BROKEN VIEW

With the presence of the selectors Paola Cassano, Cecilia Ermini and Raffaele Meale

Post-colonial studies meet the history of visuality. This could be a summary of this essay film that, with considerable visual flair, but a serious anthropological approach, investigates the nature and modes of the gaze and of constructing the Other. Namely, it departs from the invention of the magic lantern and howlantern projections were to be employed to ‘sell’ the colonial project not only to the Belgian public, but also to the colonized themselves. However fragile images made of glass may be, many thousands survived. Often lavishly hand-coloured, these tainted, horribly beautiful artefacts are the main raw material of the film, along with slides, photographs, and footage of the time that illustrate the tension between aesthetic experience and the reverberation of colonial ideology. The film attempts to map the colonial gaze from a broken view, how it persists across time and shapes the way we view, think of, and speak about the past.