Access to Empire: Presenting Colonial Films and Decolonizing Film Heritage

Molly Bower

Supervisor: Eef Masson University of Amsterdam, M.A. Second reader: Christian Gosvig Olesen (Graduate School of Humanities) Submitted: 24 June 2016 Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Access to Empire: Presenting Colonial Films and Decolonizing Film Heritage table of contents

1 Introduction: Accessing colonial film, then and now 1

1.1 Then: Colonial perspectives escaping the frame ...... 2 1.2 Now: Archival access to colonial film ...... 5 1.3 Overview of research ...... 7

2 Theoretical foundations: Decolonizing film heritage 9

2.1 Review of relevant literature: Film, archives, and colonialism ...... 9 2.1.1 Filmic constructions of power and history ...... 10 2.1.2 Archive as a site of colonial bias ...... 12

2.2 Theoretical frameworks: Re-readings and contact in colonial film presentations 14 2.2.1 Decolonial epistemology ...... 15 2.2.2 Reinterpreting narratives ...... 15 The filmic archive as site of interpretation, Reading along the grain, Presenting preserved film 2.2.3 Film presentation as site of narrative contest and contact ...... 20 Persistent colonial narratives, Film presentation as contact zone

3 Case study: The Colonial Film Catalogue in the filmic archive 25

3.1 A single body of work ...... 25 3.2 Colonial imbalances in an online space ...... 27 3.3 Stabilizing decolonial interpretation ...... 30

4 Case study: Péter Forgács' Looming Fire and the film 34 installation as contact zone

4.1 Looming Fire and re-use of archival records ...... 34 4.2 Installation as screening environment for colonial film histories...... 35 4.3 Fragmented micro-histories...... 38 4.4 Speaking back to the colonial gaze ...... 39

5 Conclusions and further research 43

bibliography 45 Bower 1

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. Bower 2 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. 8 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), xi. Bower 3 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. 12 Archival information (no streaming video) about this film is listed on the Colonial Film Catalogue: Bower 4

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. 16 Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana University Press, 1995) Bower 5

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. 17 Ray Edmonson, Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles (Paris: UNESCO, 2016), 9. Bower 6 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 Accountability" (doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University, 2015), 220. Bower 7 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 Bower 8 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. Bower 9

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. Bower 10

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. Bower 11 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. Bower 12

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. Bower 13

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. Bower 14 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. 44 Ibid. Bower 15

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. 46 Ibid., 161. Bower 16

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. Bower 17 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): 101-2. Bower 18 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. Bower 19

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. 60 Ibid., 98. Bower 20 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. Bower 21 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. Bower 22 political developments toward nationalism in some post-colonial71 states, Said argues against what he thinks are dangerous tendencies, recreating Western colonial power structures and justifying “anachronistic attitudes.” It is important, in suggesting alternative histories and narratives, not to lean on notions of nationalism, ones that Pratt's concept will also seek to address. One method that emerges from such claims about resistance culture is creating spaces of critical engagement cross-culturally. Addressing the opportunities for decolonial contact in contemporary society, Said writes:

The point of my book is that [non-white immigrant] populations and [newly empowered] voices have been [in the midst of Western metropolises] for some time, thanks to the globalized process set in motion by modern imperialism; to ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to miss what is essential about the world in the past century.72

Here, Said argues that an analysis of imperialist culture cannot be as simple as “us versus them,” not only because of contemporary co-existence, but also because this proximity he describes within “Western metropolises” emerged from the very imperialism that limited voices from outside the West. This emphasizes that the audience of Western culture is composed of intertwined but imbalanced communities. In order to formulate an analysis of presentations of films not only as texts, but presentations as events or spaces, I will also draw on concepts applied to the field of museum studies. A history of the exhibition of art and objects acquired under colonial conditions poses challenges for thinking about museum presentations and the epistemologies of colonialism.73 One concept that has been taken up in museum curating is that of the “contact zone,” which builds on the previous discussion of cross-cultural contact. I will work to extend the concept of “contact zone” to apply it to the film presentation as a “contact zone,” in order to offer a framework for inviting the exhibition of colonial histories while addressing the legacy of representation in exhibition. Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of the contact zone in her field of comparative literature, reflecting on Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities.74 Anderson's concept posits that the world's nations in the modern era are communities imagined and constructed through assumptions about shared culture, these assumptions promulgated for the sake of consolidating political power.75 While many

71 Spelling note: This spelling, with a hyphen, (“post-colonial”) refers to a geographical region, nation, or people that has emerged from colonial rule to independence or political sovereignty. This is to distinguish this meaning from the theoretical field of “Postcolonialism” or “postcolonial studies.” 72 Said, xx. 73 See, for one, Mieke Bal's discussion about exhibitions of non-Western art at the American Museum of Natural History in “Telling, Showing, Showing Off.” Published in the journal Critical Inquiry 18, no. 3 (1992): 556-94. 74 For a full discussion of this concept, see Anderson's book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 75 Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 37-8. Bower 23 colonial film presentations have helped promote the homogeneity, fraternity and boundaries of imagined communities, a contact zone would create “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived today.”76 These “social spaces,” shaped to facilitate the exploration of power difference, can be productive in addressing and shifting that balance of power. This concept for approaching differing power relations will be useful for analysis of the power relations embedded in film archival collections, and the issues at stake in presenting those works. Film presentations as events, spaces, and texts can engage with the concept of contact zone, to encourage social or aesthetic challenges to the sometimes privileged, dominating, or exoticizing perspective constructed through film. A film presentation can become a contact zone by presenting and promoting engagement with a counter-narrative to such a perspective, either within the presentation apparatus, like the image, audio, or accompanying media, or by creating a discursive social environment around the apparatus that itself fosters such a counter-narrative. For example, in a DVD publication of early twentieth century non-fiction films from the Netherlands Indies,77 originally mute films are presented with music. The types of accompanying musical selections vary, from recordings of traditional Indonesian music to popular songs from the time period, the latter selection mimicking an “original” viewing experience. Such a recreated viewing experience would not emphasize any contact between narratives, and rather, building up nostalgia, distances the viewer from the persistence of colonial legacies depicted on-screen. Presentation in a context that encourages exploration of cultural and power difference could, on the other hand, provide a challenge to existing assumptions about colonial history. An analysis of film presentations along these lines will seek out opportunities for grappling with difference in the space of a contact zone. These suggestions do not exhaust the ways in which a film presentation can be considered a contact zone, but I hope it suggests a framework for applying this concept to presentations and exploring the power dynamics of colonial legacies in film. In recent years, the concept has seen some critique in its application in museum curating.78 Robin Boast, in “Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited,” highlights the fruitful use of this concept in museum curating, while identifying aspects of contemporary curatorial practice that are “persistently neocolonial.”79 He writes that there has been a turn in curatorial practice toward “new museology,”80 drawing from postmodernist theory and emphasizing two-way knowledge creation as education. Such a turn may encourage the creation of contact zones

76 Ibid., 34. 77 "Van De Kolonie Niets Dan Goeds: Nederlands-Indië in Beeld 1912-1942," (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 2002). See in particular the film Familie Ledeboer (1926). 78 For its use in museum studies, see James Clifford, "Museums as Contact Zones," in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 188-219. 79 Robin Boast, "Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited," Museum Anthropology 34, no. 1 (2011): 57. 80 Ibid., 58. Bower 24 in museum exhibitions. Despite this, he contends, museums still control the bulk of the narrative in their curation, tipping the balance of power between curator-viewer along incumbent lines. In this way, we will keep in mind, gallery installations do not escape existing structures in that relationship of narrative-building power. In this introduction of concepts of contestation between narratives, and by introducing the concept of the contact zone, I have established some tools for analyzing colonial film presentations in archives. In particular, I will return to these ideas in chapter 4 in the case study of Looming Fire, where I will discuss how a film installation can create a contact zone through constructions of narrative, film, and gallery space. By drawing on the theories of Edward Said and Mary Louise Pratt, as well as others, I hope to have established a theoretical background for this approach, which can contribute to larger discussions of methods of decolonization in cultural and film heritage.

In the preceding chapter, I introduced theories to justify the focus and approach of my research. First, I explored concepts of history and power in film, as well as legacies of colonial power imbalance in archival theories. This review identifies the persistence of bias in the archival context of film, and supports an investigation into archival uses of film. Next, I presented theories that built up a number of approaches to the case studies I will address in the next two chapters. These theoretical frameworks are motivated by the focus of my inquiry as well as the literature reviewed above, and seek to address the power imbalances that remain represented in colonial film. These approaches, I hope, tie together concepts from multiple fields that, used in concert, can inform the reader of the wide-ranging theoretical implications embedded in presentations of colonial films. While it was a challenge to identify just a few perspectives to explore here, I have sought to formulate this review and framework in order to both inform and prepare the reader for the case studies addressed below. With this in mind, and using the concepts I've built up in this chapter, I will regard two efforts at presenting colonial films. In applying to these case studies the concepts of the filmic archive and film presentation as contact zone, among others, I will illustrate the relationships between these theoretical notions and the practice of presenting colonial film collections. I will seek to identify choices that may be regarded as decolonial, in hopes of expanding efforts to recognize and decolonize the rich histories embedded in the images of film archival collections. Bower 25

3 Case study: The Colonial Film Catalogue in the filmic archive

In this case study, I will look at the Colonial Film Catalogue, a web-based access portal produced with support from several British archives and institutes for presenting their colonial films. This case study will address colonial film presentation in as it relates to online engagement and dynamic accessible archives. The research-based Catalogue will reveal issues regarding the relationship between image and interpretation of colonial narratives. I will address how this dedicated catalogue can engage with legacies of colonialism in archives and can contribute to decolonial interpretations in the larger filmic archive.

3.1 A single body of work

Several institutions worked together to produce the Colonial Film Catalogue, as part of the project Colonial Film: Moving Images of Empire. Included in the online Catalogue are films “showing images of life in the British colonies”81 from three archives in England: the British Film Institute, the Imperial War Museum, and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.82 The archives collaborated with the two scholars and co-directors of the project, Colin MacCabe, from Birkbeck, University of London, and Lee Grieveson of University College London. The website, launched in 2010 after three years of research and preparation, lists the location and technical details of around 6000 individual films available in one (or more) of the archives, and about 160 of these digitized films are presented online. About 350 of the entries have been “enhanced,” whereby one of the project researchers presents research about an individual film and its creators. This research is presented in the form of two written texts presented alongside the entries' default fields of year, format, length, synopsis, any production credits available, and video playback (if available). The “enhancements” include analysis of a film's perspective and place within historical trends. For example, in an analysis essay alongside the film “Father and Son,” researcher Tom Rice identifies the film's framing and choice of subject as indicative of trends in this period of filmed ethnography: “The film, in common with many instructional ethnographic pictures, features the local customs of the Africans and opens with

81 "About the Colonial Film Catalogue," Colonial Film, last modified 2010, last accessed 21 June 2016, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/. 82 Since the publication of the Colonial Film Catalogue, the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum has closed. It was a privately-funded museum opened in 2002 by the Princess Royal Anne, and received several tourism awards but closed in 2008 due to low attendance and a “tough economic climate.” It was later revealed that some artifacts were lost, mismanaged, or sold without their owners' consent during the shutdown of the institution. See articles by Steven Morris in The Guardian, "Museum Director Leaves Post Amid Police Investigation into 'Missing' Exhibits," 17 March 2011, and "Row Erupts over British Empire Museum's 'Lost' Artefacts," 10 December 2012. Bower 26 a shot of a local, partially clothed African, shown carrying water.”83 The texts, “Context” and “Analysis,” for each “enhanced” entry provide historical and critical description to supplement the information in basic catalogue fields, provided by the archive. The catalogue gives each film (record) its own page. The site offers several ways to browse and search the entries, as well as some static informational pages listed in the main menu, including details about the project, participating archives, and researchers. The site is quite simple in design and usability, and its interface is designed to search and browse for film listings in different ways and access the page for a film's details, texts, and embedded video playback, if available. Entries can be browsed geographically, where the user can select a highlighted country on a world map (see figure 3), indicating the country of the film's production, and filter the entries by year. Users can also browse by topic, which includes the subsections themes (“Empire and Administration,” “Empire and Religion”), genres (amateur, fiction, travelogues), production organizations (like the Colonial Film Unit, mentioned in chapter one), and events (the Boer War, Empire celebrations). An advanced search function is available, which includes the fields listed, as well as options to show only works viewable online or only “enhanced” entries. The list of results includes thumbnails, icons, and text to make clear what is available for each result (figure 1). The available films are hosted internally (not embedded from a proprietary site like YouTube) and can be streamed in their entirety in standard definition. Even films without an embedded video or extended analysis provide detailed information, including its accession number at the archive that holds it, and a link to that archive.

Figure 1: Screen capture of the results page of a simple search on the Colonial Film Catalogue, showing icons for video playback and “enhanced” entries, as of June 2016. Source: Author's own, taken from http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/search-content?keys=music&x=0&y=0

83 Tom Rice, "Father and Son: Analysis," Colonial Film, last modified 2008, last accessed 21 June 2016 http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1755. Bower 27

The website presents digitized films within a catalogue of primarily text, making it possible to forget that the content of the presentation on the website is fundamentally (audio)visual. Backed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a government academic research fund, the website is the product of a collaboration between archives and academic institutions. The project also encompassed a series of seminars about films from the collection, conferences, film programs, and publications, but for the purposes of this case study, I will focus on the website alone as an initiative supported by archives to present colonial films online. As a rationale for the project, the website's home page reads: “The ambition of this website is to allow both colonizers and colonized to understand better the truths of Empire.”84 This suggests that the “truths of Empire” are not to be found only in the films themselves, but also in the rest of the website: its navigational tools, fields of information, and the research done to supplement existing cataloguing information. Senior curator of non-fiction at the BFI National Archive Patrick Russell called the project “a unique opportunity further to improve the Archive’s records of these holdings,” but also stressed that the BFI's involvement was “to make those records available in easily searchable form alongside those of other institutions.”85 The Catalogue, according to one of its main archival contributors, is a presentation initiative that also feeds back into archival records, with the input of its academic researchers. By creating a catalogue separate from the rest of the archives, the project suggests that this content should be treated differently from the rest of the archives. According to Russell, the project to prepare the site “enabled the BFI's British Empire films to be examined as a single body of work, enabling patterns of content and form, production and distribution, to emerge more clearly than before.”86 A catalogue, then, was deemed necessary for investigating and presenting this “single body of work.” In the process of presenting it, such a catalogue could simultaneously address its legacy of coloniality. This legacy can be addressed through the systems of online navigation employed in the catalogue, as well as the use of fields to present information alongside the films. The choices made in these two domains, navigation and use of fields, will serve as the basis of my critique of the Colonial Film Catalogue as a decolonial archival film presentation.

3.2 Colonial imbalances in an online space

The Colonial Film Catalogue's status as an web archive, and the design of the website, point to choices and assumptions made on the part of the project's curators about its audience of users. An analysis of these technical features may reveal, as curatorial choices, how such a presentation faces colonial legacies not only in content but also in form.

84 "About the Colonial Film Catalogue." 85 Patrick Russell, "About the Archives: The BFI National Archive," Colonial Film, last accessed 21 June 2016, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/archives. 86 Ibid. Bower 28

Users access record pages on the website by selecting browsing options that group film entries by time period, geographical location, producer, subject, etc., or by reaching it using the search function. On each film's page, if the film has been digitized and cleared for online publishing by the archive, an embedded streaming player plays a low-resolution version of the film. The rest of each page is made up of text fields. Aside from embedded video players and a clickable world map, the content on the pages is mostly static and the pages' layout follows a common two-column structure (visible in figure 2 below), easily recognizable and navigable for regular internet users. Access to the website requires browsing software, and a relatively high-speed internet connection to stream the videos. In comparison to recent online archiving initiatives, led by complex “interactive” platforms that visualize content dynamically and encourage users to contribute, the Catalogue reads as relatively sober and, ostensibly, accessible. Based on the low-impact design of the website, wide and sustained access were no doubt goals of the project's curators.

Figure 2: Screen capture of a typical record page on the Colonial Film Catalogue, as of June 2016. Source: Author's own. Taken from: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/500

Web access is underpinned by social and historical factors. The fact that a high-speed connection is necessary to view the embedded videos suggests that the curators assume their users will have this sort of access. Many advocates of digitization and online access assume the ubiquity of internet connections, as a result of the web's position as “the great equalizer” in access to information. This sentiment extends to advocates of the internet as a tool for archival access. Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive suggests that web technology can provide universal access: “We [at the Internet Archive] could actually make the dream of the Library of Alexandria a reality – the dream of having it all. The idea of having all published – and I'd even suggest the bulk of unpublished – things be universally accessible.”87 The Colonial Film

87 Brewster Kahle, "Universal Access to All Knowledge," The American Archivist 70, no. 1 (2007): 24. Bower 29

Catalogue's leaders make no such grand claims, but the project's mission to have an audience who can access the catalogue by web of “both colonizers and colonized,”88 suggests a desire to provide equal access to both. However, legal debates over net neutrality, state censorship of selected content, and wide disparities in reliable telecommunications infrastructure all point to the web, from the outset, as a site of power imbalance and control. Availability of information on the internet has not provided the globe with the widespread freedoms some thought it would.89 Equal access is provided not by technology but by a practical recognition of “the power... which consists in selecting the traces in memory, in marginalising, censoring, destroying... traces through precisely a selection, a filter.”90 Indeed, the selective power of online spaces exerts itself not in access to digitization but also in the foundations of culture and information upon which technical infrastructures are built. With this in mind, though seemingly accessible online, records from the Colonial Film Catalogue can be said to assert themselves into an existing global terrain of coloniality. Referring to readings of resistance in the cultural archive, Edward Said suggests that “Western cultural forms can be taken out of the autonomous enclosures in which they have been protected, and placed instead in the dynamic global environment created by imperialism.”91 It is only be asserting decolonial analysis into colonized spaces, like the “dynamic global environment” of the web, that colonial legacies can be retrieved. Despite the internet being a space affected by colonialism, and despite access to it being unequal, it is one of the main spaces of the filmic archive that demands decolonization. This catalogue, then, goes on to insert a decolonial perspective into a space where traces of coloniality often go without discussion. This perspective can be seen in how the Catalogue addresses its own point of departure, as a project of British archives presenting films of the British Empire. Said emphasizes that readings of texts within the cultural archive should not neglect the role of imperialism in shaping the culture of the “metropolis” as well as the “periphery”: “We may thus consider imperialism as a process occurring as part of the metropolitan culture, which at times acknowledges, at other times obscures the sustained business of the empire itself”92. The “metropolitan culture” to which Said refers here is the geographic region of colonial power, in this case England. Any work to identify and resist colonial legacies must thus acknowledge that the epistemological impact of colonialism on culture affects not only post-colonial regions but also Britain itself.

88 "About the Colonial Film Catalogue." 89 For an extended analysis of the unfulfilled hopes of democratization provided by the internet, see Evgeny Morosov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Philadelphia: PublicAffairs, 2013). 90 Derrida, 44. 91 Said, 51. 92 Ibid. Bower 30

Figure 3: Screen capture of the map for navigating browsing by country on the Colonial Film Catalogue, as of June 2016. Source: Author's own. Taken from: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/home

Navigational elements on the Catalogue help to construct an archive that reflects this interplay between metropolis and periphery within the collection of colonial films. While the geographical navigation in the Catalogue lists only regions outside of England, one topic by which to browse titled “Empire in Britain” stands out. Selecting this topic displays films shot and produced in England for the purpose of promoting Empire abroad. Such navigational tools promote the visibility of Britain as one of many sites of colonial film production, and one of many sites of colonially-influenced cultural production. Excluded from the interactive map (figure 3 above), and buried within a list of topics unrelated to geography, it also suggests an exceptionalism to the films produced in the “metropolis”. By displaying browsing options such as “Empire in Britain” as a topic rather than a region, this navigational structure contributes to the catalogue's priority of placing the largest impact of cultural imperialism as outside the metropolitan center of power. These navigational guides are important because they present the digitized films in the context of the site's specific browsing and navigational layout. As an online space, the Catalogue uses navigation as a way of structuring records and promoting a limited number of avenues toward accessing the colonial film legacy.

3.3 Stabilizing decolonial interpretation

In this section, I will assess the role of contemporary research in the form of “enhanced” essay fields as a method of decolonization in the online Colonial Film Catalogue. Drawing on Edward Said's notions of coloniality and resistance in the cultural archive, I will explore how adding discursive analysis to a film archival collection can promote decolonial or resistant narratives in Bower 31 archival film presentation. This discussion is important because it will provide insight into how online databases can connect aesthetic and discursive aspects to present film history in a way that resists colonial narratives. The impetus for collecting and presenting the films in the Colonial Film Catalogue stems in part from an “interpretive change of perspective” of post-modern and post-colonial discourse.93 These discourses have influenced the academy as well as curators in the cultural heritage sector, and this project is one of many efforts to remember and re-present films that at times played explicit roles in promoting imperialism. The site's “enhanced” entries are peer-reviewed94 essays that draw from the theoretical and historical perspectives of website's researchers, and they make up the theoretical core of the catalogue. The presentation of archival records deemed to be needing “enhancement” also speaks to the contested meanings of the content. If conceptually, according to Derrida, the archive is a place to preserve an (eternally) unfinished history, the analysis texts represent the continuing efforts to “finish” it. They reveal that, even within a catalogue, some records demand interpretive analysis beyond the more “neutral” descriptive fields of the archive. If they are to take a decolonial approach, the aim of such analyses is to identify and explicate the way films enact or challenge a colonial status quo. Said writes that there can be resistance in offering an actively decolonial hermeneutic: “We must therefore read the great canonical texts with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented.”95 Decolonizing the filmic archive by asserting new readings, in this case by inserting them as catalogue fields, provides opportunities for the emergence of narratives that challenge embedded colonial perspectives. Said's call to read with an eye toward “what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” is taken up in the Catalogue's analytical essays. The sometimes subtle traces of colonial ideology the Catalogue's films are drawn out and and explored in analysis essays. This is important because, while basic archival fields can provide factual information that implies the existence of a colonial ideology, it is not clear to contemporary audiences how the colonial context surrounding the film shapes the narratives found within it. For example, the film “Nigerian Footballers in England” (1949)96 has been enhanced with “Context” and “Analysis” essays. As its expository title suggests, the film depicts matches between a team from Nigeria against various English football teams before large audiences. While the film focuses largely on interactions between players during the matches, it includes a sequence of directorial ambiguity, when it features a shot of Nigerian players playing without shoes (figure 4 below). In his analysis alongside the video, researcher Tom Rice builds up two possible readings of this sequence:

This shot is significant in illustrating the cultural differences between the British and

93 Ibid. 94 "FAQ." Colonial Film, last modified 2010, last accessed 21 June 2016, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/faq. 95 Said, 66. 96 Video and texts accessible here: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1444 Bower 32

Nigerians. On the one hand, since clothing is often seen as a signifier of ‘civilisation’, the camera’s focus on the feet emphasizes the still ‘undeveloped’ aspects of colonial Africa, suggests British primacy and endorses established racial stereotypes. Significantly, however, the British administrators wanted the Nigerians to wear boots, and so the decision to play barefoot could also be seen, on the other hand, as a sign of defiance – the retention of a traditional Nigerian identity – within a tour that clearly sought to establish an image of a modern ‘British’ Nigeria. There is an odd disjuncture between the image and sound here, as the commentary makes no mention of the Nigerians’ feet.97

The two narratives he identifies, one of paternalism and another of resistance, intertwine in what Said might call a “contrapuntal”98 reading of a work in the filmic archive, where within the image of the film can be found multiple simultaneous narratives. Such an interpretation, based on both formal analysis and also on a reflection of the film's intentions promotes a more accurate ambiguity, or what Said calls a “simultaneous awareness”99 in the interpretation of records of historical events. Rice's reading promotes, as part of the spectatorship of this film, an understanding of colonial ideology.

alongside its “enhanced” entries, as of June 2016. Source: Author's own. Taken from: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1444

97 Tom Rice, "Nigerian Footballers in England: Analysis," Colonial Film, last modified 2008, last accessed 21 June 2016, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1444. 98 Said, 51. 99 Ibid. Bower 33

In their role as fields in the Catalogue, the readings take a step toward changing dominant colonial narratives on film by lending them authority. From re-readings emerge “alternative or new narratives,” which, with an understanding of the multiple influences on such interpretation, “become institutionalized or stable entities.”100 The institutional backing of the Catalogue and its research credentials lend to new interpretations a level of “stability” through authorization. By presenting decolonial discourse both alongside the presentation and also inside the archival structure, the authority lent to the Catalogue helps to establish decolonial discourses about the filmic archive. Even the website's name, used in texts “the Colonial Film Catalogue” or by the project's short name “Colonial Film,” implies that it is the authority for all films interpreted as colonial. This is evidence of a sense of authority throughout the website, which lends itself to the decolonial narratives it presents. There is, too, a stark contrast between the website's name and the term “colonial archive” as it is used in other literature, where the term refers to the records of a (once) actively governing colonial ministry, department, or affiliate. The term is related to defunct production companies tied to governance, like the Colonial Film Unit101 or the Empire Marketing Board.102 Here, however, the “colonial film catalogue” refers to no governing authority, but rather to the term colonial as it has been used and reshaped in day-to-day language and discourse. In this way, the Catalogue presents filmic records of the colonial as defined by the histories that have survived, and the social and political legacies that modern colonialism spawned. By helping to establish these terms and by lending archival authority to a decolonial hermeneutic, the Catalogue presents colonial film history as contested and polysemic, encouraging paths of resistant readings.

Overall, the Colonial Film Archive can be thought of as both a “chaperoned” and “pull” film presentation that offers decolonial re-reading into an online space. This chapter explored these concepts in practice by analyzing the navigational, design, technical, and interpretive choices made in producing this presentation of archival films. While the online space that the Catalogue enters into remains a site of power imbalance in the broader cultural domain, this presentation offers a model for decolonization within the filmic archive through a combination of moving image spectatorship, navigational structure, and authoritative decolonial discourse.

100 Ibid. 101 Tom Rice, "Colonial Film Unit," Colonial Film, last modified August 2010, last accessed 21 June 2016, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/colonial-film-unit. See also Smyth, referenced above. 102 Lee Grieveson, "Empire Marketing Board," Colonial Film, last modified 2010, last accessed 21 June 2016, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/empire-marketing-board. See also, David Meredith, "Imperial Images: The Empire Marketing Board, 1926-32," History Today 37 (1987): 30-36. Bower 34

4 Case study: Péter Forgács' Looming Fire and the film installation as contact zone

In this case study, I will explore the installation created by media artist Péter Forgács titled Looming Fire, as a presentation of colonial film as found-footage installation. This discussion will explore the proposition that an installation of colonial film can create a contact zone, where power differences in colonial films can “meet, clash, and grapple with each other.”103 First, I will discuss the institutional and technological conditions that play a role in the use of this format as a method of presenting archival film, and the implications of these conditions for providing historical context and creating conditions of contact. Next, I will consider the choices of spatial distribution for the acknowledgment power difference in colonial histories. Finally, I will explore how Looming Fire presents difference through its combination of competing narratives arranged in space. This discussion of film installation as a contact zone will link the site-specific reuse of colonial film heritage to efforts at cultural decolonization.

4.1 Looming Fire and re-use of archival records

The media artist Péter Forgács is best known for montages of film material sourced from pre- existing material, in the form of found-footage films, and he often uses archival collections as the sources for his footage. Found-footage or compilation films often appropriate politically-charged images as a means of addressing the power of the film medium, which both interprets and acts upon the world: “the horizon of possibility in appropriated images is mapped by and through ideological significations already present in the artifact.”104 In particular, Forgács' works apply this spirit to home movie footage, drawing out the political and ideological significance found in depictions of private lives in home movies from archives. The exhibition Looming Fire: Stories from the Dutch East Indies 1900-1940 opened on October 5, 2013, and consisted of sixteen simultaneously running digital projectors and screens. Forgács compiled digitized home movie footage around particular persons or ideas, and these pieces were projected across the many screens. The edited pieces include quotes from the Royal Tropical Institute's collection of letters, written by members of the elite class of settlers living in the region and describing aspects of daily life, whether these aspects are explicitly depicted in the films or not. Many of the films are lighthearted (or were shot in a lighthearted manner), centering around family celebrations and outings, like a visit to a “native” village. Other sequences depict civil servants or local people working, and some pieces are more ominous, like the segment titled “I Have Bared My Soul Completely.” In total, the installation comprises more than nine hours of footage, and the screens are clustered in one large room, inviting the visitor to move between screens but ensuring

103 Pratt, 34. 104 Paul Arthur, "The Status of Found Footage," Spectator 20, no. 1 (1999): 62. Bower 35 that they shall not see everything. In producing this installation, Forgács was given access to EYE's Dutch East Indies collection, which is composed of material from a variety of professional and non-professional, governmental and entertainment sources. Forgács focused on the amateur home movies from colonial Indonesia. As suggested in chapter one, many of these home movies were shot, developed, and sent back to family members in the Netherlands to be snapshots or vignettes of daily life and events. According to exhibition documents, Forgács also referenced collections of personal correspondence in the archives of the Royal Tropical Institute and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. He selected quotes from six individuals or families as well as anonymous sources, several from European backgrounds, though he also quotes from the letters of a Chinese businessman and an Indonesian woman, among others. Some of the letters and films were previously published, but many of these texts were presented from the archive for the first time publicly. The exhibition was later installed elsewhere, including the 2014 Tong Tong Fair in the Hague. In 2015, it was also the subject of analysis in the (untranslated) paper “Memórias do império: o filme amador e seus deslocamentos na instalação Looming Fire de Péter Forgács”, published in the Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image.105 My analysis will contribute to reflections on the work by also focusing on the context of the archival organization it was originally commissioned by, and will therefore combine institutional archiving concerns with analysis of its reuse of footage from a film archival collection.

4.2 Installation as screening environment for colonial film histories

In 2010, four Dutch audiovisual institutions, the Netherlands Film Museum, the Netherlands Institute for Film Education, Holland Film, and the Filmbank, merged to form EYE, a moving image heritage institute that combines audiovisual archival activities with exhibitions of moving image history and technologies. Though none of these institutions previously focused on gallery exhibitions, when the combined institution's new public facility opened in 2012 it included a gallery space, to be used for temporary installations of audiovisual heritage and culture. EYE drew many of its curators from those who worked at the Netherlands Film Museum, which has a history of inviting artists to re-use footage from its archive. Film Museum and EYE curator Mark-Paul Meyer has worked with and written about found-footage filmmakers like Peter Delpeut, Fiona Tan, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who used the archive of the Film Museum as a creative resource.106 So, it is little surprise that one of the first exhibitions at the EYE was a work of

105 To access this analysis in Portuguese, see Beatriz Rodovalho, "Memórias Do Império: O Filme Amador E Seus Deslocamentos Na Instalação 'Looming Fire' De Péter Forgács," [In Portuguese], Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2015): 276-93. 106 Mark-Paul Meyer, "From the Archive and Other Contexts," In Found Footage: Cinema Exposed, ed. Marente Bloemheuvel, Giovanna Fossati and Jaap Guldemond, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 152. Bower 36 this sort by artist Péter Forgács, whose previous found-footage work already forms part of EYE's collection. Presenting moving images as part of gallery installations has become increasingly prominent in film heritage institutions. This is driven both by the adoption of digital tools for presentation and also by changes in the activities of cultural institutions. Exhibiting archival cinema in an exhibition space is facilitated by increasing institutional access to digital playback, through digitization initiatives, and digital projection, through adherence to this new industry-wide theatrical standard. Publicly-funded film archives, in addition, are cultural institutions facing financial pressures that lead to mergers with institutions that have different responsibilities and collections, some more geared toward art. According to their staff, film archives are also becoming museums, offering temporary and permanent exhibitions related to their collections and mission.107 Archives, then, increasingly contend with the pressures of access and presentation in variable contexts. This drives what Erika Balsom has identified as a set of gallery practices in contemporary moving image art that she refers to as “other cinema.”108 Found-footage commissions are, according to Meyer, “major strategies to explore the collection and to bring its potential to the surface.”109 Cinema presentations in the gallery, designed for a mobile spectator to experience multiple moving images, sounds, and texts arranged in space, differs from traditional conceptions of cinematic viewership. When applied to films drawn from the archive, these differences have implications on the material such presentations appropriate. Archival moving image installations take with them not only the aesthetic and historical meanings of their source material, but also these changes to cinematic experience. In Looming Fire, the digitization of the archive is linked to the digitization of the gallery, as a possible site for exploring colonial histories under contemporary conditions. While it is important in this discussion not to consider technological tools as the sole determinants driving presentation strategies, in this case a consideration of the digital technologies in use may shed light on the installation's departure from previous presentations. Several special programs and exhibitions preceded Looming Fire in presenting the Dutch East Indies collection, including a screening of compilation films at the Film Museum in 2002.110 Péter Forgács is also a familiar artist to EYE and the Film Museum, having previously remixed films from the archives, screened his films there, and donated over twenty of his works to the collection.111 Commissioning Looming Fire would not make use of a collection that had not been presented before. However, even on a loop, multiple film projections in a gallery would require near-constant supervision and maintenance, not to mention subsequent replacement of worn-out or damaged film elements. This means that the former difficulty of managing projection as a core part of an installation posed generally prohibitive practical limitations. On the other hand, when produced in a digital

107 Mark-Paul Meyer, "Traditional Film Projection in a Digital Age," Journal of Film Preservation 70 (2005): 16. 108 Erika Balsom, "A Cinema in the Gallery, a Cinema in Ruins," Screen 50, no. 4 (2009): 412. 109 Meyer, “From the Archive,” 152. 110 Meyer, “From the Archive,” 149. 111 Wall text, Looming Fire, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Bower 37 environment, where the desired footage is digitized and digital projection equipment is accessible to the exhibiting institution, found-footage works can more feasibly enter the gallery space as an installation. The ability to arrange multiple projections in EYE's large exhibition space, inaugurated only eighteen months before Looming Fire, presented an opportunity for EYE to present footage from the Dutch colonial period in this new gallery environment. This use of the installation environment introduces another avenue, and another type of screening environment, in which an archive can present film from their collection, and “bring its potential to the surface.”112

Figure 5: Installation schematic, showing the spatial arrangement of screens. Source: Press material, Looming Fire, 2013.

The crucial difference between a traditional film screening and a moving image installation like Looming Fire is the audiovisual and physical experience available to a viewer moving through space. The techniques and implications of traditional found-footage films, based largely on the formal structure of edits between clips, are altered by the simultaneity and three-dimensionality of an installation like Looming Fire. The variety of projections visible from any point in the room (visible in figure 5 above), rainbow array of tinting in the clips, and multiple soundscapes, create a surrounding media experience. The visitor can pivot under a suspended speaker (visible in figure 6 below) and focus on any number of screens, building a nonlinear narrative, facilitated by digital projection. In contrast to the traditionally fixed spectating position for films, this three-dimensional viewing environment distributes the attention from the focused gaze of a single screen. In contrast to single-screen found-footage films which edit historical images end-to-end, this installation produces meaning not only through the selection and rhythm of images, but also through their placement and the possible combinations. In this way, the filmmaker acts as an architect and curator, arranging where in space the images can be seen, but relinquishing control over when and in which order they are.

112 Meyer, “From the Archive,” 152. Bower 38

Figure 6: A view from inside the installation, showing the visibility of multiple screens, and the overhead audio system suspended near screens. Source: Press material, Looming Fire, 2013. Photo: Reproduced with permission from photographer Hans Wilschut.

4.3 Fragmented micro-histories

By presenting archival films in Looming Fire as spatially-distributed across many screens rather than just one, the filmed representations of colonial history are structured to present home movies as fragmented micro-histories. Spatially, the installation assembles private images and presents them as a sort of life-size sculpture of screens. The moving images projected onto them, once privately preserved and later entering into the collection of a film archive, become public and traversable, bringing them into the physical space of the twenty-first century. The private and amateur origins of the footage, collected as private donations, represent only a fragment of the filmed and lived histories of colonial settlers in Indonesia, not to mention of the entire population there. The spatial fragmentation of the installation and the visibility of multiple amateur histories help to challenge the unity of the “imagined communities” that contact zones deconstruct. In a contact zone, power differentials are explored explicitly. This explicit exploration ruptures the myths of national unity that colonialism and nationalistic imagined communities project onto historical and social narratives. In contrast to a traditional cinematic single-screen viewing environment, the film installation, being made up of a busy array of shifting moving images, gives the viewer a more fragmented vision of colonial life. Such a de-unified viewing experience helps drive the viewer toward a “simultaneous awareness”113 of colonial history, in a site of continuous

113 Said, 51. Bower 39 resistance to dominant narratives. Though drawn together into smaller thematic segments, the reuse of the Dutch East Indies home movie collection as an installation of spatially-distributed micro- histories places the viewer in a space of contestation and challenge, rather than one of narrative unity. This contributes to the installation's ability to use archival films to present decolonial narratives.

4.4 Speaking back to the amateur colonial gaze

I suggested in chapter one, despite its alterity to dominant codes of cinematic language, the amateur cinematic gaze was also informed by colonial philosophies. The Dutch East Indies collection home movies, like most amateur movies shot on film, depicts the perspective of the relatively privileged in society who could afford the materials, equipment, and leisure time to produce home movies. Patricia Zimmermann writes that “amateur film contains the history of self-representation, an auto- ethnography. The amateur camera mediates between self and fantasy, between self and others.”114 Other scholars of amateur film history point out that amateur film can also re-inscribe exoticism and racial difference, using an ethnographic gaze. Heather Norris Nicholson writes that “amateur footage is prone to many of the same short-comings found in other ethnographic representations and their depictions of people and settings reflect similar assumptions and cultural politics.”115 The home movies in this installation indeed represent the “first world authority”116 of the colonial ethnographic gaze. A film presentation as contact zone would reverse the dominance of this ethnographic gaze, as a way of challenging the epistemology of such ethnographies and decolonizing the production of cultural knowledge. The “auto-ethnographic” perspective Zimmermann refers to in amateur film, contrasts, with Pratt's use of the concept as a phenomenon of a contact zone. Pratt identifies two main phenomena, saying about the first: “If ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts.”117 In any collection of home movies, there is a paucity of the Prattian “autoethnographic” perspectives of the “so-defined others.” The collection of home movies Forgács draws on is not only biased toward the “happy moments of colonial life,”118 according to the exhibition's introduction, or away from the “abuse, aberration, or aggression” Forgács says is omitted from home movies.119 It also

114 Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future," in Mining the Home Movie: Excavating Histories and Memories, ed. Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, (London: University of California Press, 2008), 276. 115 Nicholson, 204. 116 Zimmermann, “Morphing History into Histories,” 284. 117 Pratt, 35. 118 "Exhibition: Péter Forgács – Looming Fire," EYE Film Institute, last accessed 21 June 2016, https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/exhibition/p%C3%A9ter-forg%C3%A1cs-%E2%80%93-looming-fire. 119 Péter Forgács, "Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections on Home Movies," In Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, Bower 40 represents the bias of all colonial archives toward those in power or in control of industry, land or people. In this way, the narrow range of perspectives offered in colonial home movie collections is presented in the films of Looming Fire. The factual text in the exhibition provides little insight into the power relations present in the films. For example, wall text informs viewers what kind of sample the film materials draw from: of the sixty million inhabitants of the Indonesian archipelago in 1930, only half of one percent were European or of European descent. This statistic alone does little to explain the extremely unequal access to power between the families of elite industrialists and those that they lived among and employed. The elements of a contact zone, then, are centered in the aesthetic interplay between audiovisual elements, spatial relations, and combination of narratives depicted in the projections themselves, rather than in a historical analysis. The privilege in the gaze of home moviemakers is depicted not only in the idealized daily life presented on screens but also in the surrounding space of the installation. Alongside the segment, “Philistines and Idealists,” a quote from a letter by settler Willem Walraven presents the perspective of sexualizing orientalism: “Itih was twenty at most and of a love life, as Westerners know it, she had [...] little notion. She only knew love as it is in a Priangan dessa, love with a sting in it that is never sure of itself or of the other party.”120 In the segment “We Europeans are charming to one another,” Walraven's letter describes the life of privilege at the parties depicted in these films:

We visit one another’s homes and we introduce ourselves (Would you mind if I...?). We play tennis (if the boss likes to) and we foxtrot (if the boss likes to) and we play bridge (as above) and we go to the club (as above) and we don’t dare to stay away too long should something be going on, because that might damage our promotion prospects and people would say of us that we were not ‘charming’ enough. Oh, for many of us work only begins in the evening after six, when we start to be ‘charming’, and I assure you that many succeed very well this way.121

Alone, this kind of worldview coupled with the idealized images could present as nostalgic to contemporary European audiences. However, other texts in the installation delve into the impact of such privilege. Here, Forgács' expansion of the meaning in Dutch East Indies home movies into a spatial relation allows for an exploration of the relations of power they carry. Between the installation's spatial relations, the colonial gaze embedded in the home movies can be challenged by other narratives. The audio from contemporaneous letters included in the installation, for example, presents a marginalized perspective. One segment, “I Have Bared my Soul Completely / Echo,” focuses on the experience of Indonesian women under colonial rule. The home movies in this

(London: University of California Press, 2008), 51. 120 Wall text, Looming Fire, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. From letters by Willem Walraven in Brieven: Aan Familie En Vrienden 1919-1941, (Amsterdam: GA van Oorschot, 1966). 121 Ibid. Bower 41 segment project a sexualizing colonial gaze onto Indonesian women, however in the same space, readings and text from an anonymous mixed-race Indonesian woman's letters describe her reflections on such a gaze. One letter reads: “This confession may seem tough, mean and embittered, but it is the truth. I have bared my soul completely, putting my whole being into it, and I am open and honest about everything. In everything I am what others have made me and I am made up of what people gave and did to me.”122 The audio portion of this segment, beamed from above, expands on her experiences of objectification. The juxtaposition of perspectives, colonized and colonizer, creates a tension that alters the impact of the exoticizing gaze of ethnographic home movies, presenting the viewer with a counter-narrative to the narrow viewpoint presented in the film. This type of juxtaposition, which presents both the dominant and counter-narratives in the same space, embodies the two main elements of Pratt's contact zone in audiovisual terms. As autoethnography, the first of her phenomena, the voices of the marginalized are presented as audio and text. Through the spatial organization of the installation, they are “construct[ed...] in dialogue with”123 the home movies placed before them. The assertion of a marginalized narrative challenges and reframes the ethnography depicted on the original film, constituting an autoethnography constructed aesthetically and spatially as a film installation. Pratt also identifies “transculturation” as the other main phenomenon of the contact zone, which she defines as “processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture.”124 The meaning contained within the home movies, as a “transmi[ssion]” of dominant culture, is used in “I Have Bared My Soul Completely” to the effect of bolstering the marginalized letter-writer's claims. Home movies with an ethnographic gaze are used, thereby, in a process of transculturation, reshaping their original perspectives in a space of contact zone. In this way, the audio and text that fill the space in Looming Fire around the colonial ethnographic gaze of the home movies create a zone for challenging the understanding of the privileged life depicted in them. The installation expands the home movies into a space where audio clips and text narratives can co-mingle and even contest them.

Overall, Looming Fire can be thought of as a film presentation as contact zone, where the historical weight of colonial perspectives coupled with spatial and textual artistic choices construct a space where the viewer can enter into a dialogue of power dynamics on film. This discussion touched on how the influence of institutional factors on this presentation of archival film is evident in the ability to create a filmic installation using a recently digitized collection of moving images. Despite the bias I have identified toward the perspective of the colonizer in the filmic archive generally and

122 Wall text, Looming Fire, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. From anonymous letter cited in Paul W. Van der Veur, "Race and Color in Colonial Society: Biographical Sketches by a Eurasian Woman Concerning Pre-World War Ii Indonesia," Indonesia 8 (1969): 69-80. 123 Pratt, 35. 124 Ibid., 36. Bower 42 amateur film in this case, Looming Fire explores differing power relations by installing narratives around the presentation of colonial home movies spatially. I have discussed how the arrangement of multiple projected films facilitating the introduction of competing narratives has particular implications on the presentation's confrontation with colonial legacies. This analysis of Looming Fire suggests theoretical and aesthetic methods for film archives to construct a contact zone spatially and audiovisually in the presentation of colonial history on film, by taking advantage of projection, sound, text, and space to assert multiple histories of colonialism. Bower 43

5 Conclusions and further research

In the preceding chapters, I have aimed to build up and carry out an analysis of the issues at stake when presenting colonial film collections. This required an introduction to the conditions of accessing colonial films, and a suggestion of the history of control, propaganda and insinuation in film screenings designed to bolster pro-colonial sentiment, against the long-term interests of those living under colonial occupation. I also wanted to introduce to the reader some of the situations in film archives today that influence what material from this period is presented and how. Overall, I hope this introduction directed the reader's attention toward links between empire and film heritage, between culture and archives, and between moving image audiences and colonial governance. This web of institutions, notions, and legacies, I hope, was explicated and strengthened throughout the text. In the theoretical foundations I laid, I worked to construct a theorization about the role of presentations of film heritage, and how these efforts reflect both cultural and historical notions of what an archive is and how it functions. This section also borrowed and molded some concepts that I took up in my case studies. By drawing on these concepts, I worked to illustrate how contemporary presentations of colonial films can take up decolonial approaches, and can, through programming and curatorial decisions, work to challenge the cultural narratives embedded in these collections. Both the Colonial Film Catalogue and Looming Fire represent presentations of colonial film that take a decolonizing approach, by emphasizing re-interpretations in the archive and by creating a space of contested narratives within and around the film frame. I would say that the conclusions my research must be limited by my focus on only two case studies, selected from a much longer history of efforts by archives to screen colonial films. Therefore, I can only speculate about the claims I am able to make from these two presentations. I sought to delve into several issues at play in each, and hope that their formal and disciplinary differences, one an online access database and the other an artistic installation, could mean a wider range of implications. I also attempted in my extended theoretical discussion to contribute some thinking about the relationships between colonialism, culture, archives, and audiences. These are all subjects that still deserve further research, and there are many more presentations that could provide insight into these relationships. For one, the recent EYE exhibition Archive as a Place to Play suggested a number of ways the re-use and presentation of colonial film collections can be tied directly to contemporary issues of social power imbalance. According its curator, the Netherlands Film Academy's artist-in-residence Jyoti Mistry, this exhibition of student films and media installations “aim[s] to challenge the gaze regimes of these historically ethnographic images.... [by] suggest[ing] a contemporary relevance that invites personal reflection on a broader socio-cultural canvas.”125 With my research, I have attempted to start a discussion on this type of active

125 Jyoti Mistry, Archive as a Place to Play, curator's statement in program, Amsterdam: EYE Film Institute, 10-22 May 2016. Bower 44 engagement with the past and future of colonialism in society, starting from the film archive. In closing, I hope that my research will be of use and interest to archival film programmers who care for collections of colonial films. The contemporary cultural landscape benefits from a growing number of older films made publicly visible again and anew through the dedicated efforts of film preservationists. While the depictions, visual hierarchies, and intentions of some of these early films may evoke troublesome legacies, moving images can likewise be used to confront difficult histories and sustain cultures of resistance. Bower 45

Access to Empire: Presenting Colonial Films and Decolonizing Film Heritage bibliography

"About the Colonial Film Catalogue." Colonial Film, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/.

Amad, Paula. "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.

Arthur, Paul. "The Status of Found Footage." Spectator 20, no. 1 (1999): 57-69.

Balsom, Erika. "A Cinema in the Gallery, a Cinema in Ruins." Screen 50, no. 4 (2009): 411-27.

Boast, Robin. "Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited." Museum Anthropology 34, no. 1 (2011): 56-70.

Cook, Terry. "Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of Archives in Constructing Social Memory." In Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, edited by Jr. Blouin, Francis X. and William G. Rosenberg, 169-81. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

———. "Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms." Archival Science 13, no. 2-3 (2013): 95-120.

Derrida, Jacques. "Archive Fever." In Refiguring the Archive, edited by C. Hamilton, V. Harris, J. Taylor, J. Pickover, G. Reid and R. Saleh, 38-80. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

Edmonson, Ray. Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles. Paris: UNESCO, 2016.

"Exhibition: Péter Forgács – Looming Fire." EYE Film Institute, https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/exhibition/p%C3%A9ter-forg%C3%A1cs-%E2%80%93- looming-fire.

"FAQ.” Colonial Film, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/faq.

Forgács, Péter. "Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections on Home Movies." In Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, edited by Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, 47-56. London: University of California Press, 2008.

Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.

Fuhrmann, Wolfgang. "Locating Early Film Audiences: Voluntary Associations and Colonial Film." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 291-304.

Gracy, Karen F. "Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital." Library Trends 56, no. 1 (2007): 183-97.

Grieveson, Lee. "Empire Marketing Board." Colonial Film, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production-company/empire-marketing-board. Bower 46

Gunning, Tom. "The Whole World within Reach: Travel Images without Borders." In Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff, 25-41. London: Duke University Press, 2006.

Harris, Verne. "Archives, Politics and Justice." In Political Pressure and the Archival Record, edited by Margaret Procter, Michael G. Cook and Caroline Williams, 173-82. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005.

Hendriks, Gerda Jansen. "‘Not a Colonial War’: Dutch Film Propaganda in the Fight against Indonesia, 1945–49." Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 3-4 (2012): 403-18.

Hilderbrand, Lucas. "Media Access Preservation and Technologies: Editor's Introduction." Spectator 27, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 5-8.

Jenkinson, Hilary. A Manual of Archive Administration Including the Problems of War Archives and Archive Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922.

Jimerson, Randall C. Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009.

Kahle, Brewster. "Universal Access to All Knowledge." The American Archivist 70, no. 1 (2007): 23-31.

Klerk, Nico de. "Showing and Telling: Film Heritage Institutes and Their Performance of Public Accountability." Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University, 2015.

Landy, Marcia. Cinematic Uses of the Past. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Meyer, Mark-Paul. "Traditional Film Projection in a Digital Age." Journal of Film Preservation 70 (2005): 15-18.

———. "From the Archive and Other Contexts." In Found Footage: Cinema Exposed, edited by Marente Bloemheuvel, Giovanna Fossati and Jaap Guldemond. Framing Film, 145-52. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.

Mistry, Jyoti. Archive as a Place to Play, curator's statement in program. Amsterdam: EYE Film Institute, 10-22 May 2016.

Mignolo, Walter D. "Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom." Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 7-8 (2009): 159-81.

Nicholson, Heather Norris. "In Amateur Hands: Framing Time and Space in Home-Movies." History Workshop Journal, no. 43 (Spring 1997): 198-212.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession (1991): 33-40.

Rice, Tom. "Father and Son: Analysis." Colonial Film, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1755.

———. "Nigerian Footballers in England: Analysis." Colonial Film, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1444.

———. "Colonial Film Unit." Colonial Film, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/production- company/colonial-film-unit.

Russell, Patrick. "About the Archives: The BFI National Archive." Colonial Film, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/archives. Bower 47

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Smyth, Rosaleen. "The British Colonial Film Unit and Sub-Saharan Africa, 1939–1945." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 8, no. 3 (1988): 285-98.

Stoler, Ann Laura. "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance." Archival Science 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 87-109.

———. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009.

"Van De Kolonie Niets Dan Goeds: Nederlands-Indië in Beeld 1912-1942." Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 2002.

Zimmermann, Patricia R. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Indiana University Press, 1995.

———. "Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future." In Mining the Home Movie: Excavating Histories and Memories, edited by Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, 275-88. London: University of California Press, 2008.

Zinn, Howard. "Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest." The Midwestern Archivist 2, no. 2 (1977): 14-26.