29 April 2019
All day
‘Archives of Decolonisation’. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Deutsches Institut für Film, Frankfurt, April 29 2019
Erica Carter’s project, Cold War icon, explores the circulation around Germany, Britain and West Africa of documentary and newsreel images of the Pan-African leader and first Prime Minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. In April 2019, Carter presented first insights from the subproject to an audience at the Filmmuseum Frankfurt including lay members of the public as well as Masters students on the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt MA Film Culture: Archiving, Programming. Comparing British actuality and documentary with DEFA titles including
Das Lied der Ströme/Song of the Rivers (Joris Ivens, 1954),
Ghana heute/Ghana Today (Walter Marten, 1960),
Der schwarze Stern/Black Star (Joachim Hellwig, 1964) and
Erzählungen aus der neuen Welt/Stories from the New World (Joachim Hellwig, 1968), the presentation explored questions of conflicting African and European modernities, focusing in particular on the question of Nkrumah’s cinematic body and its capacity to dance to, but also to resist through the performance of resolute stasis the varied rhythms of Eurocentric conceptions of African futures.
