MEDIEN | DENKEN SoSe 2021

In an era of increasingly collaborative documentary practices, the director becomes increasingly a recipient, and often an editor, of audiovisual recordings that were generated in her absence. Her presence takes the form of a motive force, she becomes identified with the presence of the recording apparatus, she may even be the one to whom people give themselves to be seen, or to whom the address themselves. But she, herself, receives the recordings as an event, a surprise, a belated encounter with that from which she remains irrevocably exiled. She becomes implicated in a structure of future anteriority, from the perspective of those who record (she is the one for whom the profilmic event becomes that which will have been seen). And she becomes the telos of her own desire to have been where she was not, from another perspective, her own. What kind of a relationship is this? Is the profilmic event, determined by the anticipation of becoming filmic/audiographic, structurally analogous to that overheard conversation of the mass-mediated public sphere, which, though not addressed to a particular listener, can be heard by her—she being an instance of the anyone? In this lecture, I consider these issues on the basis of a long-term coloration with southern African migrant miners, whose recording of themselves underground for me has been the basis of several filmic productions. 

tba.

Die Entstehung von Erdöl braucht Ewigkeiten, seine Verwendung aber kennt nur den Augenblick: ob als Kraftstoff oder Plastiktüte, als Lippenstift oder Luftballon. Erdöl ist allgegenwärtig und doch unsichtbar. Es ist vorzeitlicher Naturstoff und hypermoderner Kunststoff. Es ist Kriegstreiber, Wohlstands­bringer und sogar Lebensmittel. Benjamin Steininger und Alexander Klose sprechen über ein ebenso fundamentales wie oft übersehenes Medium der Moderne.

Benjamin Steininger ist Kultur- und Medientheoretiker, Wissenschafts- und Technikhistoriker sowie Kurator in Wien und Berlin. Er forscht am Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin sowie an der Technischen Universität Berlin.

Alexander Klose ist Kulturwissenschaftler und freier Kurator mit Wohnsitz in Berlin und Halle (Saale). 2009 bis 2014 war er als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter und Programmentwickler bei der Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

Gemeinsam mit dem Berliner Künstler und Zukunftsforscher Bernd Hopfengärtner gründeten sie 2017 das Forscherkollektiv Beauty of Oil zur Erforschung der Widersprüche und Komplexitäten der Erdölmoderne.

In one of the first cultural acts to follow independence in 1975, Frelimo’s new socialist government of Mozambique set up a National Institute of Cinema (the INC). In a country where many people had little previous experience of cinema, the INC was tasked to “deliver to the people an image of the people”. This book explores how this unique culture of revolutionary filmmaking began during the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Following independence, the INC began the task of decolonising the film industry, building on networks of solidarity with other socialist and non-aligned struggles. Mozambique became an epicentre for militant filmmakers from around the world and cinema played an essential role in building the new nation. Crucially, the book examines how filmmaking became a resource for resistance against Apartheid as the Cold War played out across Southern Africa during the late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on detailed film analysis, production histories and testimonies of key participants, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution provides a compelling account of this radical experiment in harnessing cinema to social change.

Ros Gray is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Critical Studies in the Art Department at Goldsmiths where she has led the development of the MA Art & Ecology programme.  Her research has investigated militant filmmaking, particularly in relation to liberation struggles and revolutionary movements in Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso. This research informs her monograph Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968–1991 (James Currey, 2020), among many other publications in journals and books. In recent years, her research has increasingly focused on artistic interventions in the fields of soil care, cultivation and decolonial ecologies more broadly. In 2018 Ros co-edited with Shela Sheikh a special issue of Third Text entitled ‘The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions’, and in 2020 they produced ‘The Coloniality of Planting’ for the Camden Art Centre’s podcast series The Botanical Mind, which was also published as an article in Architectural Review in 2021.

In dem Vortrag schlage ich einen Bogen von der Geschichte der visuellen Anthropologie und dem ethnographischen Film zu kollaborativen Praktiken und dem „Vierten Film“ (Barry Barclay), also indigenen Kinematographien. Ich diskutiere, wie Filmpraktiken zu (dekolonialen) Methoden (Linda Tuhiwai Smith) wurden, die Forschung, Aktivismus und Community Care verbinden, wie es Carolina Alonso Bejarano et al argumentieren. Damit gerät auch die Frage in den Blick, wer wie mit wem und welchen Methoden forscht.
Die Frage des Dokumentarischen verschiebt sich so von der Repräsentation zum Operativen des Films, zur Handlung. Mit dem Konzept einer pragmatischen Filmpraxis entwickele ich Ansätze weiter, die Gilles Deleuze in Bezug auf den „Dritten Film“ und den ethnographischen Film als „Fabulation“ beschrieben hat. Die Filmphilosophie wird so am Ende von Das Zeit-Bild eine „Philosophie der Praktiken“.

[english version]

Images of Experience and Interventions: Ethnographic film, collaboration, and decolonial methodologies.

In this talk, I trace the history of visual anthropology and ethnographic film to collaborative practices and the “Fourth Film” (Barry Barclay), or indigenous cinematographies. I discuss how film practices became (decolonial) methodologies (Linda Tuhiwai Smith) that connect research, activism, and community care, as argued by Carolina Alonso Bejarano et al. This also brings into focus the question of who does research, how, with whom, and what methods.
The question of the documentary thus shifts from representation to the operations of film and to its action. With the concept of a pragmatic film practice, I further develop approaches that Gilles Deleuze described as “fabulation” in relation to the “third film” and ethnographic film. The philosophy of film thus becomes a “philosophy of practices” at the end of The Time-Image.

Julia Bee, Dr. phil, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaftlerin, ist Juniorprofessorin für Bildtheorie an der Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar. Im Sose ist sie Mercatorfellow am SFB Medien der Kooperation an der Universität Siegen, wo sie zu Praktiken des Fahrradfahrens und ihren Medien forscht. Aktuelle Arbeitsgebiete: Visuelle Anthropologie und experimentelle Verfahren, Gender, Affekt und Medien, Fahrradmedien, Mobilitätsgerechtigkeit.
Aktuelle Veröffentlichungen: Differenzen und Affirmation, queerfeministische Positionen zur Medialität, hrsg mit Nicole Kandioler, Berlin 2020, Experimente, lernen, Techniken tauschen, ein spekulatives Handbuch, hrsg. mit Gerko Egert, Berlin/Weimar 2020, „Diffraktion – Individuation – Spekulation. Zur Methodendebatte in den Medienwissenschaften“, in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 22, 2020, mit Jennifer Eickelmann und Kat Köppert.