Access to Empire: Presenting Colonial Films and Decolonizing Film Heritage

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Access to Empire:

Presenting Colonial Films and

Decolonizing Film Heritage

Molly Bower

Supervisor: Eef Masson

Second reader: Christian Gosvig Olesen Submitted: 24 June 2016

University of Amsterdam, M.A.

(Graduate School of Humanities) Preservation and Presentation of the

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1 Introduction: Accessing colonial ﬁlm,

then and now

Usually the ﬁlm screenings were included into a larger colonial program with speeches or musical performances of singers or a local marching band. Lectures were conceived of as a social gathering and were therefore strongly recommended by the Society. Following the “social spirit” the Weilburg branch asked the viewers not to leave the lecture hall

immediately after the ﬁlm screening but to stay for a glass of beer and talk about the things people had seen or listened to.

(Wolfgang Fuhrmann, “Locating Early Film Audiences: Voluntary Associations and Colonial Film,” 296)

The pro-colonial agenda of film screening environments has not always been explicit, but in the case of the events organized by the German Colonial Society, it could not have been more clear. Their popular1_{screenings held between 1905 and 1908 by local branches of this society were part}

of a larger effort to promote nationalism, along with German colonial policies and investments.2

Branches of the society were present “in almost every German city and town”3_{, and the screened}

films were largely produced by amateur cinematographer Carl Müller and depicted scenes, landscapes, and phantom rides in the German colonies of East Africa.4_{The screenings' steadiest}

attendees were invited groups from the German Colonial Women's Association, school children, and soldiers5_{. The events were made part of pro-colonial political campaigns, when during the}

legislative election campaign of 1907, the Society organized screening-lectures to reach the working class and promote candidates from the “colonial wing in the Reichstag.”6_{The film}

screening was used, in other words, as a place for constructing and solidifying convictions about the colonies.

While scholarship on colonialism in film theory has focused on formally constructed representations, much less has been said with regard to how the act of presenting of colonial film history day can construct knowledge. As this introduction will show, films become sources of colonial knowledge within specific screening environments. However, screening environments can also challenge the colonial knowledge such films aimed to reproduce. Overall, this research will

1 Wolfgang Fuhrmann, "Locating Early Film Audiences: Voluntary Associations and Colonial Film,"

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 299.

2 Ibid., 295. Note: According to Fuhrmann, one explicit link to colonial investments can be found in the

membership and support of Adolph Woermann, a powerful investor and trader in German colonies. As a member of the Colonial Society, Woermann sponsored ﬁlms to promote his shipping and transport businesses in the colonies, which were then screened by the Woermann Company in German harbor cities to promote the business and its military ties.

3 Ibid., 293. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 296. 6 Ibid., 298.

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seek to theorize how colonial film history forms part of practice in film archives, and to identify how colonial films are used to resist the legacies of oppression they once had a hand in promoting.

In this context, “colonial films” are those which take as their subject people, places or events that existed or took place under or as a direct result of colonial occupation. This term, which I define for the purposes of this research, will refer to films made largely between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century, and may include films, videos and moving images made after this period that take as their subject de-colonization.7_{I will open with a discussion of}

how screenings of colonial films have constituted an important part of intellectual and cultural life, in order to show the reader how such films formed part of a culture of colonial support. Such a culture is strongly linked to oppressive colonial projects, according to Edward Said, in its promotion, at times, of “the disturbingly familiar ideas about flogging or death or extended punishment being required when 'they' misbehaved or became rebellious, because 'they' mainly understood force or violence best; 'they' were not like 'us,' and for that reason deserved to be ruled.”8_{Now, many colonial films are housed in collections at national film archives in Europe,}

particularly in those countries that pursued colonial occupation into the twentieth century.

Contemporary access to these films through such archives' presentations demands an engagement with the history of film's ties to empire. To start, I will discuss how those ties were formed in part through the context surrounding their presentation.

1.1 Then: Colonial perspectives escaping the frame

Throughout their histories, colonial films have been screened under a variety of conditions, but according to research into the history of colonial films, the original screening conditions generally promoted the perspective of the filmmakers. The range of such perspectives spans from

instructional state propaganda, directly promoting policies of colonial governance, to earnest but selective depictions of happy family life in European settlers' home movies. A discussion of the different types of colonial films' screening conditions, both theatrical and non-theatrical, public and private, will illustrate the ties between films' exhibition and the promotion of empire.

The context through which most colonial images made their way to commercial screening halls was in the form of newsreels. These single-reel films were shot, edited, and distributed quickly and presented as news about events in the colonies, screened there and also screened “back home.” Adding a journalistic (though often sensationalist) tone to the established style of film travelogues, many newsreels took as their subjects faraway locales, often colonies. While they sometimes looked at lighter human-interest stories, they also addressed events of military intervention, though not

7 Spelling note: This spelling, with a hyphen (“de-colonize”) refers to the political process of being granted,

ﬁghting for and/or establishing political independence and self-government following a colonization, annexation, or occupation. This is to distinguish this usage from the term “decolonial” as a theoretical concept and approach.

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without care for the preservation of empire. Gerda Jansen Hendriks's research into the limited newsreel coverage of the Indonesian war for independence (1945-49) reveals its imperial strategy: “The Dutch policy was seen as ‘providing information’. With hindsight, it is certainly justified to call the information policy ‘propaganda’, because it was explicitly produced to influence the opinion of the Dutch audience, even if the authors believed their vision was balanced and impartial.”9_{The theatrical newsreel format was presented as objective journalism, lending these}

films an authority that, “with hindsight” promoted for audiences a biased view of colonial governance.

Access to colonial moving images also took place far beyond European theatrical conditions. Such screenings included those of state-funded colonial film companies, which

organized screenings within colonies for the educational and instructional films they produced for an audience of the colonized. Rosaleen Smyth has written about the British Colonial Film Unit, one such organization. In addition to publishing the magazine Colonial Cinema, which promoted colonial engagement with film,10_{the Unit organized “on-site” screenings as rhetorical and}

educational opportunities. Smyth describes a typical screening environment for the company's films:

The films were exhibited in 'static' cinemas, often community halls or at mission stations, and by means of mobile cinema vans in rural and some urban areas. The mobile cinema vans were fitted with a generator and projection facilities and would exhibit in areas accessible by road. Sometimes portable projectors and screens were carried on river boats, trains, or as head loads. The films were in 16mm and, in the beginning, silent. Each film was provided with a commentary in simple English which was given through a loud speaker in the local language by an interpreter.11

There, films were screened as part of a “multi-faceted propaganda campaign,” accompanied by lectures, music, and pro-Empire rhetoric. An excerpt of an extended program from a 1944 screening in the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) provides an idea of the particularly controlled

environment of these screenings:

(1) Loud martial music or recording of vernacular songs popular locally, to bring the audience to the van (15-30 minutes).

(2) Opening talk, dealing with the reason for the van's presence, the care of Britain for colonial peoples, the African family life and the strong feeling for the land, and the

attempts of the Nazis to destroy in occupied Europe the similar ways of life and to ﬁlch the ownership of the land and the fruits of the soil.

(3) Film: Empire's New Armies12_{--Army training from various parts of the Empire, the aim}

9 Gerda Jansen Hendriks, "‘Not a Colonial War’: Dutch Film Propaganda in the Fight against Indonesia,

1945–49," Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 3-4 (2012): 412.

10 All issues of the magazine were recently digitized by the BFI and the University of St. Andrews at. They

are available online: http://cinemastandrews.org.uk/archive/colonial-cinema/

11 Rosaleen Smyth, "The British Colonial Film Unit and Sub-Saharan Africa, 1939–1945," Historical Journal

of Film, Radio and Television 8, no. 3 (1988): 287-8.

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being to stress the power of the Empire. ….

(12) Closing talk: Remember what you have seen: the Empire is strong; all are members and are safe and free within it. Everyone must do his bit towards winning the war. You have been told what you can do to help. The truth has been shown; avoid rumour.13

In this screening, it is clear that the impact of such colonial films was not always contained entirely within its frame. In this case, screening events were part of explicit efforts to sow obedience among the colonized and, more broadly, to control information.

Colonial film presentations also took place outside the public eye, in the form of home movies and amateur films. Home movies tended to depict a more intimate or impromptu view of colonial conditions. Heather Norris Nicholson writes about the role of amateur films in overseas family life:

Film became a potent means of keeping in touch across distance. Sometimes it served to bridge the generational and geographical gaps between expatriates raising families overseas and relatives elsewhere. Home movies were often made or shown during family visits or periods of leave.14

Amateur films were produced and funded through personal investment, so their production was not explicitly tied to any official colonial agenda. However, they promoted colonial viewpoints in a more subtle way. Nicholson identifies the particularly revelatory amateur gaze of colonial home movies:

Film became a means to reaﬃrm their own self-image and purpose in contexts where European imperialism was beginning to lose its former conﬁdent and self-righteous hold. Footage may capture more private aspects of colonial encounters too, for instance, family attachments to localities.15

Despite the intimacy of amateur home movies, amateur film screenings were not always private, nor did they always have a limited audience reach. Amateur films also travelled and were screened in a variety of public, though largely non-commercial, settings. As Patricia Zimmermann writes, this was particularly true after the standardization of the sixteen-millimeter film gauge as the go-to amateur format:

Bypassing 35mm commercial theatres, films such as [Hopi Horizons, a 1947 amateur sixteen-millimeter film sympathetic to Native Americans struggles in the United States] could be screened in private homes, churches, museums and other more local venues, helping to build a new, different and at times even oppositional distribution system.16

http://www.colonialﬁlm.org.uk/node/5723

13 Smyth, 294-5.

14 Heather Norris Nicholson, "In Amateur Hands: Framing Time and Space in Home-Movies," History

Workshop Journal no. 43 (Spring 1997): 206.

15 Ibid., 205.

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In this way, amateur or home screening environments were a significant site of access to amateur colonial moving images. Despite lacking direct ties to colonial governance, these films' screening contexts implicitly promoted colonial endeavors in spaces and institutions at various levels of society.

Colonial ideology played a role not only in what was seen within the frame of colonial films but also in where and how they were seen. The wide variety of original screening environments used for presenting colonial films points to a wide ubiquity in different contexts. Such films cannot be seen simply as aesthetic expressions of creativity or historical documents, considering the history of the variously academic, private, and politicized contexts in which they were screened, whether produced expressly for them or not. In many of these contexts, the film screenings was only a secondary goal for attendance, and inevitably the primary goal shapes the understanding of the film. In order to understand the kinds of knowledge that colonial films produce, it is necessary to

evaluate how context around such presentations affects them. Presentation conditions stand out as a significant subject of analysis in assessing in the role of colonial films in culture. Later, this

research will theorize and analyze the place of contemporary presentations as they form part of archival institutions. First, however, I will discuss how the possible conditions of accessing archival films can shape how they are to take up a role in today's culture.

1.2 Now: Archival access to colonial ﬁlm

In the current day, accessing these same films, once screened as contemporaneous representations of colonial life and policy, has been affected by technological and institutional shifts in film

archiving practice. One difference is that the technologies that make cinema possible have taken on different forms and are being used for presenting or playing back moving images in different ways than were common in the colonial era. Digital access technology will play a role in this

investigation, insofar as the adoption of digital tools is changing the way film archival collections are presented.

The digital technologies used today for moving image presentation mean that access to a film no longer necessarily means risk to it. Film archives are tasked with preservation of the

integrity and authenticity of moving images, according to film archivist Ray Edmonson's

foundational values.17_{When many of the first European film archives were founded in the middle of}

the twentieth century, the risk of projection meant policies of access and preservation were in conflict. This conflict has even been mythicized (film archivally speaking) in the conflicting presentation and preservation policies of Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française and Ernest Lindgren of the British National Film Archive. Now, however an array of film strip-mechanical

111.

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projector systems exists alongside moving image formats stored and played back using only digital hardware and software. In many film archives considered state-of-the-art, analogue film and video are quickly becoming physical artifacts, destined for storage once the scanning of master prints creates digital access files. With a digital access file in hand, a film programmer can, if not barred by copyright restrictions, exhibit, project, play back, or stream it in any number of technical and curatorial contexts.

Further, the traditional methods of access are being quickly re-conceived after the rapid growth of online video streaming, around the purchase of YouTube by Google in 2006. The following year, Karen F. Gracy asked, “If cultural institutions no longer muster the same authority to curate collections – and by curate I mean shape them through the activities of acquisition,

appraisal, description, deaccessioning, and all the other processes in which such institutions engage – what is their role within society and in regard to cultural heritage?”18_{The same year, the}

University of Southern California published an issue of The Spectator devoted to the effects of digital access, particularly online. The editor of this issue cited the Association of Moving Image Archivists' membership as the main source of responses to his call for papers: “The central drama in this issue is the conflict between technology and archives.”19_{These reflections suggest that the}

raison d'être of film archives – acquiring moving image collections and managing their care and

access – is in transition.

Such a transition means a different approach to access, in particular, one that treats access to and presentation of collections as a core function of film archives. In this case, policies regarding methods of presentation could take a more central place, where approaches to presentation of collections like colonial films may be broached. In writing about the presentation of colonial non-fiction films, former curator at the Netherlands Film Museum and researcher Nico de Klerk asserts that if the role of film archives is to preserve heritage, stronger presentation policies are needed:

Collection policies include, as they should, criteria to specify what an archive is prioritizing at a certain moment and help decide which materials are accepted and preserved or not. So, if there are, and remain, well-considered reasons for collecting and preserving, I see no reason why an archive would be so casual when oﬀering these materials to the public.... Collecting and presenting archival materials do – or should – not merely mirror each other in terms of materials, but also in terms of considerations.20

With this call, de Klerk suggests that, as much as these institutions' raison d'être is conscientious acquisition, just as central are conscientious presentations. This conclusion demands that more investigation be done into how to present audiovisual heritage, and particularly colonial film heritage. In my analysis of theory and selected cases in later chapters, I will suggest how legacies of

18 Karen F. Gracy, "Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital," Library Trends 56, no. 1 (2007): 184. 19 Lucas Hilderbrand, "Media Access Preservation and Technologies: Editor's Introduction," Spectator 27,

no. 1 (Spring 2007): 5.

20 Nico de Klerk, "Showing and Telling: Film Heritage Institutes and Their Performance of Public

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colonialism in archival film collections can be addressed in the context and conditions of their presentation.

1.3 Overview of research

The issues introduced in the preceding sections suggest that there are legacies of colonial power that have an effect on how film presentations work, as well as suggest a need for analysis of approaches to presenting colonial films. Such conditions pose motivating questions. What political, social, and cultural conditions affect the presentation and reception of colonial films? And can the archival environment, the film medium, and decolonizing strategies mold their contemporary interpretation? Finally, what concepts can be useful in interpreting the relationship between colonialism and film in the space of their presentation? Motivated by these broad questions, my specific research concerns have been geared toward an understanding of the impact of colonial film presentations as an activity of audiovisual heritage institutions. I regard large national institutions conceptually as gatekeepers of culture and history and leaders in their field, and will therefore gear my analysis toward such institutions, rather than smaller or one-off initiatives and projects.

The examples mentioned in this chapter so far point to an established field of analyzing colonialism in cinema historically. However, there has been less attention paid to contemporary presentations of such films, particularly in relation to their status as cultural heritage. In the next chapter, I will review literature pertinent to these questions, drawing from a variety of fields. I will establish using film and archival theory how moving images shape and are shaped by the past, and how audiovisual heritage is shaped by colonial epistemologies. Then, I will introduce and propose concepts, borrowing from relevant literature, that will support my approach to analyzing colonial film presentations in archives.

My approach will aim to contribute strategies for “decolonizing” film heritage that will be explored in my case studies. In the scope of what I will refer to as the “filmic archive,” I will look at the Colonial Film Catalogue, a web-based access portal for colonial films released in 2010. This case study will explore how this online archive presents colonial films and reflects on the role of interpretation in their reception. It will also discuss the role of the online spaces as sites of presentation for films dealing with colonialism. The research-based Catalogue will reveal issues regarding online engagement and the construction of a relationship between interpretation and image in such spaces. Next, I will look back on the EYE's 2013 found-footage installation Looming

Fire by Péter Forgács. In this study, I will look at the film installation as a “contact zone,” or a

space where conflicting narratives can emerge and challenge the dominating gaze of amateur colonial film.

Avoiding traditional screening programs, festivals, or publications as case studies, I look to more unorthodox objects of analysis in an effort to explore the broadening scope of moving image presentation contexts. The end-to-end screening programs of cinémathèques and festivals no longer

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dominate today's moving image consumption. Online streaming platforms and non-theatrical spaces fitted with digital projectors show moving images in spaces and environments previously

impossible. In the selection of these formats, I hope to shed light on the way technologies and spectatorship practices in transition can impact the presentation of archival moving images.

I also draw theoretical inspiration in the selection of these two case studies as part of their their national heritages. In his book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said explains his focus on novels from England and France21_{in a way that I believe I can mirror in my analysis. Throughout}

his selected period of analysis, there was continuous output of novels in these two regions. I see my national cases similarly: compared to much of the world, England and the Netherlands both had highly developed and documented industries of moving image production and consumption throughout the twentieth century. This means both that these countries had largely continuous output of films, and also that their periods of cinema industry and culture were contemporaneous with their governments' long-standing colonial projects. This suggests the possibility of a strong tie in these cases between film culture and colonialism, with which the national audiovisual heritage institutions there would contend.

Finally, I would like to make a note regarding my personal position in relation to this research. Said, again, identifies his book as an “exile's book,” being between places and alienated from an originary one, and on “both sides of the imperial divide.”22_{I would like similarly to locate}

my personal origins with relation to imperialism. As an American by birth, I am an outsider to both the nations from which I select my cases and also the territories depicted within the films therein. In other words, I am not directly implicated in the specific nation-building contexts of these cultural heritage institutions. I was raised outside the historical centers of the imperial powers implicated here, and I hope that such distance in origin provides perspective. As Said also writes, the United States is not immune to cultural narratives of imperialism. Indeed, it is a principal arbiter of a contemporary imperial ethos, driving international trade, military intervention, and much

humanitarian policy. I focus on European cases not only because of my physical proximity, writing from the University of Amsterdam, though this physical and educational context informs both my interest and professional-academic perspective. I also select those European cases emerging from institutions with long-term support for the conservation of cultural heritage, which presents a future of opportunities to expose this heritage to their regional audiences, whose identities and makeup are rapidly shifting.

21 Said, xxii-xxiii. 22 Ibid., xxvi.

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2 Theoretical foundations: Decolonizing ﬁlm heritage

The link between culture and empire, and particularly between film and empire, shows that cultural heritage is particularly susceptible to taking up and also particularly suited to changing damaging colonial legacies. Drawing on a large corpus of aesthetic history, cultural heritage institutions are poised to contribute much to the digital cultural landscape. However, it is important to approach such contributions with a regard for issues of power imbalance, particularly when dealing with colonial history and its lingering narratives. Colonial film heritage provides a particularly charged opportunity to discuss issues of political contestation in access and presentation.

The previous chapter introduced some of the underpinnings of colonial moving image heritage, as well as the conditions for accessing that heritage in the current day. The purpose of the current chapter will be to ground the larger discussion and later case studies in a theoretical

landscape, as a way of situating both the focus and approach of this research. Overall, the theory discussed here should provide the reader with an understanding of preceding scholarly

investigations that will be relevant to the issues of colonial film presentations. First, I will review literature from the fields of film theory, archival science, history, and philosophy which will illustrate the issues with which colonial film presentations in archives must engage. Next, I will introduce and elaborate on concepts that will be used in later chapters to analyze how the case studies either reproduce or resist colonial legacies and narratives. By bringing together theory from the fields of archive science, film analysis, decolonial theory, museum studies, and philosophy I hope to build up a foundation of theoretical perspectives that can be used to contribute to a

conversation about the relationship between cultural heritage and colonialism. With this theoretical introduction in mind, I will then turn to two case studies to apply some of these concepts.

2.1 Review of relevant literature: Film, archives, and colonialism

In this section, I will motivate the focus of my research in theoretical terms, by introducing

perspectives that indicate a need to assess how film archives present colonial film collections. First, I will discuss some film theoretical perspectives that indicate the ability of moving images to contain and construct power relations, particularly with regard to colonial power relations. Next, I will draw on theorizations of the archive as an institution and concept that point to its status as a site of selectivity and bias, in order to indicate the implications of such a site for presenting colonial histories. This review of relevant perspectives and concepts will situate this research as an

investigation into several fields, which contribute perspectives on historical power imbalance and cultural heritage.

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2.1.1 Filmic constructions of power and history

Perspectives in film theory have identified how the medium can represent power dynamics,

particularly colonial power dynamics. This has been argued in the work of Marcia Landy, who has written about the role of power in films about the past, and in debates around the gaze in films depicting a colonial power imbalance. This discussion will introduce the focus of the theoretical issues already identified in colonial film, and draw out some film discourses to which this research can contribute. This section will lead into the following discussion of how the current archival context of such films are at issue in their presentation.

The focus of this research is, in part, how representations of the past in film can

communicate or even reproduce the power dynamics depicted in them. In her writing on historical uses of film, Marcia Landy conceives of films about history as both political and cultural tools. She takes an approach to history that draws on the work of Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, where culture is not merely a superstructure to an economically-driven hegemony, but rather it constitutes a major part of the politics and social life that support and create power.23_{Landy goes on to study}

representations of the past in film and how political messages are represented using filmic language. One of Landy's examples illustrates how filmed representations can construct and impose a political identity for filmed subjects, particularly those deemed “Other.” Landy writes that in Nazi propaganda films were “a range of disturbing but instructive uses of historical images.”24_{The film}

Der ewige Jude (1940), she writes, uses framing, editing, and narration to construct a racialization

of the German Jewish community. The film is “constructed like a catalogue,”25_{likening it both to}

archival notions, in its “catalogue” structure, and also to the academy, through methodological references to ethnography and taxonomy. The film Landy describes also pushes an essentializing agenda through the use of specific framing and editing: “The film capitalizes on voyeurism in its intrusive uses of the close-up, with its probing of marginalized individuals and its focus on the strange and exotic nature of their clothing, behavior and language.”26_{Such films, she writes,}

constructout of selected traces of history, in the form of non-fiction found footage, a supposedly long-standing “Jewish problem.” This base racialization, or racial distinction of Other, could be applied to any of the diverse communities the regime deemed problematic. This broadly justified a response to a diversity of their political challenges – socialism, sexuality, wealth distribution, intellectual discourse. Constructing these justifications using the power of filmed reality manages to rationalize the regime's responses, just as constructions about the colonial subject helped to

rationalize, using film, continued colonial occupation and rule.

Colonial films at times also use these same techniques of cataloguing, ethnography,

fascination, and voyeurism to transform the subjects into fetishized objects, and to contribute to the distinctions of self and other that supported (and support ongoing) colonial oppression. Landy's

23 Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 7. 24 Ibid., 234.

25 Ibid., 237. 26 Ibid., 237-8.

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analysis indicates how films of the past, particularly those that seek to demonstrate racial and cultural difference, use a set of identifiable formal techniques.

One concept for analyzing the legacy of colonial film has been through the reappropriation of the gaze in filmed images of the colonized, particularly in early non-fiction film like travelogues, newsreels, or home movies. In this approach, termed by Paula Amad the “return-of-the-gaze

hermeneutic,”27_{when a colonized subject acknowledges and gazes directly into the camera filming}

them, such an act is read as appropriating agency and challenging the perspective of the camera's gaze. Film theorist Tom Gunning has taken this approach, like when “native” filmed subjects in the 1903 film Native Woman Washing a Negro Baby in Nassau, B.I. acknowledge and gaze at the camera. He writes that with this image, “the spectacle makers have themselves become a spectacle”, and such an acknowledgement “turn[s the] tables.”28_{In recent decades, this agency-giving}

interpretation of a filmed subject gazing back toward the camera lens has provided an approach for analysis of colonial films.

However, the agency found in the return-of-the-gaze in has also seen review and critique. In her analysis of the hermeneutic, Amad challenges this approach. She accepts that this type of interpretation of the cinematic gaze helped to displace a limited spectator agency derived from the dominant approaches of apparatus theory. This displacement had implications for challenging colonial narratives, since it “ushered in the possibility of the annihilation of the Western self while ethically intending to supplant the passive spectator of apparatus theory with an active witness – a witness not just to history; but to a history of the gaze in cinema.”29_{Amad, however, indicts a type}

of film discourse on early non-fiction films of empire that oversimplify agency and subjectivity, in order to “historically unburden the medium of film of its entomologizing and zoologizing legacy regarding the visual representation of racial and colonial others.”30_{She goes on to argue that this}

approach is “belated,” and that it remains virtual, discursive, and unlinked to oppressive structures.31

Amad's critique concludes by looking to recent re-considerations and re-contextualizations of archival colonial film as alternative approaches to colonial film analysis. She cites the repatriation to Benin of some early travelogue films from Albert Kahn's collection of colonial films, as well as the BFI's Colonial Film Catalogue (the subject of my analysis in chapter 3). In these examples, Amad sees concrete changes in the management of colonial film heritage, a practice on which I hope this research can shed light.

27 Paula Amad, "Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory's Gift to

Film Studies," Cinema Journal 52, no. 3 (2013): 49-74.

28 Tom Gunning, "The Whole World within Reach: Travel Images without Borders," in Virtual Voyages:

Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeﬀrey Ruoﬀ (London: Duke University Press, 2006), 40. See also Gunning,

"Before Documentary: Early Nonﬁction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic," in Uncharted Territory: Essays on

Early Nonﬁction Film, ed. Daan Heritors and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Netherlands Film Museum,

1997).

29 Amad, 62. 30 Ibid., 53. 31 Ibid., 62-4.

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2.1.2 Archive as a site of colonial bias

Next, I will introduce some theoretical perspectives that indicate how the archive is a selective and biased site of colonial histories, through its conceptualization, institutional practice, and relationship to the production of knowledge. These perspectives will provide some theoretical ground for my attention on film archives as sites and sources of presentations of colonial film.

Recent theorizations of the archive as concept and institution identify it as highly selective source of only incomplete histories. Such claims, broadly referred to as the “archival turn,” stem largely from the work of Jacques Derrida and his concept of “archive fever,” through which he articulates that archives are not totalizing and abstract collections of historical knowledge, but are rather by nature exclusive and located. Derrida contends that the archive is a site that, being populated by records of some histories and not others, paradoxically “produces memory but

produces forgetting at the same time.”32_{This exclusivity betrays the presence of what he refers to as}

a “selective power”33_{that collective memories built from the archive are dictated by.}

The existence of such a bias or “power” has long been denied in institutional archiving, whose practices can be seen to be grounded in Enlightenment distinctions between body and mind, objectivity and subjectivity. One of the establishing notions embraced in the development of modern archives was the practice of “neutrality.” Institutional archives of the nineteenth century, according to archiving theorist Terry Cook, were created in the West to collect evidence used in legal proceedings to establish judicial and state truths.34_{Around this time, archivist Hilary}

Jenkinson helped to professionalize and codify the practice of archiving by writing manuals of instruction for archivists. The call for neutrality in his Manual of Archive Administration is

unequivocal: “the Archive [possesses] qualities of impartiality and authenticity which it must be the Archivist's main duty to conserve.”35_{He describes this characteristic of impartiality as “possessed”}36

by to the archive itself, existing thusly outside or despite the work of the archivist. Here, Jenkinson instructs the archivist to avoid subjectivity in work, as it “might be positively dangerous”37_{to the}

archive. Such recommendations for practice are rooted in the dominant epistemology of Western philosophy, which emphasizes the existence of objective truths separate from subjectivity or experience. In the institutional archive, aligning itself with the rationality of the state, objectivity and its practical imperative, neutrality, were identified as important principles of the archival practice and profession. Such institutional practice and philosophical basis are challenged by the postmodern conceptualizations of the archive with which I align my research.

32 Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever" (transcribed seminar), in Reﬁguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton

et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 54.

33 Ibid., 40.

34 Terry Cook, "Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms," Archival

Science 13, no. 2-3 (2013): 106.

35 Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration Including the Problems of War Archives and

Archive Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 164.

36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 106.

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Indeed, efforts by historians to recover the records and histories of marginalized people and places have indicated that archives were not as neutral as intended. Historian Howard Zinn

describes archives as containing a “bias toward the important and powerful people of the society, tending to ignore the impotent and obscure.”38_{Zinn taps into a discourse that considers archives as}

places that not only contain but also actively produce records, and that do not record only a single narrative of history but many. Rejecting the assumption, identified by Cook, that the archive is “passively inherited, natural or organic”39_{offers a conceptualization that challenges traditional}

archival frameworks. Verne Harris worked in the “normalization” process at South African archives during the transition from the state's apartheid, a process which by its very necessity betrays the unreliability of archival neutrality. Calling impartiality “a chimera turning record-makers into the pawns of those who have power,” Harris in his reflections calls for “archives for justice,”40_a

framework of archiving motivated by resistance to replications of power relations and resistance to the control of archives by those in power to secure it41_{. These perspectives together illustrate a}

theoretical basis for the conviction that archives, particularly those focusing on colonial rule, are steeped in a bias toward those in power.

To support my focus on colonial films in presentation, where they can be sources of knowledge, I will draw on theories that identify archives as sites of knowledge production. In de-constructing the link between the archive and truth, Derrida invites us to look critically at the interpretive work done through archiving. Between events and the “archivization” of them, as he calls this work, is an ideological power apparatus: “...the archive as being not simply a recording of the past, but also something which is shaped by a certain power, a selective power, and shaped by the future, by the future anterior.”42_{The term “future anterior” generally refers to a grammatical}

tense like in the phrase “will have been.” In other words, this “future anterior” perspective that shapes the archive does so on the basis of what “will have been,” indeed, what the archive “will have” created. In this conceptualization, there is both the fact of what has unquestionably been forgotten from the archive, but also the implication, in its orientation toward the future, of later reclamation. Future interpretations already begin to determine what is selected for the archive. This is a concept of the archive where, despite being the product of existing power relations, it is shaped as much by future production as it is by the past.

Further research has shown that colonial epistemologies shape what is recorded in the archive, and how historical knowledge is produced within archival structures. Ann Laura Stoler, in her book Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense,

38 Howard Zinn, "Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest," The Midwestern Archivist 2, no. 2 (1977): 21. 39 Terry Cook, "Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of Archives in Constructing

Social Memory," in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, ed. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 174.

40 Verne Harris, "Archives, Politics and Justice." In Political Pressure and the Archival Record, ed. Margaret

Procter, Michael G. Cook and Caroline Williams (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), 179.

41 Ibid., 178. 42 Derrida, 40.

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conceptualizes how “colonial common sense” is the intermediary between colonial events and archival records thereof. She focuses on the production of the archive itself, specifically the colonial archive, by studying archives of colonial administration in the Netherlands Indies. Identifying tendencies toward euphemism and concealment in the language of colonial archival documents, Stoler finds archives to be “condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety.”43_{The weight}

of state authority in the production of archival records allowed the paradoxes of colonial society to be legible in archival records. Indeed, despite any visible “anxieties,” colonial archives' ultimate responsibility was the continuous governance of colonial territories and subjects: “these colonial archives were both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate

technologies of rule in themselves.”44_{The conception of the archive as a place where certain biased}

types of knowledge are established, preserved, and reproduced reveals much about the cultural environment these institutions serve or have served. The use of an archival collection therefore merits critique in the way it is structured within a “common sense” that reproduces certain types of knowledge.

In this review of literature, I have introduced some concepts that point toward film within an archival setting as a source of colonial bias worthy of critical exploration. This discussion of

selected debates is not comprehensive of all perspectives on these subjects, however, it establishes a basis upon which my analysis may be able to contribute. In this analysis, I will take an approach that aims to resist the issues established here of colonial filmic narratives and biased sources of history, drawing on a number of theoretical inquiries, which I will explore further below.

2.2 Theoretical frameworks: Re-readings and contact in colonial ﬁlm

presentations

In this section, I will draw on theoretical concepts that frame the approach I will take to archival presentations of colonial films. First, I will establish an epistemological perspective, which indicates a need to decolonize presentations of film heritage as a form of knowledge production. Next, I will introduce two broad concepts for approaching the case studies in the following chapters. The second subsection proposes that re-readings and interpretation applied to colonial texts and archives can be sources of decolonization. In the third subsection, I will propose the idea that presenting contested narratives and contact are strategies toward the decolonization of film heritage. These approaches draw from theoretical discourses discussed here and will be used in further analysis of case studies to demonstrate ways of decolonizing film histories.

43 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Oxford:

Princeton University Press, 2009), 20.

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2.2.1 Decolonial epistemology

My humble claim is that geo- and body-politics of knowledge has been hidden from the self-serving interests of Western epistemology and that a task of decolonial thinking is the unveiling of epistemic silences of Western epistemology and aﬃrming the epistemic rights of the racially devalued, and decolonial options to allow the silences to build arguments to confront those who take ‘originality’ as the ultimate criterion for the ﬁnal judgment.

(Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” 162)

In forming an epistemological perspective, I will draw on “decolonial” discourses, which seek to actively change the trajectory of knowledge production and to de-marginalize and amplify oppressed voices. In recent writing, philosopher and semiotician Walter D. Mignolo describes a framework around the coloniality of knowledge, proposing that Western epistemology is formed by, complicit in, and reproducing colonial inequalities. He asks, “Why did eurocentered epistemology conceal its own geo-historical and bio-graphical locations and succeed in creating the idea of universal knowledge as if the knowing subjects were also universal?”45_{Such a perspective}

contends, as does my later analysis, that Western cultural production largely draws from an

epistemological canon that assumes a universal subjectivity, not accounting for inequality in access to power.

This form of decolonial thinking invites products of a colonial epistemology, then, for critique that acknowledges “the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally.”46_{Decolonial critique builds}

on this acknowledgment by demanding, as indicated in the epigraph above, not simply censure of that which produced the “silences of Western epistemology,” but indeed a retrieval of the narratives once devalued, or “classified as underdeveloped” by colonial epistemology. My framework, then, will similarly seek not just to reveal imbalances of power in the history of colonial film, but also to identify strategies for retrieving the voices and histories silenced by this imbalance.

2.2.2 Reinterpreting narratives

The ﬁlmic archive as site of interpretation

Cultural texts exist within a power structure that informs and houses it, and the conceptual housing for such texts, the “cultural archive,” is therefore a site for analysis of such power. Drawing on Stuart Hall's approach, Said defines culture as “all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure.”

45 Walter D. Mignolo, "Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom," Theory,

Culture & Society 26, no. 7-8 (2009): 160.

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Culture, he goes on, also includes the “refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought.”47_{This definition addresses both the aesthetic and social}

bases of culture, a pairing that suggests that cultural objects are at once sovereign and produced by their political context.

Applying his definition of culture to the imperial legacy, Said writes: “the great cultural archive, I argue, is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made.”48_{Said refers to the “cultural archive” as the set of narratives realized in dominant Western}

cultural output, which helped to sustain colonial policies by normalizing the idea that in colonized territories, outside authority was deemed necessary and self-determination an impossibility. These narratives, he argues, have not left contemporary culture and indeed continue to produce unequal social and political categories. When seen as the ideological output of social structures, this cultural archive that was so tied up in imperial history is a source for understanding colonial history.

Exposure to moving images is increasingly an experience of daily life, visible not only in darkened cinemas and at home on televisions, but also in public spaces, on mobile devices, in all manner of museums, schools, and workplaces. Said's reference to the cultural archive, which encompasses works from which re-readings of colonial history can be drawn, may extend to a “filmic archive”: the broad field of moving images “where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made,”49_{and from which depictions of imperial conditions and colonial}

epistemologies emerge and stand for critique. The term “filmic archive” in this sense would clearly implicate film-archival institutions that provide access to their collections, but the concept also includes the corpus of moving images that are increasingly being made accessible,

non-professionally, for research or casual viewing. Drawing on Said's concept, the filmic archive suggests a coloniality to film heritage, where the available narratives of colonial history that exist in moving images are not only affected but largely determined by the powerful in colonial society and the institutions that protected it. Colonial films form only part of the larger filmic archive, but a part worth specifically addressing. Looking at works within this filmic archive demands, also, a

decolonizing interpretation that takes account and aims to challenge the limited perspective represented within it.

Film objects are both records documenting past moments and also unstable chemical objects, whose degradation marks their age. In this two-fold distancing with the past, archival film presentations, particularly those which draw from older collections, are situated within this filmic archive. The temporal distance from their original context implies that new presentations offer opportunities for new interpretation. Said argues that such reinterpretations are part of an era of a “new generation of scholars and critics” that see in the cultural output of the past “lesser histories and perspectives.”50_{Re-screenings take as their site the filmic archive, and the reinterpretations that}

47 Said, xii. 48 Ibid., xxi. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., xvi.

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take place therein can participate in this latent re-analysis.

Critical interpretations of colonial films would not serve simply to denigrate their value. Such reinterpretations would add to the value of these films s powerful aesthetic objects. Said defends the richness of works in the cultural archive, rejecting the idea that identifying imperial biases within a work should inevitably lead to its condemnation: “what we learn about this hitherto ignored aspect actually and truly enhances our reading and understanding” of them and of colonial history.51_{Misplaced efforts to preserve the repute of certain works by ignoring their unwanted}

colonial legacies are attempts to make culture a “protective enclosure: check your politics at the door before you enter it.”52_{Turning a blind eye forms no productive part of a decolonial approach.}

With this in mind, these concepts of narrative and the filmic archive will assist in a decolonial and critical interpretation of colonial imagery on film.

Reading along the grain

Archives must take on the responsibility of inviting unexplored interpretations within their collections, in an effort to pursue the justice that can flow from the knowledge in archives. Film archives have particular opportunities to broaden the limited histories colonial life, in the form of presentations that invite reinterpretation. By pursuing interpretations of colonial films that

acknowledge and work “along” their biases, the limitations in the filmic archive can be challenged. In resistance to imperial narratives, Said argues for the ability in culture to “see the

community's history whole.”53_{One might think that colonial archives sought to surveil and}

document as much of a history as possible. However, in her work on the formation of knowledge in colonial archives, Stoler critiques the suggestion that the state “was always intent on accumulating more knowledge rather than on a selective winnowing and reduction of it.”54_{In this way, she}

argues, archives tend toward the exclusion of certain types of knowledge. The need to protect the perception of the colonial project led to a high level of state control on the production of

authoritative archival records:“Dutch civil servants with too much knowledge of things Javanese were condemned for not appreciating the virtues of limited and selective familiarity.”55_Resistance

comes first in the form of acknowledging these exclusions, but an acknowledgment that takes into account the political context under which records were created, indeed, by reading “along the grain.” According to Stoler, in colonial archives, knowledge is formed along the lines of a “colonial common sense,” and this knowledge is made authoritative by its publication in the archive. This strategy can help to reveal what is hidden in the “archivization” process of colonial history.

This approach is in contrast with attempts to reappropriate power by “reading against the grain” of filmic images. Reading “against the grain,” attempts to uncover ostensibly

counter-51 Ibid., xiv. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 215.

54 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 50.

55 Ann Laura Stoler, "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance," Archival Science 2, no. 1-2 (2002):

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hegemonic narratives within works with at times undeniably hegemonic intentions. However, particularly in the case of colonial histories, and recognizing the archive's “selective power,” one must be willing to read “along the grain,” as Stoler suggests, in order to understand the power-driven context of these histories' authorization in the archive, led sometimes by the “assumptions and constraints of administrators and petty officials of the colonial power.”56_{Indeed, the ability to}

read instead along the grain of colonialism can reveal narratives of resistance in the archive. The role of archival documents as a positive force in the generation and maintenance of power structures initially appears inconsistent with the acquisition habits of a film archive. Indeed, the “documents” of a film archive (films and film collections) are largely donated. Unlike the colonial archival documents Stoler describes, archives' films are not often produced for the purpose of governance or storage, nor along the strict guidelines of colonial reports and memos. However, there are two phenomena of films in archives that make Stoler's conclusions relevant to this framework. First, both text and film documents in archives are designed to enter and affect culture only after they are produced. The paper records from which Stoler draws her research were used as evidence in colonial commissions, which determined colonial policies and established norms regarding colonial subjects.57_{Films are also captured, developed, edited and printed for the express}

purpose of projection, whether on a small or large scale, and are designed to be seen when

presented as finished products. The movement in analog film, in particular, can only be perceived upon projection at a certain speed. As the epistemological significance of governmental documents is in their use as evidence toward governance, the epistemological significance of filmic records of colonial histories is in their presentation. Second, the interpretive element of record-creation Stoler identifies in colonial archives mirrors the framing and editing choices of film production, which shape their meaning as records. “Colonial statecraft,” writes Stoler, “was an administrative

apparatus to gather, draw together, and connect – and disconnect – events, to make them, as needed, legible, insignificant, or unintelligible as information.”58_{The “information” value of films is also}

made “legible,” e.g., only through editing and framing, which are processes of “connect[ion] and disconnect[ion].” If we take up Stoler's call to read the film archive along this grain, these

manipulations in formal structure and presentation can become evidence of anxieties in the colonial status quo.

In an analysis of presentations of colonial films in archives, the concept of reading “along” the grain provides a way of reading the silences and gaps invariably found in colonial film

collections. Because resistance culture calls for attempts to read marginalized histories “whole,” and because an archive “selects” instead, interpretations can read “along” a grain of limited records in film archives. This concept of interpretation will be useful in exploring the historical gaps from between which colonial films draw.

56 Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of

American Archivists, 2009), 272.

57 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 30-31. 58 Ibid., 29.

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Presenting preserved ﬁlm

Lastly in this section, I will introduce two concepts that indicate some of the distinctions in how archival films are presented. This discussion will delineate distinctions in archival film presentation, and will introduce the kinds of curatorial and practical decisions that motivate such presentations. This will build up a relationship between archival collections and their presentation, and introduce some of the concerns that shape how they relate. By discussing this relationship, I aim to conceptualize the practice that will stand for analysis in later chapters: the way colonial films are presented by the archive.

An important distinction in a presentation of archival film is whether it invites navigation of a collection or whether it promotes a programmed experience of viewing. This distinction

determines the combination and choice of images up for interpretation, and also shapes insight into the presentation's place within the archive's collections. In her book on the effect of digital tools on moving image preservation, film archivist and curator Giovanna Fossati addresses the impact of digitization on presentation. She breaks down access – “making available” – into two types: a push model and a pull model.59_{These models can be distinguished by the context of the presentation: the}

push model makes the content part of a curated program, while the pull model creates and on-demand infrastructure for the content. This “push” model is also referred to in her text as a “chaperone” model, suggesting the active role of film curating or programming as a process that “looks after” the film.

The implementation of these models in practice has been affected by recent widespread digitization initiatives. In a discussion of contemporary presentations, therefore, it is worth exploring these effects. According to Fossati, due to the instability and fragility of archival film materials, film archives have tended to favor the push model. On-demand access to celluloid film was not an option for archivists tasked with even their basic preservation, due to risk of damage, and there was indeed no structure in place for providing on-demand access to analog film

collections. The large-scale digitization efforts of large film archives in recent years have allowed for large parts of film archival collections to be scanned and made into digital access files,

providing access to the image without risk to preservation masters or celluloid copies. Since the book was published seven years ago and the digital transition has advanced inside film archives and among their users, the move toward pull models for access has only accelerated. Institutions are reconsidering their presentation policies and wondering whether to “move on from the chaperone model and let go of their collections, acknowledging the new role of the users.”60_{That this “new}

role of the user” informs presentation policy points to the fact that models of presentation within archives shape their interpretation. These models will be useful to keep in mind in later analysis when comparing how interpretation of the presentation is shaped by how chaperoning (or lack

59 Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam

University Press, 2009), 94.

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thereof) molds viewer experience.

This discussion of methods of asserting decolonial interpretations will be taken up in the following chapters of analysis. In particular, these concepts will serve a discussion of presentation and the archival structure of the BFI's Colonial Film Catalogue. That case study will take up the concept of the filmic archive, and will assess how navigational and interpretive structures around the films presented there can promote decolonial readings. Next, I will discuss another approach to my analysis, which focuses on the combination of narratives within them. These perspectives will, I hope, stand alongside one another and work together to produce a valuable exploration in this research.

2.2.3 Film presentation as site of narrative contest and contact

In this section, I will build up concepts around colonial narratives, contact, and resistance that will aid in an analysis of the presentation of colonial films. First, I will introduce perspectives on the persistence of colonial narratives in culture, and how resistance to them can be formed. Then I will present and propose concepts that can aid in resisting such narratives through contestation and contact. These concepts of narratives in contact will be applied to the presentation of colonial films by archives, as a framework to decolonize such events or spaces.

Persistent colonial narratives

Cultural narratives, as well as stereotypes and falsehoods, remain an aspect of contemporary cultural production. Said points out the tendency even after de-colonization to believe in “residual imperialist propensities,”61_{and persistent colonial narratives. In these narratives, colonial}

occupation was inevitable, and the political conflict and violence arising from it equally inevitable. By identifying these narratives in contemporary culture, a resistance culture can propose strategies for challenging them.

Resistance to colonial culture demands a process of confronting and clearing away narratives tied to territories of colonial occupation, and presenting alternatives. In these spaces, territories were redesigned again and again, while at the same time, colonial narratives encouraged domination of them. One example of such a process in narrative fiction is the “quest or voyage motif,” whereby explorers, protagonists in Western literature, struggle and gain “control and authority” over unfamiliar territory.62_{In this motif, the narrative of territorial domination joined}

together cultural and political strategies of promoting colonial endeavours. Narratives of resistance take this motif and turn it on its head – re-territorializing – these narratives as an act of

reclamation.63_{Such reversals “reinscrib[e]” the space where imperialism once subordinated the}

other.64_{This resistance motif is found in the reinterpretation by non-European artists and scholars of}

61 Said, xx. 62 Ibid., 210. 63 Ibid., 212. 64 Ibid., 210.

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what Said calls the “inaugural figures” or fables of colonial history. They contest colonial culture by contributing narratives that challenge these highly established “inaugural figures.” Such reversals of established histories may be met with opposition: “For natives to want to lay claim to that terrain [common to whites and non-whites] is, for many Westerners, an intolerable effrontery, for them actually to repossess it unthinkable.”65_{However, this form of resistance works not only to contest}

culturally-informed histories, it also sustains through imagination a decolonial political movement. The effort at ideological decolonization is “an effort at the restoration of community and

repossession of culture that goes on long after the political establishment of independent nation-states.”66_{In this way, resistance narratives can not only contest but also restore histories embedded}

in cultural production.

The basis of this concept of restoration through opposition has been seen as an overly reductive strategy. Indeed after the publication of Orientalism, Said's first major work to propose the opposition to a dominating Western power, Homi Bhabha, a leading postcolonial cultural theorist wrote: “There is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the colonizer, which is a historical and theoretical simplification.”67_This

criticism points to a need for theorization on the productivity of cultural production in the less “simplifi[ed]” zone of contact, where intertwined narratives draw from the experiences of both colonized and colonizer. Such perspectives can be found in this Said's later work referenced here, published after Bhabha's criticism and which emphasizes cultures of resistance, and in Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the “contact zone.” Next, I will discuss these perspectives in order to formulate an approach for regarding presentations of colonial film as sites where resistance culture can emerge.

Film presentation as contact zone

In the later case studies of colonial film presentations, it will be helpful to draw on concepts that theorize methods of proposing alternatives to dominant colonial narratives. In Culture and

Imperialism, Said describes several phenomena of decolonizing and cultural resistance, from which

I will draw some basis for my analysis. First, as mentioned earlier, resistance culture involves “insist[ing] on the right to see the community’s history whole, coherently, integrally.”68_{This means}

developing and fixing a national language for “sustaining communal memory” and conceiving of communities of solidarity and resistance. Next, Said insists that “resistance, far from being merely a reaction to imperialism, is an alternative way of conceiving human history.”69_{This suggests that a}

resistance culture does not simply correct or negate, but also produces and posits alternative histories. Finally, resistance culture demands “a noticeable pull away from separatist nationalism toward a more integrative view of human community and human liberation.”70_{Here, reflecting on}

65 Ibid., 212. 66 Ibid., 213.

67 Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question..." Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 25. 68 Said, 215.

69 Ibid., 216. 70 Ibid.