"The way forward is the way back": colonial and anti-colonial archives: the historiographic operation as a film praxis.

Schefer, Raquel

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In 1993, while the death of Marxism and the end of history were proclaimed, Jacques Derrida showed the irreducible heritage--itself spectral--of the German philosopher. In Spectres de Marx, (1) by analysing the speciality of Marxist theory, Derrida evoked a dislocated time, a time "out of joint". (2) Time, in its currentness, is disadjusted. Furthermore, beyond the living present, the temporality of time is disjointed. It is disturbed by the spectre, a performative, who, appearing as a revenant coming from the past, belongs conjointly to a time to come opened up by inheritance. Spectral inheritance convokes a politics of memory and a politics of representation which go beyond successive temporality.

This article considers two film works which deal with the spectral memory of colonialism and anti-colonialism, expressing a dialectical conception of history and image: Filipa Cesar's The Embassy and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc's Foreword to "Guns for Banta". These two pieces of 2011 revisit the colonial and the anti-colonial visual narratives of Guinea-Bissau's War of Liberation (1963-1974), a former Portuguese colony, through heterodox types of archival appropriation and critical interpretation. Colonial and anti-colonial photography and cinema are deconstructed as ideological systems of representation. In derridian terms, The Embassy and Foreword to "Guns for Banta" approach critically the colonial and the anti-colonial historical and visual legacies, addressing their ghosts through a complex discursive system, and the assumption of certain links of filiation.

The Embassy and Foreword to "Guns for Banta" testify of a historiographical and of an aesthetic turn. Guided by a logic of haunting, their non-linear narrative structures combine the diachronic and synchronic dimensions as a means to assume inheritance. They call together the past and the present under the same temporal arch. Visual forms think the mediality (3) of photography and cinema. Colonial and anti-colonial archives are articulated in such a way as to put forward the sensible history and the cultural memory of colonialism and anti-colonialism, and to evaluate the epistemic effects of the colonial and the anti-colonial projects.

Addressing not only the history of Portuguese late colonialism and PAIGC's (The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) anti-colonial struggle, The Embassy and Foreword to "Guns for Banta" also deal with the memory of their visual representations, namely of the 1960 and 1970's internationalist anti-colonial Liberation Cinema. History is approached through visual representations. These works enable and problematise the coexistence of the sensible direct memory and of the photographic-cinematic indirect memory of colonialism and anti-colonialism, and the way these two memories are entangled. Moreover, these pieces give actuality and effectivity to photographic-cinematic memory, in the frame of a new historiographical praxis that can be defined as a rewriting of history by art. (4)

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The Embassy and Foreword to "Guns for Banta " exemplify the historiographical operation (5) which emerges in the aesthetic sphere. The historiographical operation emerging in the aesthetic sphere might be comparable to the aesthetic operation arising in the disciplinary field of history at least since R. G. Collingwood assumed the historical imagination as a valid historiographical method. (6)

The historiographical turn of the aesthetic sphere is closely linked to the willingness of a critical review of modernity and modernism. The historical recit appears as the result of a film praxis. This is the case of the work of Angela Ferreira, Vincent Meessen, Sven Augustijnen, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Patrizio di Massimo, among other artists and filmmakers who reconsider simultaneously the history of colonialism and the history of modernism. In The Embassy and Foreword to "Gunsfor Banta", the historiographical operation is linked to an archaeological prospection having as object the colonial and the anti-colonial modernist visual forms and their mythographic and ideological function. Combining historical research and filmic procedures, Cesar and Abonnenc provoke a migration and a re-signification of archives, proposing at the same time a re-elaboration of visual forms. Cinema thinks general history, but it also thinks the history of visual forms. Through this reflection, cinema reinvents itself. Refreshed political film forms, disjointed both from militant cinema and modern film-essay, emerge from this process. In other words, by arranging cinematically a counter-history (7) of the Guinean Liberation War (1963-1974), these works are composing an alternative history of political cinema. They are also proposing a new cinematic praxis and reinventing political cinema's forms. An expanded performative conception of the archive, linked to the politics of memory, underlies this approach. Archive's interpretation entails a transformation of the general history and of the history of visual forms.

In The Embassy, a colonial photographic album rescued from Guinea-Bissau National Historical Archives, institution deserted in 1999, after the Civil War, is the point of departure of a filmic reflection about colonial and anti-colonial politics of representation. The album assembles colonial images of the territory produced prior to its independence in 1973-1974. (8) The work is part of a larger project of Cesar on the anti-colonial cinema of Guinea-Bissau, which includes films' restoration and distribution.

Through a series of photographs and other documents, the installation Foreword to "Guns for Banta" reconstructs the history of the lost film Guns for Banta [Fusils pour Banta), shot by the engaged filmmaker Sarah Maldoror in Guinea-Bissau's liberated areas in 1971.

The colonial album and Maldoror's anti-colonial film are treated as material elements of the cultural history as well as historical materials from which new perspectives on the past may arise. The two works' formal procedures and narrative structures are based upon a complex relationship between visible and invisible elements, champ and hors champ, multitemporality, and upon a critique of indexical ontology. Multemporality allows to reactivate the past in the present.

The Embassy refers to the title of Chris Marker's 1973 homonymous film, a work that questions the forms of political cinema, opposing a specific and determined space-time, Chili at the time of the coup d'Etat, to a non-place, a heterotopic spaced. (9) Between Cesar's film and Foreword to "Guns for Banta" there is, instead, a precise spatial unity: Guinea-Bissau, where the War of Liberation led by Amilcar Cabral's PAIGC started in 1963.

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The spatial unity between the two works is the result of a superposition of real and imaginary places. T he real place is the Bijagos Archipelago, located along Guinea-Bissau's coast. The Bijagos is represented in the colonial album of The Embassy. It is considered by the archivist and journalist Armando Lona, the film's sole character, as an expression of "all the Nature's beauty". It was there that Guns for Banta was shot forty years before. Likewise, both works call together the imaginary places of the Liberation struggle, such as the "itinerary of the dead" between the islands of the archipelago evoked by Marker in Sans Soleil (1983).

Foreword to "Guns for Banta " addresses the history and the memory of Guns for Bantu's shooting in the Bijagos. Commissioned by the Algerian National Office for Trade and the Film Industry (ONCIC), Maldoror's film was intended to document the struggle of the PAIGC against Portuguese colonialism. Maldoror wrote a screenplay based on the daily lives of the inhabitants of a small village, focusing on Awa, a young woman activist. On her return to Algiers, the film reels, considered too feminist and scarcely militant, were confiscated and Maldoror was expelled from the country. (10) Even if the images of Guns for Banta have disappeared, the film's shooting stands as an example of the importance given to cinema in the political and cultural project of the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau, as it was the case in other former Portuguese colonies such as Mozambique. The affirmation of an aesthetics of the colonized against the cultural hegemony of the colonizer (11) was conceived as inseparable from the emancipation process by the African liberation movements. In this context, the creation of Guinea-Bissau's national cinema was considered fundamental.

Foreword to "Guns for Banta" consists of a slideshow of one hundred fifty slides. Through a double synchronous projection, photographs of Guns for Bantu's shooting and photographic archives from the decolonization process are intermingled. Although Foreword to "Guns for Banta" is inspired by Maldoror's screenplay and filming schedule, Abonnenc presents the work as the preface of a lost oeuvre as well as the prelude of a film to come. The artist is preparing indeed the film In Search of Awa, a reenactment of Guns for Banta. In Foreword to "Guns for Banta", the combined use of analepsis--to a futures past (12)--and of prolepsis--to the film to come (13)--enable to reduce the time gap as much as possible and to propose a re-articulation of Maldoror's political film forms.

According to Maurice Blanchot, Marx has three heterogenous voices. (14) In Foreword to "Guns for Banta", three actresses recite off-stage commentaries. The first voice-over corresponds to Abonnenc's commentary. It is a questioning, self-reflexive and self-referential voice. The second voice-over represents Maldoror. It is the result of the editing of several conversations between Abonnenc and the filmmaker. The actress adopts Maldoror's cadence and vocal inflections. The third off-camera corresponds to Awa, the fictional protagonist of Guns for Bantu. The text comes from excerpts of several interviews with former activists of the PAIGC. The three voice-overs assure the narrative continuity of the image's fragmentarity. The relationship between the voices can be characterised in terms of fake polyphony.

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In The Embassy, the album stands as a metonymic crystallisation of Guinea-Bissau's history. Through a single fixed sequence-shot of thirty-seven minutes, the film shows Lona, the archivist, flipping the album. Lona's body is never seen completely.

The contiguity between the album and Lona's body, as well as the temporal and spatial opening-up of the fixed shot enacted by each of the photographs and the sound design, which is asynchronous and recorded a posteriori, summarise the film's programme: to read photography as an ideological representation and a symbolic investment of colonialism and coloniality (15) Images are lisible through the analogical relationships established by the album as a dispositif of knowledge and power. (16) The image's lisibility arises fundamentally from the album's internal autonomous editing, with its gaps and anachronisms. As an object and as a representation, the album articulates and synthesises the past, the present and the future. In their specific multitemporality, the album's photographs are traces of the past. They are, at the same time, images of substitution. They replace and stand for the images of Guinea-Bissau's national cinema lost in the Civil War of 1998-1999. Additionally, in relation to the album's strict temporality, they are anachronic prefigurations of the independent nation to come, of an imagined community. (17)

The Embassy and Foreword to "Guns for Banta" are founded upon the actions of telling and retelling. Telling and retelling imply tacitly a transformation of the original elements. A tension between seeing and telling, image and word arises from this transformation. This tension is closely linked to the generational transmission. What goes on between these two generations? Lona and Maldoror, the archivist and the filmmaker who had lived the years of militancy, transmit memory and knowledge to a younger generation. Cesar and Abonnenc inherit this legacy, but they also transform it. The two artists are not repeating the same. They are reinventing it, making the temporal hiatus visible and resonant.

Abonnenc states that the archives of Foreword to "Guns for Banta" are organised according to a subjective order. (18) An ordered form is, on the contrary, The Embassy's point of departure. Benedict Anderson considers that "the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this "visibility" [hr] was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number." (19) The colonial album is the product of a principle and of technologies of cataloguing and ordination of the human landscape. In the colonial photography, the human figure and the natural elements coexist without any apparent contradiction, misleading into forgetting the violence inherent to the colonial system and to the process of ordination itself. The unexpected correspondences proposed by Lona, linking the past and the present, the colonial, the anti-colonial and the postanticolonial (20) periods, constitute a force of disorder. The colonial album results from an editing process (linking up of associated topics, collage of images and captions, composition). It can be described as a system of categorisation, representation and thought, as an analytical table, an imaginary condensation, a mythology. (21) The film's accuracy is based upon the choice of the fixed sequence-shot. As a film form, the fixed sequence-shot is contrasted to the movement within the frame--leafing through the album--, as well as to the album as the result of an editing process. The fixed sequence-shot disorders the album's ordered form.

Abonnenc works rather an exteriority: the artist researches and assembles historical elements which are later integrated into the narration. The editing is external, but also internal. The artist inserts white slides, a blind field, into the slideshow, which is in itself the result of an editing process. An inverted palimpsest arises, expressing the mechanism of memory, with its layers and intermittences, in a visual fashion. New images appear to come from the interior of the screened images, inverting the palimpsest's spatial and temporal order, as spectres arriving from the past to (de)colonise the space of representation of this cinema of fixed images.

The album and the slideshow become passageways, in a benjaminian mode, of the paradigmatic structures of the dialectics of history. (22) The two pieces are structured by a tension between presentation and representation. The album represents the ideological constructions and the imaginary projections of Portuguese colonialism, (23) but it stands also as a device of presentation. In Foreword to "Guns for Banta", the images of the slideshow present rather than they represent a set of political conditions, a space-time in history. The tension between presentation and representation derives as well from the relationship between visible and invisible, champ et hors champ. Images are treated as complex matrices, giving rise to effects of knowledge, and intertwining vision and power.

The Embassy and Foreword to "Guns for Banta" are founded upon a system of images' spatial and temporal migration. Images achieve visibility in currentness itself. In The Embassy, the image's passageways are figured by the album's leafing, while in Foreword to "Guns for Banta" the slideshow dynamic spiral and its entre-images (24) replace perceptively the screening of the lost film.

The two pieces are linked by their aesthetics of substitution. Foreword to "Guns for Banta"'s empty frames and crossfades, as the white and ripped pages of The Embassy, the silences of the voice-over in the two pieces, are traces of non-presence. But both works create presence out of the exhibition of absence, undoing the opposition between actual, effective presence, and its other. This dialectics of presence and absence points out to the destruction of the material elements of Guinea-Bissau's history, as well as to the history of the War of Liberation and its cinema, refusing nevertheless to approach it as a closed past.

The future is yet to become, assert the two works. "The way forward is the way back", (25) state them, extending a welcome to the spectres, and making from temporal disjoining and archive's critique the basis of an artistic historiographical operation, a historiographical film praxis. A cunning, inventive and sensible historiographical operation which not only allows to rewrite general history and cinema history, but to rewrite cinema itself in the same movement. The effects of this ongoing structuration and destructuration (26) in the fields of history, aesthetics and politics are yet to evaluate.

Notes

(1) Derrida, J. 1993. Spectres de Marx. L'etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Galilee.

(2) Shakespare, W. 2007. Hamlet. London: Penguin.

(3) Agamben, G. 2000. 'Notes on Gesture'. Means Without End. Notes on Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 49-60.

(4) Castro, T. 2011. 'Artistes--historiens? Archives, memoire et explorations documentaires'. Colloque Les voies de la revolte: cinema, images et revolutions dans les annees 1960-1970. Paris: Musee du quai Branly; Foster, H. 1995. 'The Artist as Ethnographer?' The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology / ed. by Marcus, G. E. and Myers, Fred R. Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 302-309.

(5) De Certeau, M. 1975. L'ecriture de Thistoire. Paris: Gallimard.

(6) Collingwood, R. G. 1935. The Historical Imagination. An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 28 October 1935. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Collingwood, R. G. 1993. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

(7) Ferro, M. 1993. Cinema et Histoire. Paris: Folio-Gallimard.

(8) Independence was unilaterally declared by Guinea-Bissau on 24 September 1973. Although the UNO recognised the independence of the country on 9 November 1973, Portugal only accepted it on 10 September 1974, after the Carnation Revolution.

(9) Foucault, M. 1984. 'Des Espaces autres'. Architecture, Mouvement. Continuity, no. 5, pp. 46-49.

(10) Schefer, R. 'Sarah Maldoror: o cinema da noite gravida de punhais'. Entrevista. Angola, 0 Nascimento de uma Nagao, 3 / ed. by Pigarra, M. C. and Antonio, J. Lisbon: Guerra e Paz Editores, pp. 139-152, forthcoming.

(11) Fanon, F. 2002. Les damnes de la terre. Paris: La Decouverte & Syros; Cabral, A. 2011. 'Libertagao Nacional e Cultura'. Malhas que os Imperios Tecem. Textos Anticoioniais. Contextos PosColoniais / ed. by Ribeiro Sanches, M. Lisbon: Edigoes 70, pp. 355-375.

(12) Koselleck, R. Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

(13) Blanchot, M. 1999. Le livre a venir. Paris: Folio-Gallimard.

(14) Blanchot, M. 1971. 'Les trois paroles de Marx'. L'amitie. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 115-117.

(15) Quijano, A. 2009. 'Colonialidad del Poder y Des/Colonialidad del Poder'. Congreso de la Asociacion Latinoamericana de Sociologi'a. Buenos Aires.

(16) Foucault, M. 2010. L'archeologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard.

(17) Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.

(18) Benoit, G. 2011. 'Entretien - Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc'. Slash.

(19) Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, op. cit., p. 181.

(20) Shohat, E. 1992. 'Notes on the "Post-Colonial". Third World and Postcolonial Issues'. Social Text, no 31/32, p. 99-113.

(21) Barthes, R. 2010. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.

(22) Benjamin, W. 1989. Le livre des passages. Paris: Le Cerf; Benjamin, W. 2007. 'Ober den Begriff der Geschichte'. Erzahlen: Schriften zur Theorie der Narration und zur literarischen Prosa. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 129-140.

(23) Sousa Santos, B. 2003. 'Entre Prospero e Caliban: Colonialismo, Pos- Colonialismo e Interidentidade'. Novos Estudos, no 66, pp. 23-52

(24) Bellour, R. 2002. L'entre-images 1. Photo, cinema, video. Paris: Editions de la Difference.

(25) Eliot, T. S. 1968. Four Quartets. San Diego and New York: Harvest Book.

(26) Lukacs, G. 1968. Histoire et conscience de classe. Paris: Flammarion.