Audiovisual artefacts: the African politics of moving image loss

ABSTRACT

Artefacts are human-made objects deemed culturally and historically significant. But they are also those scratches, burns and glitches that appear on audiovisual screens due to poor projection, improper storage or faulty processing. They are those unwanted additions that visualise the presence of loss. This paper explores the politics of audiovisual loss by looking at the history of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation film collection’s demise alongside the 2020 films by Onyeka Igwe – a so-called archive and No Archive Can Restore You – that feature a similar collection in Nigeria. Igwe’s exploratory camera floats around the Nigerian Film Corporation building documenting the filmic carnage within its vaults, reminding audiences that archival horror lies in the “colonial residue” of the archive’s architecture. Artefacts of decay in Igwe’s films, that mark the elimination of information from the image that restoration seeks to renew, are not the result of inaction, but acts of refusal. Film artefacts not only mark loss but are also traces of postcolonial affect. As such, I argue that archival neglect and the losses that it produces may also be acts of archival labour – an articulation of artefacting.

KEYWORDS:

• Archives
• artefacts
• heritage
• Ghana Film Industry Corporation
• Nigerian Film Corporation
• preservation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. African artefacts have long been plundered by colonial institutions invested in knowledge extraction. Despite decades of criticism of the European exhibition of looted African artefacts, their restitution has often been met with resistance as in the case with the Benin bronzes and the British Museum’s refusal to return them. The bronzes were plundered by British troops from the Kingdom of Benin’s Royal Palace in 1897. In early 2022, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC agreed to return some of these stolen artefacts to Nigeria. Formal requests from the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture in Nigeria and the Benin Royal Palace to the British Museum for the return of 900 Benin bronzes have still not resulted in their journey home. Instead, the British Museum maintains its commitment to “active engagement” and dialogue with Nigerian institutions (The Trustees of the British Museum n.d.). See also Les statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die] (Resnais, Marker, and Cloquet 1953) and “Museum Antiquities” from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Pennolino 2022).

2. See Brenni ((1989) 2009) which contains GBC footage of the 1989 fire along with footage shot 20 years later of the abandoned building that had housed the GBC Film Library. Shot and edited by the former director of the GBC Video Library, Ellis Brenni.

3. Of course, cinemas elsewhere had already gone through their own life cycles by this time. In Ghana, celluloid died, but cinema was reborn with an explosion of life in a new private film industry built on the accessibility of consumer video formats like VHS.

4. The founding members make up an impressive list of white male directors from the United States. In addition to Martin Scorsese, it includes Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, with filmmakers Robert Altman and Clint Eastwood joining later.

5. As a recent alternative to film historiological approaches that are grounded in analysis of extant film prints, Allyson Nadia Field’s (2022) double special issue on speculative history in Feminist Media Histories suggests that “Speculation as a strategy, even a methodology, allows for the possibility of a film history that is neither driven nor determined by the vicissitudes of chance survival of filmic elements or extrafilmic artifacts.” Speculative approaches, Field argues drawing on Saidiya Hartman, include an “engaged relationship to archival sources rather than an extractive one” (2022, 3).

6. For more on the role of Ghana Television in broadcasting the “African Personality” see Emmanuella Amoh (2022). For more on the relationship between Ghana Television and African socialism see Blaylock (2010).

7. Carmela Garritano writes that it was 51% of its shares (Garritano 2013, 93), while Birgit Meyer claims that it was 70% (Meyer 2015, 59).

8. Importantly, Hediger, Cheeka and Campanini have pointed out that many people in Nigeria see value in these collections and that this act of refusal may not be shared by all (Hediger, Cheeka, and Campanini 2021).

9. A similar call for the digital restitution of all film materials related to the history of Nigeria has been made in the 2019 “Government White Paper on Audiovisual Heritage” written by Hyginus Ekwuazi and commissioned by the federal government of Nigeria (cited in Hediger, Cheeka, and Campanini 2021).

10. At the 1963 Institute of African Studies Convocation speech, J.H. Kwabena Nketia declared, “We believe that African traditional arts should be recorded, they should be preserved, they should be studied. But we believe also that they should not merely be studied, recorded, preserved, but practiced as living art. We believe also that the art must develop and that the study of African traditions should inspire creative experiments in the African idiom” (cited in Harper and Opoku-Boateng 2019, 76, 80).

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Jennifer Blaylock

Jennifer Blaylock is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio, Television & Film at Rowan University. She is a media historian with research interests in African studies, audio-visual archives, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. Her research has appeared in boundary 2, Feminist Media Histories, Journal of African Cinemas and Screen.