#decolonisingimages

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Blogpost #6

I really appreciate the experimental display of archival film, images, spaces narratives, and so on of the Two Meetings and a Funeral. While it took me a while to concentrate on the topic of this experimental documentary, I liked how the triptych of images/film would allow me not to just focus on the narrator but also take a look at the spaces, objects, and moments that the narrator would describe. I read this film more like an installation, where I could decide where to focus and for how long.

One other reason I liked this three-channel film is that despite that its context was about two failed projects, that were almost utopian and that emerged from the complexity of the Cold-War period, the artists managed to narrate this heavy context in a playful way. The viewer could focus on the materiality of the spaces, the architecture, and other qualities of the situation that was described, where they were displayed in one or two on the three screens.

This film inspires me to experiment with different displays of images and archival material to create a narration for complex issues and make it accessible to a larger audience by providing an array of images that can be understood and interpreted easier by a larger audience.

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Blogpost #6

In the film, “Two Meetings and a Funeral” One of the things I was drawn to was how architecture and spatial design was an integral to the narrative.

In essence, the film highlights the importance of space as an actor in the social organizing. This intentionality adds a layer of depth that I have not witnessed (in my limited film expertise) as often when historical imagery is overlaid with the present. The building themselves—well-built structures and and supposed houses of organizational change are portrayed as empty and hollow. It leave the viewer to wonder what the spaces felt  energetically when filled with many people coming together, as in a memory. On the contrary, archival footage shows spaces as alive and activated. As it states, “this movie is a war against forgetting.”

The architecture is a physical tie that connects the events of the 60s and 70s to now, though in a way that drives home the larger message of the film—how NAM experienced a period of great momentum but has since fizzled into a sort of relic as are the buildings themselves

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.

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #6

Lately in my thesis work I’ve been thinking about how to represent a timeline of events that led up to the making of my thesis site. Watching Two Meetings and a Funeral gave me so many ideas on how to represent that through film and images, in an organized way, but describing the complexities from which the final product emerged from. Thinking more about this, I feel there’s a big connection between the failed utopian projects that Mohaiemen is examining in the film, and my thesis site, which was a product of the US Federal Highway Administration and Urban Renewal. Both of which were aimed at national defense and beautification, respectively, but at immense cost to those whose lives crossed paths with the planner’s documents. I really enjoyed the three-channel composition for a lot of reasons, one being that it drives home a theme of challenging the reliability of memory, and emphasizing points of view when theres three different frames of the same object or location in view. 

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.

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Blogpost #6

Watching two meeting and a funereal and knowing that I’m watching the image of colonialism, I can’t help but be struck by the irony of me almost not needing subtitles to follow the film thanks TO colonialism: Knowing the languages because of it.

The film has been most difficult to follow so far. It was interesting however that the events of the film were narrated in a tripartite frame of existence, seemingly narrating history on three distinct frequencies. The Third-Worldism introduced in the film is highlighted by the shift from Socialism to Islamism.

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.

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blogpost #6

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.

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Blogpost #6

 “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.