Framing Colonial Film Archives: Histories and Afterlives of Indian collections
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections presents:
An evening of screenings, discussion and debate with a focus on India about the audiovisual heritage of the Indian sub-continent. The Colonial Reels team will report back from our recent symposium on archive footage from South Asia in the British and Indian national film archives.
The session will screen a selection of films from the British Film Institute, the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection and Wellcome Collection curated by members of the project team who will introduce them, including Imruh Bakari, Haroon Forde, Jacqueline Maingard, Rosa Méthol, Emma Sandon, Angela Saward and others tbc.
Subjects and themes from the project’s Indian symposium that inform the curation of this event include:
Framing the Field: Colonial Film, Historiography and the Work of the Archive.
Colonial Frontiers, Indigenous Erasure and the Visual Archive in South Asia.
Plantations and Refineries Across the Sea: Colonial and Corporate Film and Media Infrastructures.
Ecologies of the Colonial Short Film: Government Policies, Commercial Circuits, Aesthetic Forms.
Archives and Afterlives of Colonial Film.
Practice-based Research and Critical Re-use of Colonial Film Archive.
Questions that scholars raised were:
How is the term ‘colonial film’ relevant to the experience of colonialism in India under the British empire?
What kinds of films populate the archives?
How did imperial views selectively render landscapes, rivers and oceans, peoples, animals legible whilst marginalising others?
How did colonial and corporate film and media infrastructures generate images of resources and labour and naturalise the industrialisation, mobilisation and management of people and technologies used to produce commodities?
What are the legacies of Empire in non-fiction film production after independence of India in 1947?
What are the challenges for archives in India of archival practices and protocols adopted internationally?
What archival issues are pertinent for colonial film research, in relation to cataloguing and preservation, access and digitisation, rights and future policy?
What might be the afterlives of colonial reels housed in British archives?
The screenings will be followed by drinks and nibbles in the cinema foyer.
Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections https://www.bristol.ac.uk/film/research/colonial-reels/
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Contact name: Matthew Barrington
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