In April of 2022, in preparation for the After the Fire Symposium, we invited filmmaker Onyeka Igwe and film and media scholar Litheko Modisane to have a conversation about Igwe’s 2020 short film, a so-called archive. Igwe’s film, also discussed in Jennifer Blaylock’s contribution to this issue, offers a critical reflection on archival decay and imperial history, creating imagined archival fragments and remnants of museological and propagandistic film. Modisane and Igwe explore questions of voice, audience and positionality, memory, curation and extraction, and the tension between the authority of the archival fragment and that of the archive’s decay. What follows is a transcript of this conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
Litheko Modisane [00:00]
I watched [your] very interesting film, and, towards the end, the sense that I’m getting is that it’s part of a series – that it does not go alone, so there is other stuff that’s going to come in. So, whatever and however I understand it would therefore be limited by the fact that I’ve only had access to this particular part of the series. I found it very interesting, very fascinating. Firstly, the fact that it positions me, as the viewer, to expect the story of the Bristol Museum to be exciting, and I was wondering whether myself as the viewer would be part of (a kind of) that universal subject. You know, that singularity of viewership. That is perhaps curious, a little, because I’m sitting in the South which has years and years of colonial historical encounters which were not very nice. And I’m not sure that I would think of the British Empire [as] be[ing] exciting. Therefore, those words just hooked me into a kind of a critical mode. And watching the film and, you know, going through it, that is part of, really, what informed how I was kind of approaching it, because I’m trying to understand: for whom is it exciting, and what is the film trying to do, and whom is it really targeting? Who is the primary viewer here? Okay?
And then I was moved to the Nightmare Room, and, as I was telling Alírio earlier on, I find the word nightmare, you know, metaphorically, literally to be quite a rich signifier on its own. So to have a room especially carved out, curated, you know, for something that’s intangible but felt and sometimes visceral – I found that to be quite interesting because then it would challenge the filmmaker to be able to present it as this visualised internal kind of turmoil? Because that is what it is. It’s a turmoil for whoever is experiencing the nightmare.
And my other question would be, having realised that the story of the Empire is supposed to be this exciting story, and here there is a Nightmare Room, and to reconcile the two also posed a challenge for me at the same time, because I was wondering for whom was the Empire a nightmare and for whom was it simply a dream, if I may put it in that class or positional terms or positions.
I also realised that … , there were eerie sounds that the filmmaker used and the visuals themselves really felt nightmarish in that sense. They were foreboding. The sounds were foreboding. The visuals themselves were giving us a kind of sense of abandonment and a sense of otherworldliness, so to speak. But an otherworldliness that presents itself in [inaudible] terms, so to speak. So I was wondering, also, museums and archival depositories/repositories tend to use sound also as a way of presenting a particular experience of the past to whoever is visiting the museum, or whoever is going through the objects in the museum, so to speak.
So I was wondering, is it something that you found in the museum and you overlaid in the documentary? Or did you just overlay it yourself? And what is it that informed your attention to the Nightmare Room? Is it the history of imperialism? Or is it the nightmare only in so far as, say, perhaps the way you think about past archival elements, past archival objects that may in themselves be thought as evoking negative kind[s] of experience and stuff.
If, indeed, you are thinking of the nightmare in terms of the Empire and what it has done, the kind of violence that it has visited upon colonies and stuff, wouldn’t you agree that the full import of the nightmare of Empire is kind of not really coming through the visuals themselves? So I would like to challenge you on that and get the kind of response to what is it, because I might be missing something quite key there.
Another thing that I realised about the Nightmare Room is that it gives a kind of “double sense” of the archive. Here is a sense of the archive as an object that has been kind of collected, put together in a repository called a “museum.”
Although, of course, there might be some conceptual differences between the museum and an archival repository, so to speak. But these objects appear to give that sense of the archive as a collection of objects, but at the same time it is giving the sense of an archive as actually corrupted material. Decaying material. That lack of care, that abandonment, is coming through in the way the visuals capture the state of this material. So they are rotting, they are corrupted, those film reels and stuff. And I found that to be quite interesting as to whether the film is also commenting on that sense of the kind of decay that we often think of as what archives are meant to overcome. And then there’s a sense, I think at timestamp 15:45 … , I found Nina’s comments there which are speaking both to the making of the film itself and the museum itself, and I found them to be quite critical and interesting because they appear to be self-reflexive in the sense that it’s talking about how the museum itself was named, the people that are involved in the museum are themselves implicated in the project of Empire and therefore illegitimately having access to material that is not supposed to be in their hands because they are part of the problem. They are complicit in a way. You know they’re the former colonial officers and stuff. And I found that to be interesting and was wondering whether you are deliberately making the film in a kind of self-reflexive manner, or in a manner that, of course, you are inviting people to think more about the other installations in the series. The story is bigger. It’s not just about whether the film is going to capture the problem as you’re presenting it.
And then there’s also an interesting sense of the parody, because I felt that, at some point, colonial voices are being parodied here with, say for instance, the interviewee – the white male interview I gather – who says that no white man can live in a jungle or something like that, giving us this kind of a biologism that is itself rooted in racism: to say that a jungle is a natural kind of habitat; it’s not meant for a particular type of human, who of course is a universalised human; and also in the gender sense – a male – so he occupies this humanity both in gendered and racial terms.
So that’s a sense I’m kind of getting also. But as I said at the beginning, because it’s a series some things may be lost and can perhaps be explained better or come out better in the next installations and stuff, so.
My kind of impressions on what has been presented in the film are themselves also subject to the limitations that my access itself presents. So those are some of the points that came through as I was watching this very exciting, interesting film.
Thanks, I think I’ll stop there.
Onyeka Igwe [10:28]
Thank you.
I guess I’m really struck by how you opened and began and like “who is the audience?,” “what is the intention?”
And I think quite a lot about my position or subjectivity as from diaspora, as of being in a diaspora kind of position, as my parents grew up in Nigeria, but I grew up in the UK and being very much kind of socialised and educated in a western way of knowing. And I encountered … , I don’t think I was trying to … , so at the beginning of the film, you hear this kind of voice-over of the museum, and that is kind of a replica of a real video that was created to publicise this museum that existed in Bristol (which is in the southwest of the UK), from basically in the early 2000s. And this museum, I kind of learned about, I was introduced to, when I went on an archive trip to this collection, and I heard about this story of this museum, which was set up by someone who was called, nicknamed, Union Jack Hayward. The original idea started in the ‘80s and he was really kind of passionate about promoting the British Empire as something akin to the Roman Empire, as something to be proud of. And that was his original idea. That was his intention with the museum, and then it kind of changed slightly through time, from people in Bristol not wanting that to happen and wanting it to represent the kind of legacy of British colonialism. So the museum kind of sat in between these two opposing ideas of British Empire. But it was a private museum that was really trying to constantly pay for itself. So it advertises itself in this particular way, and I was very struck when I heard the voice-over in the original video about this idea of the Empire being exciting.
And the same questions that you asked – exciting to whom? – was kind of what I was thinking about. So I wanted to include that in the film, but give it an edge in some way. The voice to be heightened and being even more over the top in some way, and its kind of delivery, and for that voice to disintegrate in some way throughout the passage of the film, but also to include things in it that would not have, of course, been in the original, like this idea of the Nightmare Room. And the Nightmare Room came up in these interviews I did with people who used to work at the museum.
As I said, the museum was private, and it was struggling with its (kind of) income for a long time, and they amassed a kind of huge archive collection. They got gifted some things from the former Commonwealth Institute, which was also previously called the Empire Institute.
And they got gifted things from that collection, and they also went to interview lots of people to collect oral histories, mainly from people who were part in some way of the colonial regime, and (so) kind of bureaucrats or people who worked in the army or whatever. And so they did oral history with them and then – or their family members – and then asked them if they had any material, and that material got donated to this burgeoning collection. So the museum grew its own archive.
And so it started to get gifted lots of different material. And really without a lot of care. One of the staff members, in the interview that I did, told me that they had nicknamed a room in the museum “the Nightmare Room.” [Litheko: “mmm” or “ooh”] Because it would have objects just kind of slung in there without any care. And these will be objects like animal artefacts or things like that, that are considered, like, sacred, but they would just be kind of piled into a room. And so for me, this idea of the lack of care and the kind of rabid collection of material was indicative of what was … for me this museum is kind of like a metonym for empire. This is a continuation of the relationship. The British legacy of Empire was to repeat itself and repeat this extraction, not in the same form but in the form of perhaps a museum or an archive; that the visual wealth or the wealth of objects and artefacts continues a kind of British colonial relationship. That seemed pretty poignant to me, and so I wanted to inject that idea of a “Nightmare Room” into this voice-over, into this kind of advertisements for the museum.
That was kind of the attempt to signal to an audience for some self-reflection? How are you receiving this voice-over? How are you receiving this information about Empire? And I guess, in that way, I’ve made it with the intention for western audiences to induce some criticality about the way these ideas are talked about, because, I mean, I had made this film in 2020 (or I finished making this film in 2020) just as the Colston statue was being taken down in Bristol and people were saying, “oh we should have a Museum of Colonialism, that’s where we can put this statue in.”
And people were talking about, you know, “don’t tear these things down, we have to talk about history,” and I thought, well, there was a museum to this exact subject in this exact city.
But what it produced was the continuation of a kind of colonial relationship. So I wanted to highlight in that way and speak to these people and to the archive itself, because I’d been working with the archive that retained the material from the now defunct museum.
I filmed in their (kind of) stores and stuff, and I was trying to speak to them also in some way to kind of question them in what they’re doing, because the material now, like the video material, has been sold to Getty Images. So now to kind of like licence and engage with this material at all, you’re paying exorbitant costs to the Getty family and to the Getty Organisation.
So … I mean … I laugh because it becomes so circular, this kind of exploitation and extraction.
And then, in terms of what you were asking about the link to … So I do have a Nightmare Room and the sounds, and perhaps how I made the sounds and perhaps the kind of the way in which the images may or not be working in the same way.
So the soundtrack of the film is almost completely kind of constructed in a separate way to the visuals. So my intention was to … You’re right in saying that this kind of comes out of a series of works because I had made some films previously in reusing images from the colonial film unit, which was this kind of British Imperial visual propaganda engine that existed from there around 1932 to 1955 that produced films for and about the British colonies at the time. So I had reused that material quite often and I had got to the stage where I had more and more questions about what it meant to reuse that material.
And I was interested in thinking through a sound or thinking sonically and seeing if I could represent something of the films in the collection through sound, and some of the footage is from one of the outposts of the colonial film unit – The Nigerian film unit in Lagos – and I had gone to Nigeria to visit archives there and for many different reasons have not really been able to see that much material.
And those reasons were not only administrative or logistic. They were also political reasons. Through that experience I was kind of learning what archives meant in Nigeria as opposed to what archives meant in the UK.
And so there was something of a refusal in some ways to repeat those images. So with that in mind, I wanted to think through the archive sonically, and so the soundtrack is almost completely constructed; it has some kind of some archive material in it, but everything is recorded separately and none of it is diegetic. So one part of the of the film involves these kind of voice actors performing a speech, and we also recorded them kind of sounding out the space, and those sounds that they made make up the kind of eerie sounds that you’re talking about.
And what I was interested in there is kind of suggesting a presence in the archives that is perhaps not seen, but can be heard. And, I think my main intention was to kind of replicate a kind of disembodied tour of this space. I was very interested in archives as institutions and archives as architecture, and for me the former Bristol museum was initially like an Isambard Kingdom Brunel building, and then the stores that exist now are former kind of tobacco stores that were used in the triangular slave trade. So these kind of legacies in the building, I also wanted to kind of suggest or bring attention to in some way. Yeah, so the sounds are all very similar. They’re all kind of constructed with that in mind, with the idea of, like, suggesting your presence that we can’t see.
I think it’s interesting about the visuals not perhaps having that kind of nightmarish feel or perhaps doing something else. I’ve often … Sometimes people say to me that they felt so kind of struck by the decay and bad about it, and they were feeling like, “oh, we want to preserve this. It’s so sad that these films are now being destroyed or are decomposing.”
And I guess that’s not really what I saw. When I encountered this, this building in Lagos, I felt as if it was representative of a kind of Nigerian colonial legacy because my experience of Lagos is [that] there’s quite a lot of buildings in Lagos that are linked in somehow to British colonialism, like, for example, Independence House, which was like a gift from the British when they left Nigeria. That now stands completely empty; not destroyed, not knocked down, but they stand empty.
And the Nigerian film unit exists as you see it in the film as a building that is empty, that’s kind of been evacuated in some way behind the new Nigerian Film Corporation building, so it’s in the shadow of this building… So this kind of presence that hasn’t been completely knocked down, but that it’s been left is what I was interested in representing.
So that was the intention behind the way in which those scenes were filmed: that there’s no bodies there; it’s like [a] disembodied tour. Someone is moving around this space, but these spaces are without people. They have been left in some way, and in the end that was kind of a suggestion that I was interested in putting forward at the end of the film.
The question that I was kind of ruminating [on] was, what does it mean, what would it mean, to empty out and leave these colonial archives? And leave them decaying, leave them decomposing. And leave them, knowing that there’s a presence that we can’t see, but take all the things that have been hoarded by imperial (kind of) endeavour and mindset. Take them and repatriate them, or just take them away from this cycle of extraction and monetisation.
So that’s [how] the final tracking shot of the film is representative in some way of those kind of ideas.
Litheko [25:25]
I hear you, I hear you, and what is striking me about the way that you are presenting it is that it’s not just a film about the museum. It’s just a museum as you would find, for instance, in promotional films, but it’s challenging the viewer to – what is the word? – estranging. This estrangement, isn’t it? So that the viewer occupies a position not of identification as such, but of a critical curiosity, if I may be allowed here, where you’re not quite sure what is happening, but at the same time you are being pushed towards an understanding that what is being presented is far … , much more layered. You know than what you might be imagining. And as you’re speaking, I’m thinking this whole problem of the archive as something that goes away, as something that gets destroyed, is presented to us today as a challenge because if we think about the archive in relation to the very history that is implicated in its own making through particular selections and stuff. We realise that there are some things about the memory of violence, of colonial violence, of the Empire that seem to rally against that deep, deep sense of preserving. And, I don’t know, if in thinking in that way, what we are doing could be to actually oppose that very sense of what an archive should be like; to kind of resist the archive in that sense because of its historical complicity.
Because when you look at what’s happening right now at UCT:
So we had the fire, our library burned, and the questions are being asked as to whether this is a necessary loss or not.
And it’s a question, of course, that might appear to be not very important, but you know when you consider how the institution itself is part of the complicity of the production of particular problematic images of Africa and Africans, then perhaps it’s worth listening to.
Anyway, I think I’ll end there with my thoughts which are all over the place. [chuckles]
Onyeka [28:46]
No, no, no. I think that’s exactly it and I definitely think that’s what I’m trying to kind of put forward with the film – to question these kind of colonial state archives and their persistence, and their practices. And to, as you say … a critical curiosity. Or maybe to introduce a kind of horror of the archive that makes people have these kind of questions.
Litheko [29:15]
Yeah, and I think your visuals of the … of those decaying objects or film reels and books and other stuff capture that very powerfully, because on the other hand you’ve got a voice that is going on and on about preserving the British Empire, the memory of the British Empire and stuff. But then the visuals themselves are kind of diametrically opposed to preservation in that sense. So I find that could be quite a powerful way of actually visualising it and putting it ahead and making us think about the ignored significance of decay and corruptibility of archival objects. I think I’ll stop there for now.
Onyeka [30:02]
Thank you so much.
Litheko [30:04]
You’re welcome, you’re welcome. Thank you.
Acknowledgment
The authors are grateful to Himal Ramji for transcribing the conversation. Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa [email protected]
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Onyeka Igwe
Onyeka Igwe is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task.
Litheko Modisane
Litheko Modisane is the author of South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of Black-Centred Films (2013, Palgrave Macmillan). Modisane’s scope of interests includes film and archive, heritage, representations of Nelson Mandela in film and repertoires of sartorial representations in the contemporary political public sphere in South Africa.