Film Screenings / Programs / Series
DECOLONIZE THE MUSEUM?
December 13 – December 15
December 13-15, 2024
Frantz Fanon described the transformative whirlwind of decolonization as “a program of complete disorder.” Museums did not precede a world created through conquest, colonization, empire and genocide – they were a product of that order. Built to store pillaged objects, project visions of power, and prove who was “primitive” and who was “modern,” could museums and their rigid hierarchies and categories ever coexist with the liberating chaos of decolonization? As early as the 1970s – on the heels of African nations claiming independence – the call for restitution was introduced and has grown ever louder in recent years. The demand for the return of Africa’s looted cultural inheritance represents an intergenerational struggle of political and economic consequence, especially urgent for a contemporary youth deprived of their own past.
DECOLONIZE THE MUSEUM? brings together documentaries made between the 1970s and today, framing an ongoing historical process and challenging what is too often an empty promise of justice. By turns conversational, traveling, clandestine, fantastical, and pedagogical, the films grapple with a heritage that is not only material but spiritual and social, showing objects that speak, scream, and thread the fabric of a Pan-African people’s history and collective identity. While the issue is not directly invoked, they occasion a reminder that African Cinema is also part of a broad inheritance that has not only been stolen but commodified and twisted into the profits of tourism and commercialism. This program addresses the limits of a circular debate and centers the evolving story the African continent and diaspora can tell itself about itself – and in that story, museums and restitution are only chapters, not ends.
Guest-programmed by Yasmina Price, who wrote the introduction above, as well as all the individual film descriptions.
Mati Diop
DAHOMEY
2024, 67 min, DCP. In English, French, and Fon with English subtitles.
Colonization is always a story of arrivals, departures, and returns. Following her spectral love story and woman-centered indictment of neocolonial labor exploitation, ATLANTIQUE (2019), the fantasy-infused documentary DAHOMEY is Mati Diop’s second feature. The Franco-Senegalese filmmaker returns to the terrain of restless spirits and haunting pasts to situate still unfolding efforts for the restitution of the African cultural patrimony looted by colonial powers. In 2021, 26 (of at least 7,000) artworks taken from the Kingdom of Dahomey in an 1892 invasion were returned to Cotonou, in their remapped home territory of the present-day Republic of Benin. Released from their long imprisonment in the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, these items are not merely silent objects, but a vital inheritance which continues to speak to and with the present. Maintaining her cinematic signature of hybridity, DAHOMEY is a collage of forensic observation and spiritual reanimation – the latter delivered through the voiceover interventions of the recovered statue of King Ghezo. Significantly, his crackly tones are spoken in Fon, defying the colonial imposition of the French language. Diop’s tightly-coiled documentary centralizes the importance of sustaining and recuperating a plural and collective store of indigenous knowledge and memory. DAHOMEY takes seriously the question of what constitutes a cultural heritage, as part of a vigorous debate which makes up the second half of the film, as students at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin complicate, demystify, and dissect what could otherwise be uncritically celebrated as an easy victory.
Preceded by:
Chris Marker & Alain Resnais
STATUES ALSO DIE / LES STATUES MEURENT AUSSI
1953, 30 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Where anti-colonial cinema is concerned, banning and censorship are a badge of honor. Commissioned by Présence Africaine, the magazine and publishing house started by Alioune Diop as a home for Pan-African thought, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s essay film was swiftly stifled in their home country. This was an unsurprising fate for an early cinematic denunciation of the cultural ravages, violent pillaging, and remorseless thefts wrought by French colonization. Resnais and Marker’s close visual attention to African statues and masks formally protests their transformation into commodities by the European art world’s mechanisms of capture and commercialization. The documentary levels a robust diatribe against the legitimacy of museums – especially taking aim at one bathed in the miasma of ethnography, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. With its tones of necromancy and reanimation, STATUES ALSO DIE served as a rare French recognition that the materials recoded as “African art objects” were materializations of entire cosmologies, and spiritual and social systems. The opening lines spoken over a dark screen offer a poetic introduction: “When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.”
Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Fri, Dec 13 at 7:30. Followed by a conversation and Q&A with Yasmina Price and EMPAC curator and writer Katherine C. M. Adams!
Jean-Marie Teno
AFRICA, I WILL FLEECE YOU / AFRIQUE, JE TE PLUMERAI
1992, 88 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
A polemical pastiche and ludic film essay, Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno’s AFRICA, I WILL FLEECE YOU summons the history of colonization to explain the present. Set in Cameroon – which holds the unfortunate, singular status of having been colonized by France, Germany and Britain – the documentary presents an effective account of the harsh realities of neocolonialism on the African continent. Teno’s presence is woven through the insertion of his own childhood memories and an ironic first-person voiceover which guides the narrative through archives, interviews, performances, and across the brute violences of invasion, betrayals of colonial education, and uninterrupted continuum of damage. Opening with a fable and taking its title from a children’s song, his feature is a captivating delight, which succeeds in identifying what might still be embers of possibility in the inheritance of once autonomous societies and indigenous cultures that are not yet entirely lost.
Sat, Dec 14 at 5:30.
Stan Lathan STATUES HARDLY EVER SMILE 1971, 19 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“They began to feel that the space belonged to them.” For six weeks in 1971, a group of middle school students were invited to participate in a performance project at the Brooklyn Museum. What is traditionally a locus of cautious movements and hushed voices was turned into a chaotic theater of improvisatory playfulness. The credits of the lush 16mm film produced by Chamba Productions is a lesson in the Black Independent filmmaking scene in New York: directed by Stan Lathan, produced by St. Clair Bourne and Kent Garrett, and edited by Kathleen Collins. Much of the children’s collective choreography takes place in a large, empty rotunda, as they reanimate a space of carceral stillness with their running around, jumping, dancing and stop-motion games – arriving at a ritualistic understanding of themselves in relation to the space and its holdings. STATUES HARDLY EVER SMILE documents the performative and contemplative relationship established between the students and objects in an exhibition on Ancient Egypt, generating a contact zone of creative pedagogy and inspired curiosity, transgressing museum norms and spilling back out into the streets and surrounding community.
Sarah Maldoror AND THE DOGS WERE QUIET / ET LES CHIENS SE TAISAIENT 1978, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Briefly returning to her acting origins, the French and Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror adapted the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire’s play of the same name to the screen. A co-founder of Les Griots, the first theatrical troupe of exclusively African and Afro-descendent actors in France in 1956, she had also previously participated in its theatrical production. Maldoror applied her lyrical and militant lens to a work centered on the Haitian Revolution and the death of Toussaint L’Ouverture to offer its Black, anti-colonial spirit another life through cinema. Her version adds a pedagogic dimension to the invective, specifically targeting the anthropological Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Playing the role of “mother” opposite Gabriel Glissant (who starred in Med Hondo’s incendiary 1970 SOLEIL Ô), Maldoror’s staging presents AND THE DOGS WERE QUIET in pieces, set amongst a visiting group of students and the museum’s storage area of caged African objects.
Manthia Diawara DIASPORA CONVERSATIONS: FROM GORÉE TO DOGON 2000, 47 min, digital
This documentary begins with a group of children gathered around the Maison des Esclaves – the House of Slaves – on Gorée Island in Senegal, whose Door of No Return has become a site of commemoration and pilgrimage, marking a final point of departure in the transatlantic slave trade. Malian scholar Manthia Diawara and American actor Danny Glover take this charged location as their own starting point for a journey across West Africa, travelling by train, van, and boat to explore the complicated and shared histories of the continent and diaspora. Emphasizing the importance of dialogue and the recuperation of fragmented, interlinked histories, they also confront the continuum of colonization in the predatory tourist industry of globalization. The film features a rich set of appearances by Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour, Malian Minister of Culture Aminata Traoré, American poet Ted Joans, and more, with the recently passed steward of Black Cinema Clyde Taylor as one of the cameramen.
Camille Billops TAKE YOUR BAGS 1998, 11 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“My take on slavery,” begins the voiceover by infinitely multidisciplinary storyteller and archivist Camille Billops, in one of the many experimental documentaries she made with her partner James Hatch. This short film navigates cultural memory within the context of slavery, exposing the artistic and spiritual theft which accompanied the enslavement of Africans. Billops’s take on the looting of “dreams and memories” targets the further plundering by artists such as Matisse, Braque, and Picasso, and the structures of Euro-American art museums.
Nii Kwate Owoo YOU HIDE ME 1970/2024, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. YOU HIDE ME was made in 1970 and re-edited in the early 1990s. In 2024, the director once more returned to his work to create this version, which is based on a digitally restored 16mm duplicate negative and was made possible by a collaboration between Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, the British Film Institute, and Nii Kwate Owoo.
Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo’s deliciously clandestine subversion of his access to the British Museum’s hidden holdings coincided with some of the earlier calls for restitution. Shooting in one day and under urgent conditions, Owoo and his team revealed the overflowing storage vaults of stolen African objects, artefacts, and artworks. The film powerfully holds up over 50 years later, situating a militant demand for repatriation in clear historical terms. In testament to the related importance of African and Afro-descent stewardship, the film’s recent resurfacing is significantly due to the work of Guyanese-born June Givanni’s Pan African Cinema Archive in London.
Total running time: ca. 110 min.
Sat, Dec 14 at 7:45. Followed by a conversation and Q&A with Yasmina Price and filmmaker and writer Milisuthando Bongela!
Matthias De Groof
PALIMPSEST OF THE AFRICA MUSEUM
2019, 69 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Made in collaboration with Congolese journalist Mona Mpembele, Belgian scholar Matthias De Groof’s documentary addresses the 2013 renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels. PALIMPSEST OF THE AFRICA MUSEUM is a forensic investigation of the uncertain limbo that results when old hegemonies are met with efforts to transform them. Grouped under the efficient, if opaque, title of “Les 6,” a group of relevant experts and museum staff are filmed in the midst of conversations by turns impassioned, placid, exasperated, and lucid about how the reopened museum might negotiate its role in the brutal history of Belgian colonization of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, accounting for the particularly horrifying years under King Leopold II. Also included is the footage of several commemorative gatherings by the Congolese diaspora as “symbolic acts to reappropriate history,” archival materials, and additional talking heads (such as the particularly stellar Joseph Ibongo Gilungule, then director of DRC’s national museums). Accompanied throughout by a voiceover performing an animation of the museum’s African objects, the documentary ends with what is always telling information about institutions: the budget.
Manthia Diawara
MAISON TROPICALE
2008, 58 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles.
The fate of “Les Maisons Tropicales” exemplifies the slippage between practical objects and artworks within a colonial context. Designed by French architect and designer Jean Prouvé, these prefabricated, transportable houses of aluminum and steel were made for efficient disassembly and reassembly in the late 1940s, intended to fill housing shortages in Niamey and Brazzaville, the capitals of the Republic of Niger and Republic of the Congo, then French colonies. Under unquestionably predatory circumstances, once a growing appreciation for Prouvé resulted in the houses accruing cultural cachet in 2000, several were bought and returned to Europe as coveted objects of modernist design and eventually auctioned for millions. In collaboration with Portuguese artist Ângela Ferreira, Manthia Diawara’s astute filmic archeology turns on the twisted continuum of this narrative, threading neocolonialism, mercenary economics, and the stakes of cultural patrimony. The interviews with former residents of the houses supply a key dimension of oral history.
Total running time: ca. 130 min.
Sun, Dec 15 at 7:00.
