directing, a “third space” where critical concepts and voices from minoritised cinemas do not remain on the fringes of the location. In other words, this monograph centres not only the indispensability of dramaturgical critical-practice to film directing largely overlooked in the discourse, but slso prioritises inclusion, diversity and cultural sensitivity to directorial craft. To contextualise these two aspects, although the text invites critical Western contexts, it prioritises those of the “Global South”, as well as of Black-British and African-American films, which are largely overlooked in the scholarship of film-production.
This paper will, thus, offer insights into the intersecting location of Postcolonialism, African Cinema, and the Ubuntu Philosophy which informs the methodology of the monograph. It will underscore that this paradigm proposes new concepts and techniques from marginalised film-spaces to mediate production tensions unlimited to the ‘gendering’ of (leadership) roles, team-work fatigue, and problematic leanings of auteur theory, which privileges the director as “the” author - by implication, ‘invisibilizing’/deprioritising team contributions. It will draw on my interviews with actors and directors from the “Global South”, and their approaches to mise en scène, minimalist directing, production collaboration, and psycho-spiritual systems of acting. In summary, the presentation will discuss how the text attempts to disrupt colonial legacies in the discourse of film directing.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper introduces 'Colonial Reels' and the project's proposed research into colonial film holdings in selected British archives and collections: British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, British Film Institute, Royal Anthropological Institute and Wellcome Collection.
Contribution long abstract:
The 'Colonial Reels' project aims to research histories of selected repositories of colonial films; conceptualise the aesthetics and formal practices of the films they hold; analyse the films' strategies of representation; and investigate their circulation, exhibition and audiences. It will actively contribute to debates on decolonisation, reparation and restitution in relation to film archives.
The project will focus on: historical contexts; film-specific infrastructures and technologies; production histories and contexts; representation; and archive. Its time frame is 1920 to 1980, which will be divided into two historical periods: 1920-1950 and 1950-1980, relating to technological shifts and also to British colonial histories, histories of independence and the move from colonial to postcolonial worlds.
The project's primary research methods are: 1) in-depth film analysis and historical research; 2) practice-based research and the creation of thematic short films; and 3) recordings of African and Indian filmmakers cataloguing their experiences with archives, and their perspectives on decolonising the archives.
The paper will reflect on the opportunities the RAI conference has afforded to present and discuss imaginaries that colonial films project, 'interventions and interrogations' (2021), and how we might shape 21st century counter-futures (2023).