Cinema Palace : Broken View

Palace : Broken View

04/06 @ 19h00

This article was part of FORUM+ vol. 30 no. 1 | 2, pp. 68-79

Broken View.
Congo and the magic lantern.

As an early projection device, the magic lantern was often used for colonial propaganda. For instance, to showcase and legitimize the ‘good works’ of the church in the colony. But lanterns were also used by missionaries in Africa to evangelize the local people and create a colonized mindset. This text is a reflection on the work process of Broken View, an essay film on colonial images from the Belgian Congo and the magic lantern. Through montage, collage, and assemblage the film examines and recontextualizes these images of the Belgian colonial past.

Als vroeg projectiemedium werd de toverlantaarn vaak gebruikt voor koloniale propaganda. Bijvoorbeeld om de 'goede werken' van de kerk in de kolonie te presenteren en te legitimeren. Maar lantaarns werden ook door missionarissen in Afrika gebruikt om de plaatselijke bevolking te evangeliseren en een gekoloniseerde mentaliteit te creëren. Deze tekst is een reflectie op het werkproces van Broken View, een essayfilm over de toverlantaarn en koloniale beelden uit Belgisch-Congo. Door montage, collage en assemblage onderzoekt en hercontextualiseert de film deze beelden uit het Belgische koloniale verleden.

[...]

"I see montage not as a final stage of the filmmaking process, but rather as a way of beginning, montage as a way of writing."

In trying to find a way to present still images in a medium which relies on movement, I quite intuitively turned towards collage. This way, movement lies in the act of cutting out, in the tension between two arrested movements: the captured ça a été of the photograph and the completed collage-gesture that brings two or more images in the same space. The form gives rhythm to the discourse and engenders it. The cutting out of figures becomes a formal translation of what I try to do in the film discursively, to decontextualize and recontextualize fragments from the past. It performs the question of how to see these colonial images today, if we even should see them?

Perhaps the only way to be able to show these images is when they are set in motion within a poetic space that aims to do justice to the realities of oppression from which they were taken. I am aware that some of the images in the film are hurtful to see. I am aware that some will see the reuse of these images as a continuation of the violence their taking involved, and that my position as a white European man will enforce this view. Though I have seen instances of this reiteration of colonial violence in cultural products that purport to denounce the colonial past, I do not believe that to show these images, even violent ones, even from my side of the colonial heritage, automatically implies continuing the violence they both document and materialize. I think this happens when not only the images themselves but also the spectacle-form and ideological framework in which they were presented are reproduced, in other words, when the effects of their reproduction are either ignored or anticipated and exploited in the service of this or that agenda. I have not treated this lightly. Broken View does not seek out a shock effect, it does not try to sell a product or resort to cynically rousing controversy to gain attention in an increasingly saturated audio-visual market. Nor do I claim a sort of neutral ground or moral high ground. It is the spectacle-form, the milieu in which these images were made and shown, that I hope the film interrogates and deconstructs. I do this knowing that any deconstruction is also a construction, that my film is also a form, and that there is no inherently unproblematic form.

Both the essayistic montage and the collage, the poetics I turned to in this film, bring together elements that often have little to do with one another. They do this, as the writer Brian Dillon wrote about the essay form, ‘in such a way that the scandal or shock of their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged together’.11 So, these images must be accompanied by other images, brought into relation with other, maybe even seemingly unconnected images. These relationships are not comparisons or equations, but the threads of an unfinished fabric, a continuous work of de- and reassembly, a broader, perhaps speculative contextualization. Assemblages are formed in which the figures are brought into each other’s orbit, within a wider frame and into another timeline than those of the photographs they were taken out of, inserting them into new constellations, trying to find new rhythms. In doing so, I hope to make visible some of the brushstrokes with which they were originally made, the power relations these images texturized and helped (helplessly) to fabulate, the purposes they were to serve. The film is an essay, an atlas of sorts, or an album where fragments of images and language exchange their shortcomings, what words can show and what images can say.

But what to say? Who is speaking and to whom? The spoken text is not only a feature of the essay film. Magic lantern projections were almost always accompanied by live narration. In the case of mission photography almost always in the explanatory mode, an authoritative register, a man, a priest, who spoke with full authority on what was being projected. There was no doubt in his voice. There is but one truth, and that is the Christian truth. At this stage in the editing process, I am trying to find a balance between different registers of the voice-over. The challenge is to subvert the authority of the colonial voice, to replace it not with silence, but to find another way of speaking, of giving information, to introduce an element of doubt. This can reside in subtle formal gestures, a tone of voice, an emphasis turning into a question mark, repetition, or wordplay. I am not quite sure yet how, but I want to let this informative, authoritative mode disintegrate into a poetic mode. I mean poetry in the sense that it is the opposite of the direct speech of the colonizer. That it is a tentative way of speaking. An essayistic way of speaking if you will. The text becomes a collage of registers, of sources and tones but spoken by a single voice.

Cinema Palace
This article was part of FORUM+ vol. 30 no. 1 | 2, pp. 68-79

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