#decolonisingimages

There is a line around 38” that states how with regards to the spatial design “the politics were more sympathetic [to anti-colonialism] than the art.” For me this is a reminder of the difficulties of taking politics and ideologies and cementing into tangible practice and/or space—particularly over time.

I was thoroughly confused by Charleston Parade; it felt silly being centered around a dance, but also serious with its post-apocalyptic/sci-fi themes. It is confusing to me that the filmmakers seemed like they were trying to subvert colonization or something, but it seemed willfully ignorant that the Parisian Savage would go so willingly with the African Explorer if colonization were being portrayed in a real way. This makes me think that the film wasn’t supposed to be all that serious? I’m not sure what people were thinking about in 1927.

The mise en scene was also quite unexpected and intriguing within the storytelling. Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture seemed to be a character in the film embodying the traits of Socialism all the while the text showed differently with the political shift portrayed.

Naeem Mohaiemen’s film about the dreams and subsequent collapse of the Non-Aligned Movement against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this week was quite powerful, if destabilizing. I felt as if Mohaiemen’s three side-by-side frames which depicted historical footage of negotiations next to present day footage of vast transnational meeting halls alongside textual explanations and translations of their events could have easily been supplemented by a fourth frame showing footage from this past week. For me, it highlighted not only the necessity but also precarity of international alliances, and in particular, the enormous challenges that Non-Aligned countries back then and “developing” nations today face in attempting to chart their own path of agency and diplomacy when their technological infrastructures are so often at the whim of the world’s empires. What I found interesting was that rather than focus on footage of protest, war, and death / assasination (the fate of many of the protagonists who we meet in the film) as the archetypal image of decolonization, Mohaiemen draws us into a discourse of decolonization through footage of negotiations and conversations and the spaces in which they take place. I’m not sure whether Mohaiemen is ultimately hopeful about the prospects of negotiations however, because the eerie cleanliness of the film ends with a summary of the ways in which world leaders at the various OIC and NAM meetings ultimately meet different fates. This brought me back to the dissonance of seeing nearly simultaneous recordings of world leaders talking past each other at the UN and violence in the streets of Ukraine. The fact that Mohaiemen created this film is a sign that he wants to learn from history in order to revive discourse around non-aligned struggles, but he does so with a heavy dose of reality regarding its challenges.

 “The Third World was not a place, but a project.” This quote is one that is mentioned in Two Meetings and a Funeral, and reflects a message of colonialism that was present throughout this week’s films.  When one encounters history, the story is often dictated through the lens of the writer—how we choose to tell a story, what ideas are important, what gets included, and what is left out. The Third World was a subject of many of these stories, where countries would implement an ethnocentric idea of what a society should look like; thereby, leading to many developed countries to intervene in the day-to-day life of other regions in order to improve their living conditions, while also benefiting themselves.  In the films for this week, the message is prominent in how nations viewed each other. For example, in Charleston Parade, the audience is entrenched in a simple narrative of how a native white girl teaches an African airman about the Charleston dance. Yet, the film is not designed to communicate a didactic message, what it does is present a scenario where colonial countries have the responsibility to teach and change the culture of other regions. It is paralleled with Two Meetings and a Funeral, especially when referring to La Coupole D’Alger Arena. Despite its aim to represent the post-colonial order of Algeria and aspirations for democracy, the project is impractical. It is difficult to maintain, and even the structure of the chairs’ layout are undemocratic where there is not enough for a large population. As countries work to forge a new path, independent of the colonial powers, it begs the question of how will they do so? There is a sense of how individuals and cultures can maintain their identity despite an impeding wave of new colonial ideas. Accordingly, the films demonstrate the ongoing struggle of how colonialism still lingers, and through their images works on changing the narrative of how we view other regions, like the Third World.