RESCHEDULED - Nikolaus Perneczky - Restitution and the Moving Image...

IZK - Institute for Contemporary Art

Annenstraße 53

<h1>Restitution and the Moving Image or, How to Decolonise Global Film Heritage</h1><h3>Nikolaus Perneczky</h3>29 March, 18:00 CETHYBRID EVENT at Annenstraße 53, and online via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/91517219401As demands for the return of Africa's artefacts from Western museums and ethnological collections are growing louder once again, what about its similarly sequestered film heritage? The call for the restitution of moving images has been articulated as early as 1958 as an intrinsic part of the process of decolonisation and indeed has been a concern for filmmakers and cultural activists ever since. Yet these longstanding reclamations have until now fallen on deaf ears: to this day, a large part of colonial and post-colonial African film heritage is held—and frequently monetised—by public and commercial archives in Europe and the US, where these important works remain largely inaccessible to African scholars and wider publics alike. While the question of restitution has long been the object of filmic mediation—from Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s landmark essay film Statues Also Die (1953) to Ghanaian filmmaker Nii-Kwate Owoo’s groundbreaking You Hide Me (1970)—the images and sounds stored in global film archives have been almost entirely absent from this ongoing debate. Following intensifying popular mobilisations to decolonise public spaces and institutions, recent years have seen an incipient conversation among film and media scholars on colonial legacies and post-colonial fragilities in audio-visual archiving. However, much remains to be done in this emergent field at the intersection of film and heritage studies. Missing in particular is a systematic consideration of what the recently renewed call for restitution might mean in relation to the moving image. My talk will address this lacuna in historical perspective.

Nikolaus Perneczky is a researcher and curator based in London. His PhD reappraised filmmaking in post-independence West Africa as a struggle against “development” as modernising policy and wider framework of rationality; his postdoctoral research focuses on colonial legacies of uneven development and unequal exchange in audio-visual archiving. Together with Dr June Givanni, he is currently producing a podcast series on African film heritage and the question of restitution.

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