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- Brunow, Dagmar
(författare)
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Modernist Cinema as Black (Atlantic) Historiography : Aesthetic Strategies in Black British Filmmaking
- 2009
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Ingår i: Panels of the Eighth Conference of the Collegium for African American Research.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- How do artists deal with the lack of discursive space for the representation of Blackhistory? While Spike Lee depicts the story of Malcolm X in an epic mode, the British Black AudioFilm Collective (BAFC) rather focuses on the ruptures, gaps and fissures of Black history. Theirfilm Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), which hit the cinema screens only a few months later than its US-counterpart, thus forms an interesting contrast to Lee’s feature film, in particular as itwas photographed by Spike Lee’s and Julie Dash’s cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Moreover, boththe BAFC-productions Handsworth Songs (1986) and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989)acknowledge that Black history cannot be told in a linear mode. Instead, in centring around memoryand oblivion they focus on the “ghosts of stories” rather than on a chronological positivist narrative.My argument is that during the 1980s the BAFC (John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George,Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson, and Trevor Mathison) as well as other British filmcollectives like Sankofa (Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood and Nadine Marsh-Edwards) developed a modernist filmmaking that consciously employs formalistic means in orderto undermine the traditional depiction of history and memory inscribed into the Industrial Mode ofRepresentation.My paper explores the following questions: In what way did the industrial context in the 1980s enablethe avant-garde practices of British independent filmmaking? What aesthetic devices does the BAFCemploy to point at the “absence of ruins” (Derek Walcott)? How are modernist poetic strategies usedto reveal the “ghosts of history”? And in what way can Black British filmmaking be regarded as a siteof remembrance, as a part of postcolonial historiography?
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- Brunow, Dagmar
(författare)
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Performativity, Self-reflexivity, and the Archive : Transnational family memory as national counter-historiography in Fatih Akin‘s Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (2001) and Sandhya Suri’s I for India (2005)
- 2009
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Ingår i: Families and Memories, a Committee on Family Research OSLO, JUNE 15-17, 2009.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Acclaimed German film director Fatih Akin‘s documentary Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (We forgot to return home, 2001) and Sandhya Suri’s film essay I for India (2005) both deal with questions of memory and belonging. Both films employ a parallel strategy of the filmmakers interviewing their parents, who migrated to Germany (from Turkey) or to Britain (from India) respectively. Suri’s film is based on super8-footage shot by her father that was originally sent to his family in India, recording the life of this 1st generation migrant family in Britain. In turn, Suri’s family received films and tapes from India. Thus, the home movie footage forms an epistolary account of the creation of transnational memory production. Furthermore, her film shows how some experiences are silenced and how a certain (official) narration of home and belonging is created. Also Akin’s film not only documents migrant history, but is in itself a document of the construction of memory.I would like to focus on the following questions: How does individual memory become collective memory? What aesthetic devices (use of archive footage, modes of self-reflexivity) do the filmmakers employ to broaden the narrative, to make the personal political? In what way do these films form a counter-history to the hegemonic national discourse in which migrant experiences are marginalized, objectified or rendered invisible?In what way can these films become a source for migrant historiography? Do they even exceedthe representational level? My point is that these films are not mere documentaries and should not only be read from a mimetic perspective, as “representations” of “ethnicity”, but are more interesting to look at from the perspective of performativity. They show in what way memory is shaped, how a narrative is constructed and how individuals create their own perception of reality. Thus, they take an anti-essentialist stand and avoid presenting their characters as objects, granting them agency and subjectivity instead.
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- Brunow, Dagmar
(författare)
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[ Review of ] Borderline : Ein Film von Kenneth Macpherson
- 2009
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Ingår i: testcard #18. - Mainz : Ventil Verlag. - 9783931555177 ; , s. 294-295
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Bokkapitel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Review of the DVD edition of Macpherson's experimental film "Borderline", a British avant-garde classic negotiating issues of race and sexuality.
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