Film Club: Onyeka Igwe and Trinh T. Minh-ha

Please join us for a screening of Onyeka Igwe's a so-called archive (2020) and Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage (1982).

The screening is presented as part of the Anti-Racist organising work in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, and forms part of an ongoing Film Club which meets twice a semester.

The Film Club is aimed at all staff and students in the school, but others are welcome to join us. For more information, please email Dr Maki Fukuoka or Dr Gill Park.

Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive (2020)

In Lagos, the former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit (1932–1955). Today it stands empty. Its rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. The films found in this building are hard to see, not only because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them. They reveal a colonial residue, echoed in walls of the building itself.

Meanwhile, in Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002–2009) was previously housed in the vaults of one Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s most famous railway designs. The museum included photographic, film, sound and object collections from across the former British Empire. However, it is now shrouded in ignominy after the alleged illegal sale of several items from its collection, leading to its closure. The monetisation and obscurity of its collection points to an attitude to Britain’s colonial past. 

a so-called archive magines the ‘lost’ films from both of these archives, using distinctive soundscapes, choral arrangements and a radio play within the confines of images from a disembodied tour of the equisite corpse of an archive building.

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage (1982)

Women are the focus but not the object of Trinh T. Minh-ha's influential first film, a complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal. Through a complicity of interaction between film and spectator, Reassemblage reflects on documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.

Image

Video still: Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive (2020) Courtesy of the artist.