Join us in May - June 2024 for the first segment of our “National Cinemas” series, focused on Sudan and the works of the Sudanese Film Group.

Art for the People: African National Cinemas looks at the emergence of “national” policies for cinema production in the era of decolonization movements and later postcolonial independent states in four countries, Nigeria, Sudan, Cameroon and Mozambique. This project looks critically at the frame of the “nation” as a fraught ideological and material context in which African films were made, promoted, circulated in the post-independence era. Each of these contexts, while harnessing the idea of the nation, offered very different approaches to the daunting task of decolonizing the image, and the role of cinema in creating a sense of collective, if not national identity, and political consciousness.

May 4th, 2024 in-person screening at Treehouse Lagos at 6PM, followed by a discussion with two of our curators, Ese & Dara.

The Sudanese Film Group

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of filmmakers who were then working in the film department of the Ministry of Culture published the magazine CINEMA. This group founded the Sudanese Film Group (SFG) in April 1989 in order to be able to operate more independently from the state. Their goal was to be involved in all aspects of film production, screening and teaching, and to maintain Sudanese people’s passion for cinema. However, on June 30, 1989, the coup, which brought with it a distrust of all forms of art, ended all cultural aspirations. All civil society organizations were banned. In 2005, the state’s tight grip was finally loosened and the SFG was able to register again.

Currently, two of the members of the Sudanese Film Group, Suliman Elnour and Ibrahim Shaddad, were forced to leave Sudan with their families due to the outbreak of the war on April 15, 2023

Organizations and fundraisers to support:

Sudan Solidarity Collective

Sudanese Diaspora Network

Screening program:

• ‘جمل‎’ Jamal, (A Camel) 1981, Ibrahim Shaddad, 14’

• Al Habil (The Rope), 1985, Ibrahim Shaddad, 31

• ’‘إنسان’ Insan (Human Being) 1994, Ibrahim Shaddad, 27’

‘جمل‎’ Jamal, (A Camel) 1981, Ibrahim Shaddad, 14’

Al Habil (The Rope), 1985, Ibrahim Shaddad

‘إنسان’ Insan (Human Being) 1994, Ibrahim Shaddad

“WE HELPED EACH OTHER BIRTH OUR IDEAS” : A CONVERSATION WITH THE SUDANESE FILM GROUP

Suhaib Gasmelbari’s 2019 Talking About Trees chronicles the attempts of veterans of Sudanese cinema to revive an old cinema in Khartoum.  Berlin-based Arsenal – Institut für Film and Video Kunst facilitated the digital restoration of 8 short films by the Sudanese film group in 2020, as well as a subsequent re-release of these films. Founded in 1989 on the cusp of the military coup that saw Omar Al-Bachir rise to power in Sudan, the Sudanese Film Group sought to make independent films that reflected ongoing sociopolitical changes. Armed with a will to document and a stark belief in the power of cinema as a tool of political transformation, they journeyed across Sudan to make films and exhibit them to diverse audiences. Theirs was a commitment to a nomadic ethos of filmmaking and exhibition. Going by the urgency with which they approached their practice as well as the new representational vocabularies their works proffered the cinematic medium, it isn’t hard to see why a deeper consideration of the conditions that initially displaced their works off the radar of global cinematic circuits is necessary.  Equally important is the question of how the international circulation of their works, occasioned by the twin factors of their portrait in Gasmelbari’s 2019 film and the restoration of some of their earlier films, is embedded within present-day conversations on audiovisual heritages and the politics of film preservation. Although restorations have helped secure a renewed interest in the Sudanese Film Group, there isn’t much available literature on the motivations of the filmmakers who comprise the group. We thought it necessary to highlight the peculiar conditions that produced these works: the political context; the cinematic landscape at the time; the nature of the training these filmmakers received as well as their aspirations both personal and professional. 

As a collective, our engagement with the Sudanese Film Group forms an integral part of an ongoing commitment to filmic practices within the African continent and its diasporas that center, equally, political change and formal experimentation. The following is a transcription of a Zoom conversation hosted by Monangambee members Tobi Akinde and Dara Omotoso with Eltayeb Mahdi on behalf of the SFG on the 9th of November 2022. Originally intended as a series of conversations, this ongoing discussion was unfortunately stalled by the war that broke out in Sudan in April 2023, which subsequently forced members of the SFG into exile, once again. 

Alongside Eltayeb Mahdi, Ahmed Elsadiq acted as a gifted translator, and insightful interlocutor, who remediated some of the linguistic and contextual gaps inherent in that kind of process. Yet such an endeavor is not without its difficulties. How does one compress the experiences from a distant past —ridden with vivid recollections of a repressive regime— into a digestible narrative encounter? An encounter mediated by translation, the instability of internet connections, both on our end in Lagos and on theirs in Khartoum, and the specific technological affordances of the Zoom Call. This text therefore is an ongoing testament to the resilience of spirit embodied by these brilliant filmmakers; their unflinching commitment to preserving their films as well as desire to pass down their experiences to newer generations. We hope this text retains traces of that indomitable spirit. 

*This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.

DO: Thank you so much for your willingness to be in ongoing conversation with us! To get us started, could you tell us about the circumstances in which the SFG met? 

SFG: Of course. Sometime close to the end of the 1970s we met at the Ministry of Culture and media. We started to make films with a little bit of help. After some time we decided to quit our government jobs and create a separate non-governmental entity that was primarily volunteer-run.  Initially, we held our film screenings mostly in rural areas. You know these were the places where people needed them the most. We wanted to provide a chance to discover new kinds of films. Most screening spaces at the time were showing a lot of mainstream films, like Hollywood and that kind of stuff. We didn’t get to see films from Eastern or Western Africa! 

And then, in the middle of the nineties, after a short time from when the SFG was formed, a dictatorship came into power. This new regime reigned from 1998. The coup that brought the regime to power was led by the Muslim Brotherhood, who were a bit like radical Islamists. They had a strong opinion about art and cinema, of course. It was very bad. They started to close cinemas all over the country. There were more than sixty cinemas all around Sudan. It's not like a big number, but it was better than nothing at least, you know. It was a decent number. They started to close them. One after the other. In a short time, people no longer had a chance to see films in cinemas.

TA: That problem you mentioned of not seeing ourselves and our specific geographies in the films we watch reminds me of Al Mahatta (The Station, 1989). 

SFG: I made Al Mahatta while at the Ministry of Culture and Media. At the time, with the government, it was all empty talk about development and doing new projects: rails, roads, buildings and all that stuff. Even though it was a dictatorship. And you know how dictatorships work —they run a lot of propaganda. For me, Al Mahatta had to ask a very important question —is this development for the people or the industrialists? Did the government really launch this kind of infrastructure for the people who live in those places and for their benefit? Or did they create it for you know, big companies, supply chains and stuff like that?

TA: In Al Mahatta you are telling a story about propaganda and development. How did you reconcile these two topics and how did the process come to be for you? 

SFG: I was inspired actually by a personal experience. When I was young, I went to Al Ghazal. It’s like a far place in the East and I went there from Khartoum, the capital, with my mother.  When returning to Khartoum, we faced some difficulties that caused us to wait for a very long time at the station. While we waited, I saw various kinds of goods and products moving very easily. Yet there were transportation problems for regular people that the government could not manage. Everyday people were facing a lot of problems in their daily lives, despite the existence of a rich trade and exchange in the country at the time. This personal experience actually sparked the inspiration to make Al Mahatta.

DO: Before you made Al Mahatta, what kind of training did you have? 

SFG: It was actually my third project. I made my first film when I graduated from the Cairo Institute of Cinema in Egypt. After I graduated, I did a  film named Al Dhareeh  (The Tomb, 1977). I made another film about children with disabilities and the kind of gaze they are subjected to, Arba'a marat lil-atfal (Four Times for Children, 1979). I was fascinated by what they were capable of doing. I did Al Mahatta ten years after graduation. I had a decent experience in filmmaking at the time and had developed a sense for the craft. There were a lot of sources of inspiration for me such as personal experience as well as good stories. My entire life is a process of observation from which I grab some ideas, and develop stories.

TA: It is interesting that you describe your life as an observation process. Is it related to how you came to the cinema?

SFG: In high school, I used to go to what was called the Sudanese Cinema Club. It was a kind of club where people met and watched movies and I discovered that I was fascinated  by the films and stories.  From there, I went to the Cairo Institute of Cinema, came back to Sudan, and met the other members of the SFG and we shared a kind of vision, as well as the necessity of creating and sharing. 

El Sadiq: We are reviving this cinematic culture through screenings all over the country. After thirty years of operation, people still don’t have a proper chance to see their own films, not any different kind of films, but films that actually benefit the audience. Our primary interest is to create a space for that to happen. We try not to surrender to any kind of structure. The Sudanese Film Group shares a lot in terms of artistic vision and conception of cinema. They have a lot of knowledge and critiques.  The friendship between them also helps them continue their work. They share this view of Sudan as a very rich country, rich in stories, myth, theology, and folklore. Here in Sudan, we have a lot of different cultures. People from different colors and different backgrounds. With this rich culture, you have a responsibility to share, to let the people have a chance to see themselves through cinema, and that's what we try to do, actually.

TA: I believe that this sense of responsibility kept you going but I also believe a sense of care also informed the approach of the collective.

SFG: Of course. We did most of the work as a collective. We helped each other birth our ideas. Even if a particular idea came from one of us, the entire group always contributed artistically and logistically. All the work we've done emerged out of collaboration between all  members because we had limited resources.   For example, when I make my film as a director, Ibrahim [Shaddad] helps with logistics, or maybe with the edits. We share both the technical and the artistic aspects. 

TA: Individually, and even as a collective, limitation in material resources is still a problem for African cinema now.

SFG: True. As a group, we have a strong interest in Africa and films. We organize a screening series for African films. We screen films from all over Africa. This year, we are focusing on East Africa. So far, we have screened a lot of films from Somalia,  Ethiopia,  Kenya, Tanzania, and so on. It’s important  to  us that the Sudanese viewers see the cinema of their neighbors and people who are like them. We share similar social problems. We share a lot as Africans on the continent and it’s important to see one another. We believe some questions and answers can be worked through films. We call this  our Neighbors’ Cinema. People from all over Sudan come to the screening places, and they also present some critical reviews, studies and seminars about cinema in Africa and in general. 

TA: It is really beautiful that you talk about finding answers to our problems at the cinema because this medium also reflects us as people. I wonder how many films we have to forget to remember… 

El Sadiq: The issue here is that a lot of films are forgotten. Here in Sudan, we used to have one of the biggest film archives. Unfortunately, most of the films were not properly stored  which made it impossible to restore them.

A German company that came here to Sudan, did a project to digitize a lot of systems that were neglected by the Government. It all happened in the thirty years of the regime in Sudan. As I said before, they had a strong opinion about films and the documentation of the old Sudan. Sudan, before this dictatorship was kind of a different place with freedom of speech. Even the dress code was different. They forced a lot on the people: how to live, what to wear, what to do, etc. Projects that sought to restore old films and digitize them were stopped. There is a short Sudanese documentary on the state of the archives and the Sudanese Revolution which was released in 2018. 

We have a big library of films here in Sudan, maybe like thirteen thousand rare films. It is actually very sad how these films are treated. We may have lost a lot of films and aspects of the past. But filmmakers continue to work and make some more, even though it is difficult. The practitioners persevere and remain hopeful. They continue to work, make films and tell stories. They try to continue their journey.

DO: When I think of the way Sudan is framed within popular media, it is this kind of monolithic discourse about conservative tendencies. Yet I am aware, as Mr. Altayeb has aptly pointed out, there is a wide range of political cultures that aggregate within the Sudanese context. I was wondering if Mr. Altayeb could expand upon that.

SFG: The conservative tendencies really do happen, and you can see the impact of this kind of explosion. The enforcement of conservative and radical views across the communities is real. You know they impose their power all over the place. Since they control the media and the TV and all of that, it facilitates the spread of that kind of radical propaganda. We’ve had a lot of civil wars in Sudan that are mostly fueled by this kind of ideology and propaganda. The dictatorship in Khartoum tried to stay in power by pushing these ideas. 

TA: Cinema then becomes a necessary rebellion or a necessary source of hope…. 

El Sadiq: Yes. It’s also a way to find answers, I think. By representing these stories on screen, we illuminate aspects of our lives, and maybe find answers. We are fascinated as a collective by all the  interesting films coming out of Nigeria, and we would be interested in showcasing some of the works from Nigeria and other countries across the continent.

* El Sadiq works professionally as a sound designer and videographer. He was in charge of sound design for Talking about Trees (Gasmalbari, 2019) and Sudan Forgotten Films (Gasmalbari, 2017), which can be accessed on Youtube. He would like to draw attention to the tragic story of another Sudanese filmmaker, who worked assiduously in the country’s cinema department but was caught on the other side in the wake of the separation of Sudan from South Sudan in 2011. Unfortunately, he died without making it back to Sudan. El Sadiq  considers this a sad demonstration of the actual consequences of working as a filmmaker under such an unstable environment ridden with political tensions. 

Screening virtually from December 18-25, 2022, Archival Mappings, Three by Onyeka Igwe, accompanied by a conversation between artist-filmmaker Onyeka Igwe and architectural designer/researcher Thandi Loewenson.

Onyeka Igwe manipulates found footage, sounds & other archival material – questioning the colonial gaze and reasserting the agency of the colonized. She uncovers the material & metaphoric remnants of the British colonial regime in all its ugliness, but also beautifully recollects personal and collective memories from multiple visual and narrative fronts.

Program:

• Specialised Technique (2018)

• The names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019)

• A so-called archive (2020)

Specialized technique (Onyeka Igwe, 2018, 6 minutes)

William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit developed a framework for colonial cinema, this included slow edits, no camera tricks and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance to this rule set. In an effort to recuperate black dance from this colonial project, Specialised Technique, attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.

The names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (Onyeka Igwe, 2019, 25 minutes)

This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So the names have changed tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.Igwe pushes against the materials of the archive—its distortions, fabrications and embellishments—with her own kind of autofictional response. The artist summons a variety of artistic, literary and personal sources to create a singular biographical document of many strands. the names have changed throws the ordinary and the everyday within the archive into relief by daring to write and re-write the stories of diasporic African life against the grain of colonial history’s master narratives. (Tendai John Mutambu)

A so-called archive (Onyeka Igwe, 2020, 19 minutes)

The work interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot over the past year in two separate colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ‘lost’ from these archives, mixing genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.In Lagos, the former Nigerian Film Unit was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit (1932-1955). A So-Called Archive documents a building largely emptied of its contents, finding desolate rooms full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. The materials found in this building are hard to see, not only because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them.Meanwhile, in Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002-2009) was previously housed in the vaults of one Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s most famous railway designs. The museum included photography, film, sound and object collections from across the former British Empire. Like the Nigerian Film Unit building, this building too has been emptied of its content; the museum closed shortly after reported allegations of the illegal sale of several items from its collection. A So-Called Archive depicts these former archives—along with their histories of hoarding, monetisation, documentation and now abandonment—as metonyms for the enduring entanglements between the UK and its former colonies. They were and continue to be home purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see. (Mason Leaver-Yap)

Onyeka Igwe in conversation with Thandi Loewenson

Thandi: I was thinking about the idea of revisiting work since you recently screened your work in Lagos for the first time. I’m wondering how reviewing your work has elicited new understandings for you? 

Onyeka: I recognize different versions of myself in the films which sometimes is kind of uncomfortable. It’s a reminder of what I was like or thinking about a few years ago, almost like a document you can refer back to. Because these films were part of the research I was doing for a PhD, there is a chronological plotting of questions I was trying to get at, and each film is a different way to approach these questions. I also think that I don’t really understand my work until quite a few years after. In Lagos, I had such a strong experience watching these films with mostly people that live there. I felt shy, very vulnerable and exposed presenting these versions of myself that were learning or unlearning. It’s just very different watching these films with an audience which I assume has more of a connection and vested interest in the questions I’m asking in terms of Nigerian history, colonial history and West African culture, as opposed to other contexts where I am the one who is introducing the audience to these questions.

a so-called archive (2020), because it was done more recently and also during the lockdowns and the pandemic, it feels very strange, haunting. Someone said it reminds them of a horror film or ghost film. I was like,” really?” I was surprised.

Thandi: I had goosebumps watching it!

Onyeka: I can see it now, but making it, I wasn’t trying to work with the trope of horror. Clearly there was something haunting me while making it, a certain presence in the archives,, but it wasn’t conscious at all.

Thandi: This resonates so much because I was thinking a lot about haunting when watching the work. In Specialised Technique (2018) there is a scene where you are projecting onto your body, which I read as a kind of possession. Also the way the light works is quite spectral at times. It made me think of Hartman’s work on critical fabulation, attending to and feeling for the contours of the gaps rather than trying to fill them. There is something very powerful when you place yourself or others — their bodies or their voices — in the work. I constantly come back to Mark Fischer’s distinction between the eerie, defined by absence, and the weird as this more productive mode, defined by the presence of something that shouldn’t be but is. I see that so much in your work, in these layers, archival materials, places, sounds… How do you think about placing yourself in the films in relation to the work of disrupting or refiguring the archives? 

Onyeka: Making Specialised Technique (2018), I found out about this grammar of colonial filmmaking that William Sellers had developed when he was in charge of the Colonial Film Unit. He believed the physiology and intelligence of Africans meant they weren’t capable of being cinema literate. The technique, then, was meant to be the standard of cinema literacy. It was about being very literal: no camera movement, no montage, no trickery, no close ups. In sum, really boring films. I wanted to work with this material and get it to do different things, to be weird, to have another kind of presence which ran against the logic which presided over its creation. I wanted to use the material against itself. This grammar, although debunked in the 1950s via a report that the colonial film unit did on itself, continues in filmmaking. After all, the first Nigerian filmmakers were trained by the colonial film unit, by the overseas television film center… I kind of recognize that grammar in the Nollywood films I used to watch in the 1990s. 

I just happened to be wearing this black leather skirt, and I really wanted to see if I could dance with the people in the archives. It was like an impulse, a need or desire for proximity, to disrupt the colonial gaze, the ways in which the material asked to be viewed, from a studied distance. 

But I also, in a way, wanted to make sure the audience knew that the filmmaking is subjective. I am doing this work, whoever and however I am presented as in the film, because of course, it’s not a constant or stable I. There are a bunch of films about critiquing the colonial archive by white filmmakers that never call themselves into account. I really wanted to separate the work from that body of practice. Going to an archive and smelling the paper, touching people’s pen scratches, being tactile with this material. It’s going through me. There is a contact happening, that I wanted to be recorded.

Thandi: This is so incendiary, I just imagine you dancing in these archival spaces. Truly you are misbehaving, Onyeka. One isn’t supposed to do these things! In this trope of groundbreaking anticolonial films that go into the archives and show the horrors of it, often done by white filmmakers, all the labor, intimacy and tenderness of the people that worked in these spaces, that maintained them, that misbehaved within them is lost. 

There is this slippage between the films, reading across them, they develop a kind of argument. And then within the films themselves, you have all different kinds of media rubbing alongside one another. I’m wondering how the polyvocality of it all disrupts supposedly dominant notions of order or understandings of history and knowledge? Zimbabwean writer, Mhoze Chikowero writes about the role of spirits in the liberation and how one of the biggest fears of the colonizer was that the response to the repression would not just be in the physical realm but comprise all of these other planes, that is “a return of the repressed in possession mode”. In your work you develop a method of making / thinking / speaking as a disruptive mode, an anticolonial method. Do you think about your methodology as explicit or intuitive, something that comes up of what you are presented in a way? 

Onyeka: What you’re saying makes me think of this line in Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts, which I believe she borrows from NourbeSe Philips, the idea of trying her tongue… That image stayed with me. In some ways, the films are an attempt to do that. In the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019), there is this gestural movement between me and another dancer, which is ultimately trying to tell a story in this liminal, spectral space. I was also thinking of Emezi’s Freshwater, the passages describing that other space they are in, when talking with these spirits. I don’t have the framework, language, or instruction to put it in these terms. Nonetheless, I was led by encounters in the archive and I am purposely open to whatever comes from these experiences: any kind of thought, memory, gesture… Encounter was the leading methodology. 

Thandi: One of the incredible gifts of your practice is how you propose an ethics of working with this material which resonates across so many other contexts. My family lives in Zimbabwe, and I’ve been working a lot in Zambia, but with the pandemic and not being able to travel has brought up a lot of anxieties. I’m realizing that a lot of the work is trying to feel for a place, to present a reading of it, but also trying to understand one’s relation with it. There is this beautiful moment in the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019) where you’re talking with your dad with such incredible vulnerability, tenderness, but also humor…

Onyeka: I was cringing so much in Lagos watching this, precisely because it is so earnest. the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019), especially, is very much reaching for a landing. I try to understand my relationship to a home I’ve felt an absence from for a long time. I was very anxious about showing the work in Nigeria. I showed the work a few years ago in Sweden and someone in the audience who is Nigerian from the diaspora said, “this is such a diaspora film”. So I was really wondering what people who live in Nigeria would think. The films are a kind of offering to bridge a gap. They really put a relationship of absence at the front. 

Thandi: So how was it to show the films in Lagos?

Onyeka: I was really bracing myself for criticism, but people had lots of different things to say, and were approaching the work from places I hadn’t encountered so much. There wasn’t the “oh this is interesting because it is different”, which is often a response you get from audiences not familiar with the context. The questions were getting to the heart of things a bit quicker.  I felt very unconfident in talking about the films which felt refreshing. They have screened in the same contexts quite a lot. I developed a sense of how to talk about them… But this time, being in Lagos, I was thinking a little bit more about it and I also saw them in a different way. 

Thandi: Thank you for saying that and I recognize a lot of it. Especially what you’re saying about the diaspora filmmaking. It is a real anxiety, a horror even. I made a short film last year, Ukochekoche hweChizevezeve Intelsat 502 / Whisper Network Intelsat 502 (2022) about a particular site in Zimbabwe, and had an opportunity to screen it in Johannesburg recently. I worked with a translator to translate the voiceover into shona, one of the main languages in Zimbabwe. It was really an incredible experience, because of all the slippages it introduces between voice and image. But then showing the work in different contexts always comes up with a lot of anxiety.

I guess my last question is about fiction, a term I find productive in some ways but also quite restrictive, increasingly, because of how people place the work in particular ways when this word comes up. I’m curious about other kinds of storytelling modes which inform your work?

Onyeka: In the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019) there are a few narrative devices going on. For me it is really about telling the same story in multiple ways. I am really not interested in truth, with capital T or in the plural either, but rather I’m reaching for a kind of collapse. The archives is a collection of stories arranged in a particular way and presented because of hierarchies of power. The aim of the films then is to put as many of the stories that don’t exist in the official archives next to each other. My mum’s telling I won’t call it a fiction but a telling, a story or a memory passed down to her. 

This also came up in the conversation in Lagos: there was a lot of distrust of the term “oral history” as this Western term which separates, categorizes and raises some elements as worthy of study.  Instead of broadening or trying to allow things to climb up the ladder, what about flattening or horizontalizing all of these different approaches without trying to subsume the contradictions,  frictions and how these different orders of knowledge rub against each other? I’m interested in gatherings, in multiplicity as disorder, disruption. And then, there is this relinquishing of control which happens as the films continue their lives, never to be complete, as new audiences bring new readings. This is a privilege of the life of a film, really. In my quest to transform colonial images, I initially thought about it as something that happens in the making of the film, but I am realizing this is more of an ongoing process that other people come into by watching.  

Thandi: Yes, but also through the continuation of your work too, they echo backwards somehow and provide new readings of your past practice. I feel like part of the mechanism of colonial epistemologies is prescribing a finitude or completion and your work kind of undoes that. Particularly in the endings, they resist comfort. There is a beautiful moment in Specialised Technique (2018), as a face almost burns through the surface of the film on which you are drawing. It was such an electric moment for me. You burst the archive open and all of these voices, ideas, energies, spirits, come out of this stream and run amok in such powerful ways.

Onyeka: Thank you so much, I really like running amok and misbehaving as ways to think about my methodology!

Anti-ethnography: Halimuhfack (Christopher Harris, 2016) and Obatala (Sebastian Wiedemann, 2019)

This virtual screening is inspired by a 2016 program by Indigenous filmmakers and curators Adam and Zack Khalil on the violence inherent to the ethnographic gaze, and the extent to which such gaze continues to define much of the visual codes by which Black and Brown people are represented in the mainstream imaginary. As Zimbabwean novelist, Yvonne Vera puts it, “in Africa, as in most parts of the dispossessed, the camera arrives as part of the colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible.”

We selected two films by Christopher Harris and Sebastian Wiedemann, as kindred but distinctive attempts to not merely rehearse the violence of representation, but open up possibilities for otherwise modes of cinematic encounter. Halimuhfack and Obatala Film are both experiments in rhythmic intuition and non-linear time. They gesture at a kind of incantatory cinema in which presence is necessarily trance-like, spectral, yet no less intensely felt.

• Christopher Harris, 2016, Halimuhfack

Christopher Harris is a Black American moving image artist, curator and professor at the University of Iowa’s department of Cinematic Arts. His experimental films and video installations reckon with the conventions of historiography, narrative and cinematic realism, in their complicity with the forms of capture and carcerality which plague Black living. He works primarily through manually and photo-chemically altered film, collage, found footage, and staged reenactments.

Halimuhfack portrays an actress in a lush dark green dress, wooden beads necklace, red hat and black leather gloves. She lip-syncs to a 1939 archival audio of Zora Neale Hurston singing a Florida bawdy song and describing her research process. A chronicler of Black southern and Caribbean cultures, Hurston consigned them to posterity via a diverse array of forms – film, essays, novels, academic research and sound recordings. Behind the actress performing Hurston in Halimuhfack, a screen loops flickering, classically ethnographic images of Maasai people dancing or returning the camera’s gaze. Harris (re)shot these on a hand-cranked Bolex, from an educational film. The filmmaker never allows the voice of Hurston to fully sync with the lips of the actress, emphasizing the multilayered gaps between objects and technologies of capture and representation. A student of Franz Boas, but always ambivalent towards the project of ethnography, Hurston herself already practiced a kind of “sonic infidelity” (as phrased by R. Kheshti in her 2015 book, Modernity’s Ear) which refused illusions of faithful, unmediated reproduction, foregrounding instead embodied practice and improvisation. Christopher Harris’ Halimuhfack feels like a fitting homage and expansion of her project of “singing back to the people.” Hurston’s distorted and looped voice in Halimuhfack ends up producing its own kind of uncanny musicality and record of discordance, emphasizing both the violence of capture and the ways in which what matters actually elides it. 

Other recordings by Zora Neale Hurston:

Courtesy of the Library of Congress audio archive

• Sebastian Wiedemann, 2019, Obatala Film

Sebastian Wiedemann is an Afro-Colombian experimental filmmaker and philosopher, as well as editor and curator of Hambre, an online platform, observatory and laboratory dedicated to contemporary Latin-American avant-garde cinema. He describes himself as a “practitioner of cinematic modes of experience” in which the ecological and the cosmological take center stage. Film is envisioned as a space of becoming, radical pedagogy and experimentation with otherwise modes of being in lieu of representation.

Shot in the city of Ile-Ife on Super8 film during a Yoruba ritual and assembled in Brazil, Obatala Film is a transatlantic repertoire of light, rhythm and movement. Wiedemann eschews documentation, treating moving image and sound as matter from which something akin to a spiritual experience might emerge, rather than sites of inscription.

Read an exchange between Sebastian Wiedemann & Jenny Fonseca Tovar on Obatala Film and cinema in the time of the pandemic.

(excerpt)

“Cinema has never been out of us. And, of course, we may now miss going to a movie theater, but, luckily, cinema has no fixed address and it cannot be quarantined. When we understand it as a vital mode of experience in which we are inevitably submerged, more than a human manifestation, cinema is a cosmogenetic condition. Being in the world means to be in the immanence of a cosmic cinematograph. The coronavirus is not the enclosure or detention of a world, but the presence of a mutagenic agent that forces us to change the montage logics of a world, so it can continue to be claimed as multiple. Coming up with new modes of making life go on, of making cinema happen. (…) To continue writing and editing "Obatala Film" from Obaluaye's hand is to welcome the fact that the pregnant image can present itself as a un-editing force or if you want as a montage of impermanence. This is the counter-spell! A joyful state of catastrophe where the cosmic cinematograph makes the cuts, explicit occasions of crumbling creation. Vertigo, disfiguring, erasing, and blurring of images, for they are always beginning, starting. Re-starts, left behind ephemeral lives while others begin. Obaluaye making the beginning of the images last between the thresholds of getting sick and healing them. That is the affirmation of the pharmacological condition of the images. They like this Pharmakon that heals or kills. A whole question of dosage. The measure of the virus that asks for the writing to become delirious as potency of thought of a whole living world, of an animist pluriverse as a multidimensional montage that resists the eclipse of a pregnant image.”