Programme Notes Gestures of Memory

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Programme Notes - Gestures of Memory: After the Archive

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Gestures of Memory: After the Archive is a programme of three screenings interrogating film histories, the role of cinema and the processes of preservation and restoration of film outside of the West. Through various styles of documentary ranging from traditional to more experimental forms, the programme considers how the camera - a colonial weapon - might instead be recontextualised as a tool. This is shown by the reappropriation of archival footage, the use of new technologies to subvert an extractive gaze, and through the investigation of lost films.

Moving across geographies, we also see how film and cinema can be valuable methods of solidarity and their important role in the formation of a collective memory.

Gestures of Memory: After the Archive was initiated in response to the anniversaries edition of the festival, with the desire to open up a conversation about filmic memory as it sits outside of Western cinema histories. The filmmakers in the programme prompt the question of ‘what happens next once we encounter the archive?’ with this mythical question explored through their gestures.

In the first screening The Cemetery of Cinema Dir. Thierno Souleymane Diallo, the archive, or lack of it, is the catalyst for examining the relationship across film, cultural memory and attitudes towards cinema-going. The cinema becomes a contested space, its value in question, a prompt to consider the experience of collective viewing versus the solitary practice of home watching. Through the search for a lost film, we are reminded of the importance that the archive has as a holder of cultural history. The Cemetery of Cinema also nudges us to consider how memory is kept alive - where and who holds it? How is it shaped?

The short film programme brings together experimental responses to the archive whilst directly confronting colonial practices of image-making in relation to space and place. The landscape then becomes an object in itself, interpreted through these new technologies which challenge colonial surveillance and archival practices. In the case of Golden Jubilee Dir. Suneil Sanzgiri the archive is ancestral memory - reimagined, reclaimed and speculated upon through a diasporic lens. Onyeka Igwe continues on with this speculation to inform her soundscape in a so-called archive, where the lost films from the Nigerian Film Unit and the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol are imagined through a sonic world. Sanaz Sohrabi’s Sahnehaye Estekhraj (Scenes of Extraction) takes the form of a video essay which likens the extraction of oil and image-making, with images taken from the British Petroleum Archives. Encountering the archive through colonial ruin and residue, these three films playfully use architectural practices to illustrate and excavate its hold, and interrogate the language of the lens.

Lastly, R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity Dir. Mohanad Yaqubi is a documentary which sees the role of Director expanding beyond its conventional definition. Upon receiving a package of film reels, Yaqubi restored these to reveal the lost films from the Japanese solidarity movement with Palestine which he then collages together to form the documentary. Made by filmmakers across the world, the films were screened in Japan to show support for the Palestinian liberation struggle and contain an array of formats. Beyond its content, the film is an act of solidarity that is demonstrated in a myriad of ways through the making of R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity. This includes the collective actions of filming, screening, archiving, preserving, restoring and editing across time. The encounter with the archive is made visible throughout, with the documentary itself a gesture of its memory.

The thread which ties these film together is their commitment to interrogating archival practices within their own distinct way. When placed together, these films consider memory as something malleable, whilst each film serves as a process towards memory-making, or a way of grappling with an archival hold. We see how the archive exists beyond a fixed location, beyond the institution, to become something grounded in personal and/or collective histories. The archive itself then becomes a memory, sometimes preserved, sometimes forgotten, sometimes lost.

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