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

Artefacts are human-made objects deemed culturally and historically significant. An object’s singularity and age can add to its worth. Film artefacts are different. They may refer to reels of celluloid in film cans that are culturally and historically meaningful, 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 to the image that mark the elimination of information. In other words, they are the visual presence of loss. In this way, artefacts on film surfaces are not unlike African artefacts exhibited in European museums whose visual display signals the intellectual and spiritual damages that occurred through their abductions.¹ Both make present absence. And in both, visible losses prompt restoration – the image to its original state, the artefact to its home State. Similarly, absent African artefacts have invoked the need for the recuperation and restoration of African material knowledges in contemporary African scholarship.

However, the present absence of information that the film artefact makes visible is not always marked by a sense of harm. Synthetic film artefacts are highly desirable products. A google image search for “film scratch” offers up film scratches and dirt for free and for a fee. Digital film artefacts are standard filters on social media platforms where users add dirt, scratches, leader, sprocket holes etc. to their posts. These digital film artefacts add information through their subtraction. They make ephemeral moving images significant with “the aura of an anthropological artefact and the authority of a social instrument” (Enwezor 2008, 13).

We can also see the additive qualities of film artefacting in experimental film practice. Rather than an obstacle to information that must be removed, the film scratch can also be the means by which a film is restored. The scratches in Ja’Tovia Gary’s (2015) film An Ecstatic Experience, which Gary describes as, “a meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration,” bring historical footage of the Black experience in the United States into the present (Gary n.d.). The film combines footage of the civil rights activist and actress Ruby Dee performing the slave narrative of Fannie Moore, documentation of the political unrest following the murders of Mike Brown and Freddie Gray in Ferguson and Baltimore, and a Black choir performing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Gary hand-scratches Rudy Dee’s performance, and paints over archival surfaces, drawing a connection between herself and the cinematic record. The artist’s scratches – signs of the filmmaker’s hand – breathe life into the images as filmic memory moves across generations. Gary touches the past through erasure. Gary’s scratches reveal the nature of all film artefacts – they are the absences that mark cinematic life. More than the pristine restoration project that brings film back to its imagined but impossible original state, film artefacts can be seen as documenting a film’s projection and the history of its lived reception in the bodies of its audiences.

In this article, African film artefacting – or cognisant acts of audiovisual archival loss – are framed as actions that also produce meaning, rather than simply processes that accumulate information absences. Here, I will recount histories of filmic loss at three Ghanaian institutions – the 1989 fire at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), the sale and disposal of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) celluloid collection, and the decades of administrative neglect that afflicted the Information Services Department (ISD) Central Film Library – as case studies for understanding the human relationships at the centre of film artefacting and its meanings. Instead of locating the intrinsic combustible substrate of film as igniting passionate care for film artefacts, I suggest that audiovisual heritage discourse in Ghana demonstrates that the disappearance of Ghanaian films remains tangential to the devaluation of the film industry by the State that film loss represents. Using two films by Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive (2020b) and No Archive Can Restore You (2020a) that feature similar State-sponsored collections in Nigeria, as theoretical approaches to film archiving in African contexts, I argue for reimagining audiovisual preservation as primarily about caring for the relations between people – those who made films and those whose memories are entangled with them – that the film artefact symbolises.

Loss: fire

On May 23 1989, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation’s film and television library burned in a dramatic fire. It started at 5:45 pm, when a small air conditioner ignited on the second floor of the television production building (Fynn and Nyinah 1989). While the GBC had three fire extinguishers spread throughout the broadcasting campus, none of them were functional on the night of the fire, and without fire hydrants nearby, water had to be shuttled in by truck, delaying the fire’s suppression.² By 9 pm, the film and television library, a film theatre, film projectors and film cameras – all housed in the same building – had burned up, leaving only cinders (Fynn and Nyinah 1989). GBC employees tried to save what they could, but little was salvageable. That night, a good portion of Ghana’s film and television history had dramatically gone up in smoke. The films in the collection dated back to the pre-independence days with materials from the colonial Gold Coast Film Unit as well as films from its post-independence State-funded counterpart the Ghana Film Unit, later named the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC). Copies of some of these films have survived elsewhere, but irreplaceable early television programmes and field rushes shot on 16 mm were lost in the flames.

The severity of celluloid fires is often exacerbated by the flammability of film’s material substrate. Cellulose nitrate, the material upon which early cinematic images were recorded, becomes combustible as it deteriorates. Thus, there is an inherent instability to the nitrate-based cinematic image because it can self-ignite with degradation. Acetate film, also known as “safety film” because it was developed later to be less volatile than nitrate, became widely adopted by the 1940s. But it, too, burns – as the GBC fire illuminates.

The 1989 GBC fire puts the film heritage losses from the 2021 University of Cape Town Jagger Library fire in historical perspective. On Sunday, April 18 2021, the Table Mountain fire spread to the roof of the Jagger Library, burning many of the library’s special collections, including all the DVDs in the African Studies Film Collection. While the inaccessibility of water kept the GBC film fire raging into the night, fire suppression measures threatened the surviving audiovisual collections at Jagger Library with water damage and mould. Fortunately, around 850 titles on VHS were saved and digitised (Walker and Angus 2023). The celluloid film collections were in cold storage at another facility and did not contribute kindling to the already massively destructive fire that burned the Jagger Library (Singer 2021).

Fire has been a recurring cause of cinematic erasure in Africa for some time and has thus shaped film historiography on the continent. The fires that engulfed the African Studies Film Collection at the University of Cape Town and the film production materials from the GBC erased audiovisual documents of African film history from the continent in a matter of hours. However, loss (or the threat of loss) can also fan the flames of historical recovery. Film scholar Paolo Cherchi Usai argues that without the impermanence of moving images, there would be no need for film history or film historians (2001, 26–28). What has been called “new film history” in the field of cinema studies was shaped in the late twentieth-century by anxieties about the death of cinema – both its physical deterioration and its obsolescence as new moving image formats threatened to take hold in the United States and Europe.³ Archival absences not only drove historians’ desire for recovery, but also solidified the empirical necessity of film as material artefacts for film historiography. To know cinematic pasts, material evidence became the data indispensable for making new claims about early cinema. In US-based film scholarship that has meant – according to Katherine Groo – a “salvage orientation” to film historiography and a “commitment to the empirical ‘thereness’ of film artefacts” (2019, 16). Salvage is a word which has its origins in the Old French salver or “to save.” In the fifteenth century, it referred to saving cargo from shipwrecks, rendering “salvaged” objects property or goods seen to have commercial value. The salvage ethnographic project of Franz Boaz and others moved salvage work away from saving property to saving tangible and intangible elements of American Indian cultures – languages, knowledges and cultural artefacts. As Brian Hochman has argued, the nineteenth-century fixation on recording indigenous culture directly shaped the development and perception of audiovisual technologies as mechanical recording devices capable of copying and preserving matters of culture objectively (2014, xii).

But, as technologically reproducible images recorded on cellulose, singularity is not inherent to the medium of film. It must be manufactured through scarcity and the decay of emulsion. Material absences in the film archive transform films into artefacts with discrete auras. The flammability of film, Groo argues, is an essential characteristic of the medium – “fire is not a threat external to celluloid” but “instead belongs to film” (2019, 15, emphases in original). Accordingly, celluloid’s combustible essence kindles film historical cinephilia for cinematic matter – material artefacts that have endured their own inevitable expiration. In other words, film’s ephemerality begets its artefactual status.

Celluloid fires, vivid newsworthy spectacles that have the potential to titillate audiences, were not only crucial in igniting new film historiographic fervour but also a film archival fever in the United States over the last century (Frick 2011, 7). The 1990 fire at Universal Studios, which happened only a year after the GBC fire, would be a rallying point for director Martin Scorsese to reiterate the importance of protecting and preserving global cinematic heritage (Frick 2011, 4). The Universal Studios fire inspired the formation of The Film Foundation and the subsequent World Cinema Project, which has gone on to restore 50 films from 28 different countries including many from the African continent (The Film Foundation 2024). These global preservation efforts have subsequently meant that cinemas across the world, threatened by a fire within, find salvation through an organisation supported by film directors based in the United States.⁴ The GBC fire, though it was quite disastrous and had all the elements of a good news story, did not spark collective outrage for the loss of Ghana’s audiovisual heritage in the way that similar fires spurred preservation efforts in the United States. Fire at the GBC turned Ghanaian audiovisual materials to ashes, not into precious cinematic artefacts.

Groo argues that rather than see fire as an external threat to celluloid, a more expansive understanding of film’s materiality that sees its potential to go up in flames as an internal characteristic of the medium’s instability might open up space in film histories for that which cannot be known about film materials to reject an “understanding of film artifacts as objects that can be empirically known” (2019, 29). She suggests that this might allow film historians to “engage with the specificities of our artefacts as they are, in the present of our encounters: active, ongoing, becoming fire and cinder” (31). As much as I am excited by Groo’s alternative film historiographic method, that sees film artefacts as constantly becoming through the slow burn of their inherent state as a means to reject a salvage historiography of the past, both new film history and Groo’s newer one centre film loss materially.⁵

Loss: privatisation

In Ghana, cinematic loss stems from the State’s chronic devaluing of the film industry and its lack of commitment to Ghanaian filmmakers and their legacies. Specifically, the divestment of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) and the subsequent disposal of its film collections kindled the beginning of a slow death for Ghana’s film heritage that many continue to mourn. For Ghana’s first Prime Minister and President, Kwame Nkrumah, a robust Ghanaian media landscape produced by and for Ghanaians was a necessary part of developing a free nation that could be proud of its African heritage. Thus, under Nkrumah’s government, in addition to continuing to support State-sponsored radio broadcasting, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation began television broadcast to advance Nkrumah’s vision of the African personality and Nkrumah’s brand of African socialism.⁶ Next door to the broadcasting compound, film production was similarly transformed from what began as the colonial Gold Coast Film Unit into the State-owned film production and distribution company – the GFIC (Garritano 2013). It was the slow breakdown of this founding government support for media industries and the arts more broadly, not only the breakdown of celluloid substrate, that produced Ghanaian film artefacts and efforts to preserve Ghanaian film heritage.

In November 1996, Ghana sold over 50% of the shares of GFIC to a private Malaysian television company for 15 years.⁷ Once formed, the new company, GAMA Media Systems Lt., was divided into two departments: GAMA Film Company, which was devoted to film production and distribution, and TV3, a new independent television station. At first, Ghanaian filmmakers were told that the Malaysian company was going to invest money into film production to revitalise the film industry, but within a few years it became clear that GAMA Film Company was not a priority. What was once a working government film production agency was transformed into an organisation that supplied equipment and theatre rentals to private organisations with little to no film production work for Ghanaian filmmakers.

Rising dissatisfaction about the dismantling of the State-owned film industry among Ghanaian filmmakers erupted in 2002, when GAMA emptied the acquired GFIC film library onto the GAMA parking lot, exposing it to the weather for several months. The selling of GFIC and its film collections in 1996 coupled with GAMA’s act of disposal in 2002 gave filmmakers a means to criticise the government over its lack of support for the film industry and the influence of the IMF and neoliberalism on the privatisation of State assets. In Anita Afonu’s Perished Diamonds, a 2012 documentary about film preservation in Ghana, cinematographer and actor Kofi Bucknor emphatically claims, “A country that sells its own film studios and … its library of historic material, to another country … obviously does not value film, but more significantly must be in some sort of conflict about who we are” (Afonu 2012). Film director Veronica Quarshie similarly notes in the film that Ghana had sold their “birthright away” (Afonu 2012). The films that were discarded by GAMA signalled, to Ghanaian filmmakers, not only the government’s relinquishment of the film industry but also marked the end of any commitment that remained to the cultural ideals of Nkrumah, particularly those of self-representation as a decolonial act.

Following GAMA’s disposal of the film collections onto its parking lot in 2002, it took cinematographer Rev. Chris Hesse and director Kwaw Ansah several months to organise the transfer of the films to the Information Services Department (ISD) Central Film Library. The ISD, a department under the Ministry of Information, disseminates government policy to the public. The Central Film Library, started during the colonial era, was once part of an active circulating film library that provided educational films and both colonial and Ghanaian State-sponsored films for schools, government ministries and even individuals. The Central Film Library also provided ISD mobile cinema vans with films for its government campaigns into all the regions of Ghana. The mobile cinema units were started during the 1940s to support the colonial government but continued to be used by subsequent Ghanaian administrations to communicate government policy to the people. In the 1980s and ’90s, when video became available, the use of celluloid film was phased out by ISD mobile cinema crews, and the ISD Central Film Library collection ceased to be used. With the addition of the GFIC collection, the ISD Central Film Library became the largest holder of celluloid films in Ghana.

The Central Film Library was located at the head office of the Cinema Division of the ISD. Unlike the rest of the ISD headquarters, which are at the Ministry of Information building, the Cinema Division is next to the central transportation hub of Accra known as Circle in an area called North Industrial Area. Down the road from the Cinema Division are automobile mechanic shops servicing the large buses and the many taxies and trotros congregating in the area, and nearby factories produce bagged ice cream and latex foam mattresses. The Cinema Division occupies four concrete buildings. The films – which included both 35 mm and 16 mm prints – were housed in a concrete building next to a three-storey office complex. On the opposite side of the office building from the repository, there is a theatre with a 35 mm projector that fell into disrepair. Staff used the space to screen films for censorship, but it has been closed and unused for quite some time now. Since few people have air conditioners in their offices, the slated windows in all the buildings stay open, except during the occasional tropical rainstorm, when they are closed. The windows of film vaults, however, were always kept closed, so that the strong smell of vinegar coming from the decomposing acetate film did not bother the people working in their offices. It is here that the government provided a space for the GFIC films to exist for nearly two decades; but it did not actively preserve, restore or provide access to them. Eventually, they were declared hazardous material along with the other films in the film library and quietly disposed of completely.

Loss: state-sanctioned (in)action

The selling of the GFIC films and their eventual disposal was not the first time the preservation of Ghana’s audiovisual heritage was threatened by the State. The GFIC collections were “supposed to have been destroyed in the 1966 military coup d’état that ousted Kwame Nkrumah, but according to Ghanaian filmmaker Agbert Adjesu and other contemporaries, they defied the orders of the military government and saved the prints” (Nanbigne 2011, 16). In 1966, the GFIC films were dangerous not because of their substrate, but because film records of Ghana’s political history threatened the new military régime. The government’s desire to control and silence dissenting political histories may not have resulted in the collection’s destruction, but it lead to attempts to do so. Stories like these, of either State-sanctioned destruction or disinterested neglect, are the echoes of loss – both real and imagined – that structure Ghanaian cinematic archives.

Achille Mbembe notes that the “material destruction” of the archive does the opposite of reducing the past to silence. Instead, it imprints “the memory of the archive and its contents” in two ways (Mbembe et al. 2002, 23). First, the absence of the past, the known that has become unknowable, opens the imagination to all manner of historical possibility. This is to the advantage of the State. Without a record, history can be remade. On the other hand, Mbembe notes, “the destroyed archive haunts the state in the form of a spectre, an object that has no objective substance, but which, because it is touched by death, is transformed into a demon, the receptacle of all utopian ideals and of all anger, the authority of a future judgement” (24). In the case of the GFIC films, their destruction ignited the wrath of filmmakers who rose up to hold the State accountable for its abandonment of Ghanaian cultural film heritage. The collection, partially destroyed in its sale, haunted the government for many years – but the State ignored the ghosts in its vaults.

The internment of the GFIC film collection at the ISD Central Film Library, under the direct and neglected care of the government for approximately 20 years, succeed in silencing the political history of Ghana’s national film heritage more than the attempted destruction of the films in 1966 or the selling of the collection 30 years later. The ISD, unlike the former GFIC or GBC today, is controlled directly by the Ministry of Information. As such, all fundraising and preservation actions needed to be approved by the Minister of Information, who, as a political appointee, changed with each new administration. Without autonomy, any preservation efforts proposed by the Cinema Division on behalf of the Central Film Library necessarily became tied to the political agenda of the administration. It is not surprising that the ISD Central Film Library, full of State-sponsored films from past political eras on inaccessible formats, was of little interest to contemporary governments and thus ignored.

While the approval for preservation actions by the Minister is seen as a political act, ISD employees, as civil servants, are expected to remain apolitical. The duty of an information officer is to convey public service messages for the administration to the Ghanaian people through cinema van shows and public service announcements. For those custodians of the films in the ISD Central Film Library to have selected and prioritised one former administration’s film-productions over another would have been to sacrifice the public’s trust in them as apolitical public servants. Any advocacy for the collection that described the deplorable state of Ghana’s cinematic heritage could have been read as a critique of the current administration rather than a report on a persistent problem. It is this tension between the politics of Ministry of Information and the apolitical ISD public servant role that led to apathy being the defining characteristic of postcolonial film preservation in Ghana for many years.

In a 2009 television interview, Issac Dupey, who was then the head of the ISD Central Film Library, claimed that because the films discarded by the GAMA Film Company all came to the ISD, ISD did more for preserving audiovisual materials in the country than any other institution. The inaction of the ISD Central Film Library towards conservation would suggest otherwise, but his comments show the situated strategies of preservation available to civil servants under the Ministry of Information. In his statement, Dupey refused to provide any information that could be used to criticise the administration, while also showing how the ISD had provided a space for the films while other institutions had not. Dupey’s statement can be read as the only approach to preservation available to ISD civil servants: disinterested possession.

In 2011, I visited the former GFIC actor and director, Ernest Abbeyquaye, at his home to talk about the history of Ghanaian cinema. Our conversation turned towards the films held by the ISD Central Film Library and the difficulties of film preservation in Ghana, and he explained to me,

You know it became a matter of money not being available and those in power at any particular time not thinking that these things are worth preserving. We kept reporting. Nobody can fault us, or blame us, for not reporting. We did. But how strongly can a civil servant protest to his Minister or Head of State? You will be dismissed. So, you keep quiet. … You couldn’t meet the Minister at any formal or informal [event] and say, “Sir, our library or archives are going bad.” … You might find yourself in a police station having to make a statement. Why did you speak to the Minister impolitely and indiscreetly in public and brought this whole thing into disrepute? (Author interview, Aco Ajeh, Accra, March 30, 2011)

Abbeyquaye captured the essence of the problem. Caring for Ghana’s film heritage beyond the appropriate level could mean dismissal. This of course would not only be bad for those individuals who advocated for the collection who might lose their jobs, but ultimately potentially bad for the collection as well if their replacements did not value the collection. This has been especially true since those who worked at GFIC or in the ISD Central Film Library during its prime retired or passed away and were replaced with a younger generation that has no personal attachment to the films, and not necessarily any film training. Thus, the politics of carelessness that characterised archival neglect at ISD and the losses that it produced, can also be seen as an act of archival labour. Here neglect was a minor form of care.

Of course, these strategies have only delayed the death of Ghana’s State-produced films. Hesse has noted that, in hindsight, sending the GFIC films from the GAMA parking lot to ISD was like sending the films from the frying pan into the fire (Afonu 2012). Yet rather than mourn their loss every day, Hesse has shifted his efforts to preserving the 1,184 GFIC colour film reels held at a storage facility in London. Every few years, he reminds the government to pay their bill. But these films remain locked up and inaccessible. However, there is some hope that pressure from international documentary productions who want to access these films may provide the push the Ghanaian government needs to get the films digitised and make them widely available.

Loss: refusals

At the Nigerian Film Corporation’s Lagos office, a collection of government films similar to those in Accra were also left neglected for many years. At least one of the films from this collection – Shaihu Umar (Adamu Halilu, 1976) – has been restored by the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art Berlin through several German and Nigerian partnerships (Hediger, Cheeka, and Campanini 2021, 55–76). Shaihu Umar was found in 2015 by Didi Cheeka and restored in 2018. Cheeka, Vinzenz Hediger and Sonia Campanini, towards the conclusion of their co-authored article about audiovisual preservation in Nigeria, make a claim that audiovisual heritage “will be nobody’s heritage unless a human connection to the films it contains is created or renewed” (2021, 71). The restoration and exhibition of Shaihu Umar was part of the “Archive außer sich” project (2017–2021) to reconnect Nigerians to film heritage artefacts. Conversely, the artist-filmmaker, Onyeka Igwe, in 2019, documented the Nigerian Film Corporation collections and made two films that collectively ask when human connections to films might better be cut than spliced. In this section, I analyse Igwe’s a so-called archive and No Archive Can Restore You to suggest that cultural restoration may sometimes best be enacted through the productive acceptance of loss.

Both Igwe’s films are about the political legacies of colonial audiovisual archives. While a so-called archive juxtaposes the abandoned film collections in Lagos with the deserted former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002–2009) building, No Archive Can Restore You, the shorter of the two 2020 films, focuses only on the Lagos collections. Many of the shots in No Archive Can Restore You are also in a so-called archive but elongated, re-edited and accompanied with a different soundtrack. The tone associated with the Lagos footage remains the same in both films and is the emphasis of the following analysis. The films are filled with images of rusty cans piled precariously high, covered in dirt and cobwebs (see Figure 1). Shot at the former headquarters of the colonial filmmaking unit in Nigeria that has since been abandoned, Igwe’s exploratory camera floats around the building distorting archival space at the same time it carefully catalogues it. The camera is disembodied, twisting in space to reveal a spectral view. The building is empty, but not devoid of life: termites have taken up residence leaving cryptic messages on plastered walls that a line of ants manoeuvres up. Dust, cobwebs and dry and mildewy papers litter the rooms. In No Archive Can Restore You a foreboding sign of “no admittance” warns of the filmic carnage within its vaults. Inside these tombs are neglected films in rusted cans. These decomposing film artefacts visualise an archivist’s nightmare.

Figure 1. Film still from No Archive Can Restore You (Onyeka Igwe 2020a).

Igwe’s documentation of the Nigerian collections brings to the surface my own encounters with colonial and postcolonial State film collections in Ghana. The Nigerian film crypts are not unlike those that housed the GFIC films and colonial film collections at the ISD Central Film Library in Accra for many years. In these images, it is not the momentous celluloid fire or the calculated disinterest of public servants, but the material signs of neglect – dust, cobwebs, mould, film reels crystallising or turning to liquid – that prompt preservation and histories of film among international film communities that seek to recover that which has been, or is, nearly lost. These images (my own included, see e.g., Figure 2) plea for an act of salvation. But whose salvation? By what means? And by whom? Who would the preservation of these celluloid histories serve?

Figure 2. Photograph of Ghana Film Industry Corporation collection at Information Services Department Cinema Division (Blaylock 2010).

In both films, Igwe activates the neglected film archive image for a different purpose. These films capture the aesthetic beauty of decaying film – the perverse pleasure of viewing the rotten film reel – as a horror film might aestheticise gore. The simultaneous push and pull of archival carnage engage the viewer not with an appeal for the films to be “saved,” but to confront the residue of the colonial archive held within as a violent space filled with ghosts that might better be left alone. While No Archive Can Restore You is devoid of humans, sounds of life carrying on can be heard despite this Nigerian film heritage lying in ruins. Feet scuttle. Cars honk. Fleeting conversations on a busy street intrude on the silence in the forgotten film vaults. In the distance, someone is drumming. A choir sings at a religious service about freedom, releasing the spectator from the pull of the decaying film. On cue, the camera tracks backward away from the “archive” and out the door, leaving the films to rot.

No Archive Can Restore You, even more so than a so-called archive, implores audiences to see horror in the postcolonial archive’s colonial architecture – the structures of power that are both physical and imaginary. In the description of the film, Igwe writes, “They reveal a colonial residue that is echoed in [the] walls of the building itself” (Igwe n.d.). As Mbembe reminds us, “archives” first refer to “a building, a symbol of a public intuition, which is one of the organs of a constituted state” (2002, 19). Both the Nigerian and Ghanaian film collections were relics of State-sponsored filmmaking that originated in the colonial era. “The archive” then has already been structured as an institution of (post)coloniality. No Archive Can Restore You suggests that artefacts of decay, that mark the elimination of information from the image, in these spaces are not the result of inaction or inadequacy but acts of refusal. In this way, I argue for considering archival neglect as a productive preservation action. What may be preserved in this rot is certainly not the films, but the possibility of remembrance without threading up violent and exploitative histories for viewing on present and future screens.⁸

No Archive Can Restore You and a so-called archive are found-footage films that refuse to reproduce the colonial gaze or the objectification of colonised bodies. A colonial film is projected in both films, but it is obscured by windows, distorted angles of the projected image and dust. The image is neither pristine nor restored. The voiceover from a colonial film announces that, “Commerce brought us to Africa, Commerce keeps us in Africa,” reminding the viewer of the economic exploitation at the centre of former and lasting colonial ideologies. Unlike experimental found-footage films like Bruce Conner’s A Movie or even Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which each recontextualise images of naked women and imperial violence to detour their original meaning and to make US and French consumer culture visible to critique, Igwe’s films question the possibility of dismantling the colonial film archive with those same films that have been tools for colonial governance. The desire to see as a means of knowing – and in the colonial context mastering the unknown – is central to the archival practice that here is drawn into question.

However, the recontextualisation of African film and audio archives – including those produced by Europeans – have elsewhere been seen as a foundation for African creative practice. In the 1950s, Senegalese filmmaker and theorist Paulin S. Vieyra, in plans for an African cinema of the future, articulated a case for the restitution of documentary materials about Africa held by Western organisations and production houses to African film centres on the continent. Describing Vieyra’s vision, Nikolaus Perneczky writes, “This archive would serve as the basis for the first African films – a found-footage cinema to come” (2022, 386). Vieyra wrote in 1958 that “among the short films shot by Europeans on Africa, there is already material for an African cinema” (cited in Perneczky 2022, 386). What was important for Vieyra about the return of film artefacts was that the stolen images they contain could be “systematically classified and given an African reinterpretation” (Vieyra cited in Perneczky 2022, 386).⁹ The J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives at the University of Ghana, drawing on the vision of its founder, situate their collections as “the foundation for a living art, rather than a passive repository,” with musicians actively consulting their collections to develop their craft.¹⁰ Relatedly, Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, acknowledged that “an archive may be largely about ‘the past’ but it is always ‘re-read’ in the light of the present and the future” (2002, 92).

But Igwe’s films consider what it would mean to situate the archive not as a collection of archival objects that are “read,” but rather in the bodies of audiences in the continual act of “re-reading.” No Archive Can Restore You borrows its title from decolonial scholar Julietta Singh’s book by the same name. Early in Singh’s non-fiction, she describes the lure of the archive when she was a graduate student facing an uncertain job market. She writes,

The archive was an elusive hope of our individual salvation. If we could find the right archive, the right stash of materials that was sexy enough to sell ourselves, we could be spared the depression, the anxiety attacks, the pre-mid-life crises that would come when, one by one, we realized we were not going to be chosen … . If only we could stumble upon the right archive, the secrets that no one else had yet discovered, we might still be one of the chosen ones. (Singh 2018, 22)

Singh ultimately rejects this archive because it “reproduces a structure of knowledge over and over and over again,” in preference for the body archive. What she suggests is “a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies” (Singh 2018, 29).

During the credits of a so-called archive, Igwe dances with abandon in an empty building that used to house the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002–2009). Igwe is framed in a long shot by rows of metal columns that uphold the roof. Light filters into the grey room. The handheld camera responds to her every move. It witnesses her defiant dance on the grave of the colonial archive. In Igwe’s films there is an ethical relation being worked out that makes the audiences “unbounded relation to other bodies” felt, even while other bodies remain invisible in rotting celluloid corpses. Precisely because they are not visible – because of film artefacting – audiences are able to imagine a different ethical responsibility to the stolen images of people’s lives in colonial and postcolonial State-filmmaking histories. Artefacting allows us to see this cinematic loss due to archival inaction as abundant with meaning. Drawing on Marika Cifor’s “framing records as repositories of affect,” what if the archive focused on those other “repositories of affect” – the body (2016, 14). If the film archive is the feeling in the body of what the past evoked, ethical care for these repositories should come first (Odumosu 2020).

Restorations

Repatriation and restitution have been proposed models for thinking about the return of African films that remain in European and US archives and repositories, though Rebecca Ohene-Asah acknowledges that audiovisual cultural heritage is often “relegated to the background” of repatriation discussions because of its relative “intangibility” (Ohene-Asah 2021, 1). The reproducibility of digitised film challenges conventional repatriation processes. In the context of Ghana, the proposed digitisation of Ghanaian films that are stored in the UK by the private storage company Bonded Services comes with “slippery ownership” concerns where colonial legacies of infrastructural dependency play out in the logistics of the physical and digital storage of Ghanaian audiovisual heritage (Ohene-Asah 2021, 7). These films are owned by the Ghanaian government, but there are currently no institutions with facilities in Ghana that can hold them should the film reels come back to Ghana. Neither is there a clear institutional space for the storage of archival digital files of the digitised films if they were made and transferred to the Ghanaian State. As Ohene-Asah notes, digitisation does not resolve ownership questions surrounding “the tangible archive after digitization” (Ohene-Asah 2021, 8). Film restitution – like film history – seems to need discrete artefacts of material significance that can be salvaged and returned to an owner.

Art curator and critic, Okwui Enwezor theorised that “because the camera is literally an archiving machine, every photograph, every film is a priori an archival object” (2008). But what if the archive was not a collection of “archival objects” captured in the objective of the camera lens, but instead the archive was seen as a relational ethics between humans through material recombination and archiving moved away from salvaging – or the saving of and thus investment in material artefacts as tangible and valuable goods – to maintenance of human connections through the material means? This would mean embracing the shift from a salvage orientation towards material objects to the salvation of African futures. In this way, archival work cannot simply be a renewal of human connections to films through restoration and exhibition (though it may often take that form). Activating a relational ethics between humans through material recombination may also mean embracing cinematic loss – the meaning-making of absence in film artefacting.

In Ghana, the threat of the death of cinema has not been predicated on the loss of film objects but has rather been the result of a breakdown of the social commitments of the Ghanaian State towards the Ghanaian film industry. Celluloid loss matters because it signals the government’s indifference to the role filmmakers have had in the construction of the nation, not because celluloid matters in and of itself. If the disregarded ISD Central Film Library’s history makes visible the changing relations between the Ghanaian government and Ghanaian filmmakers, Onyeka Igwe’s films reveal audiences’ disinterest in historic expressions of governmental power. Both examples shift attention away from the inherent instability of film stock as central to recuperative film history, towards the possibility of acknowledging cinematic loss and film artefacting as an important part of an ethics of archival care that centres humans rather than things. Here is the impetus to move away from understanding the film archive as an institution for the salvaging of artefacts into an institution charged with the careful facilitation of human connections (or disconnections) through cinematic encounters that bring the past, present and future into dialogue. Then, possibly, film historiography can follow through the material towards the renewed study of relations between the bodies film mediate.

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Notes on contributors

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.

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).