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- Brunow, Dagmar, 1966-
(author)
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Amateur home movies and the archive of migration : Sandhya Suri's I for India (2005)
- 2010
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In: Tourists and Nomads. Amateur Images of Migration. Second Interdisciplinary Conference on Amateur Images 22 – 24 April 2010.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Encompassing 40 years of immigrant life in Britain, Sandhya Suri’s filmic essay I for India (2005) is a collage of amateur home movies, British newsreels as well as film stock shot by the director herself. The home movie footage was filmed by Suri’s father who came to Britain as an immigrant doctor in the 1960s and who exchanged super8-films andaudio reels as cine-letters about his new life with his family in India. After having rediscovered the material on the attic of her family home, Sandhya Suri transformed it into her graduate thesis film at the The National Film and Television School in London. Dealing with memory, nostalgia and migrant experiences in Britain, I for India establishes a counter-history to the hegemonic national discourse in which migrant experiences are marginalized, objectified or rendered invisible.My paper is going to examine the role of the amateur footage for reflecting on the ontology of the image and the materiality of the different film formats. How does the reception of the footage change in the course of its dissemination? In what way does the filmic montage in I for India contribute to challenging the dominant media discourse on Asians in Britain? I would like to argue that the amateur footage helps to counter the ethnographic, Eurocentric gaze on the new citizens and subverts the hegemonic use of images of migrants as a means of control and classification (Alan Sekula) or as a weapon (Susan Sontag). How do the amateur images migrate into the collective (national) visual archive? Finally, the example of I for India might also show that Zygmunt Bauman’s binary opposition between tourists and nomads needs to be complicated.
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- Brunow, Dagmar, 1966-
(author)
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Before YouTube and Indymedia : Cultural memory and the archive of video collectives in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s
- 2012
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In: Studies in European Cinema. - Bristol : Intellect Ltd.. - 1741-1548 .- 2040-0594. ; 8:3, s. 171-181
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Collective film-making practice in Germany is still a blind spot in film historiography. During the 1970s and 1980s independent film and video workshops established a nationwide network to provide ‘counter information’ (Negt/Kluge) in order to challenge dominant media representations. Therefore, the works of the video collectives can become a relevant source for historians and journalists alike. While the videos can be perceived as an important contribution to left-wing cultural memory, this memory of the various media practices of the last decades is currently fading away. The videotapes slowly disintegrate and as digitization is costly and time-consuming, many video productions will not survive. This has consequences not only for historiography, but also for the visual iconography of cultural memory. This article focuses on the archival practice of three workshops in Hamburg, the stronghold for German independent film-making after 1968: the Medienpädagogikzentrum (Centre for Media Pedagogy, 1973–), bildwechsel (1979–), the umbrella organization for women in media, culture and art, and die thede (1980–), an association of documentary film-makers. The examples show how archival practice can be conceptualized not only as part of the hegemonic national archive alone, but also as an act of counter-memory. © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article.
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- Brunow, Dagmar
(author)
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Black diasporic filmmaking and the political aesthetics of anti-essentialism
- 2011
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In: 9th International Conference of the Collegium for African American Research, "Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation", Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7, April 6-9, 2011.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The fact that Black artists are quite often pigeonholed as spokespersons of Black experience is due to a mimetic understanding of art. Using examples from 1980s Black British diasporic filmmaking I would like to shift the analytical focus from representation and mimesis towards art as interventionist practice. The mysterious deaths of young Black men in police custody form the point of departure for an exploration of memory and mourning in Mysteries in July (Black Audio Film Collective, 1991). Additionally, the Sankofa film collective's Territories (1985) is an exploration of urban space, historiography, heterotopia and Black masculinities, while practices of surveillance and the framing of Blacks via media discourses are addressed in Handsworth Songs (Black Audio Film Collective 1986). These filmic essays, instead of looking at the black male as a given social problem, reflect on its construction through discourses of media and governmentality.Rather than creating a counter-discourse, these films abstain from trying to depict events "as they really happened". Instead, they deconstruct the hegemonic media discourse through the use of self-reflexive means. While counter practices often assume a unified essentialist stand (as in concepts of Afrocentrism and négritude, for example) I would suggest that in 1980s diasporic Black British filmmaking self-reflexivity is employed as a strategy which might be able to solve a notion of "strategic essentialism" (Spivak). Filmmaking thus serves as an epistemological tool to deal with the gaps, fissures and absences in the national visual archive and in hegemonic historiography while at the same time defying notions of homogeneity and authenticity. The use of self-reflexivity enables the films to reflect on modes of exclusion of the Black subject from hegemonic discourses on the ontology of the image and on the filmic apparatus. To sum up, my paper outlines auteurist strategies of dealing with the exclusion of both the official canon and of the collective visual archive of the nation.
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- Brunow, Dagmar, 1966-
(author)
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Bollywood im Zeitalter der Globalisierung : eine transnationale Perspektive auf populäres Hindikino
- 2013
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In: Kunst als Avantgarde einer Weltkultur?, Muthesius Kunsthochschule, Kiel / Kunsthalle Kiel, Kiel, Germany, 6-8 June, 2013.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Das populäre Hindikino, schon immer hybrid, ist seit den 1990er Jahren ein globales Phänomen. Die Ausrichtung auf ein internationales Publikum hat Konsequenzen für die Produktion, Ästhetik und Distribution der Filme. Inwiefern kann eine transnationale Perspektive dem Wandel Bollywoods vom Kino zur Kulturindustrie (Rajadhyaksha) Rechnung tragen? Der Beitrag untersucht veränderte Distributionsbedingungen, lokale Rezeptionen und Aneignungen sowie Bollywoods globale Fankultur.
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- Brunow, Dagmar
(author)
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Deconstructing Essentialism and Revising Historiography : The Function of Metareference in Black British Filmmaking
- 2011
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In: The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media. - New York : Rodopi. - 9789401200691 - 9401200696 ; , s. 341-355
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article describes the function of the metareferential turn in black British filmmaking of the 1980s. Metaisation is here a result of the impact of European art cinema (Godard, Paradjanov, Kluge) as well as of Third Cinema practice and of the ‘essay film’ represented by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. Using the examples of Handsworth Songs and Seven Songs for Malcolm X by the Black Audio Film Collective, directed by John Akomfrah, as well as Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston and The Attendant, this article outlines five functions of metareference. First, it can be regarded as a means to counter and reflect on the absences in the visual archive in Britain and of questioning the master narrative of British historiography. Second, it is used as a way of transgressing the boundaries of representation and of escaping the fruitless debate about negative and positive stereotypes. Third, metaisation is employed as an artistic strategy in order to inscribe oneself as an auteur into film historiography. Fourth, it can be regarded as a means of escaping the critical label of the social realist filmmaker who deals with the representation of black experiences. Finally, metaisation contributes to a reconceptualisation of the works in terms of both media theory and the essay film.
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