Dr. Arnoud Arps (University of Amsterdam) & Dr. Kaya de Wolff (Goethe University Frankfurt, TraCe)
Tuesday, November 5, 4.15 pm
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812
In recent years, postcolonial struggles over memory have produced a wave of recent film productions across various European cinemas. In 2020, the Dutch film De Oost [The East] was released on Amazon Prime. Three years later, in 2023, Der vermessene Mensch [Measures of Men] hit theatres across Germany. These films have a shared commonality: they cinematically represent underrepresented colonial histories. Moreover, both films were widely promoted as being the first to address particular episodes in Dutch and German colonial history that have been silenced in public discourse/memory. For De Oost it is the structural violence committed by Dutch perpetrators during the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949); for Der vermessene Mensch it is the German genocide against the OvaHerero and Nama people in Namibia (1904-1908). While this premise initially may evoke decolonial promise, we argue that the films’ selective narratives and stereotypical visual representation patterns showcase restrictions on this potential. Instead, we will focus our comparative study on the production context of these films with a particular emphasis on distribution and promotion. We contend that the most comprehensive way to understand these postcolonial films is to analyse what Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka (2008) call their “plurimedial constellations”, meaning how these productions evolve in networks of media and social practices of collective memory. We do this by analysing the public debates around these films, how these films have been framed in promotion events, and by focusing on the media that are tied into the films. By analysing these plurimedial constellations, we map out how these films – each in their own right – are ambivalent and paradoxical. While they perpetuate elements of colonial thinking, their contextual existence simultaneously destabilises dominant structures of knowledge about the colonial past. Their seeming incongruity is what we propose to be a key element of contemporary European postcolonial memory films.
