No Archive can Restore You

The filmmaker Onyeka Igwe has developed a language to work with the sensitive and often racist material of audio/visual ethnographic documentation. By using auto-fictional elements, repetition and deformations, movement and rhythms, she raises questions how to approach the colonial past and how to engage with it critically and ethically whilst making multiple narratives visible.

The three films Specialised Technique, the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered and No Archive Can Restore You will be screened in front of the showcases presenting so called ethnographic objects. Onyeka Igwe shows a deep engagement and emphatic approaches in her editing techniques dealing with colonial archives, colonial violence and lost narratives. By using movement and rhythms the films contrast the static presentation of the objects and meld together colonial histories with personal memories to continue a forgotten and sometimes impossible dialogue.

Onyeka Igwe is present for an artist talk on Thursday, 27th October at 11.30 am in Modul 209: Benin: Past and Present. 

William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit developed a framework for colonial cinema, this included slow edits, no camera tricks and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance to this rule set. In an effort to recuperate black dance from this colonial project, “Specialised Technique” attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.

2019 UK Duration 6mins | 57 seconds Black & White, Sound: Stereo; Ratio: 4:3 Available Format: HD digital file, Original Format: HD Video

This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So “the names have changed” tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.

2019 UK Duration 25mins | 48 seconds Colour, Sound: Stereo, Ratio 16:9 Available Format: HD Digital file, Original Format: HD Video, 2k Video

The former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit, stands empty on Ikoyi Road, Lagos, in the shadow of today’s Nigerian Film Corporation building. The rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. Amongst these cans, a long-lost classic of Nigerian filmmaking, Shehu Umar (1976), was found in 2015. The films housed in this building are hard to see because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them. They reveal a colonial residue that is echoed in walls of the building itself.

Taking its title from the 2018 Juliette Singh book, No Archive Can Restore You depicts the spatial configuration of this colonial archive, which lies just out of view, in the heart of the Lagosian cityscape. Despite its invisibility, it contains purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see. The film imagines ‘lost’ films from the archive in distinctive soundscapes, juxtaposed with images of the abandoned interior and exteriors of the building. This is an exploration into the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial moving images continue to generate.

2022 UK Duration: 5 mins | 54 Seconds Colour, Sound: 5.1 surround Ratio: 16:9 Available Format/s: HD Video: ProRes Digital File / DCP Original Format: 2K Video