06/07/2023 - The Belgian director’s film essay reflects on the role that images played in justifying his home country’s colonisation of the Congo

(© Nina de Vroome)

We talked to Belgian director Hannes Verhoustraete, whose film Broken View [+see also:
film review
interview: Hannes Verhoustraete
film profile] recently took part in the International Competition of the 59th Pesaro Film Festival, where he won the top prize. The movie is a film essay that analyses the transmission of colonial ideas through the production of images.

Cineuropa: If one had to sum up the movie with a single adjective, it would be “diabolical”. You suggest the idea that pre-cinema technology served as an instrument to oppress the population of the Congo and colonise the country, but in order to convey this idea, you use the same technology. How do you deal with this contradiction?
Hannes Verhoustraete: With this film, I didn’t have any ambition to give answers that would be considered universal. I was interested in the quote “Every technology is born within a web of existing power relations”. French critic Serge Daney also talks about cinema as a tool: you can use it as a hammer to smash a window or to construct something. The tool in itself is powerless; it becomes powerful only within an existing ideology. I think cinema was born of this contradiction between the possibility to destroy and to construct, although I don’t have the delusion that cinema can directly change the world. These small islands of thought that I have internalised in my craft are used to give some direction, but without theorising excessively. I agree that my film is diabolical, in the sense that it tries to address the hidden forces behind art and technology.

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The film starts off with some footage that portrays your uncle in the Congo. How strong was the desire to deal with your family history and to relate it to the colonial past of Belgium?
I use this personal perspective only as a point of departure, as I didn’t want the autobiographical side of the story to take up too much space. I tried to strike a balance, to give just enough details about my uncle, but also to use this story as a symbol or an emblem of the colonial figure. I was interested in the dialectic between the images that he filmed in the Congo and the pictures I found in the official archives of the colony, the magic-lantern slides that I use in the film. Those family movies on 8 mm were given to me, and when I was confronted with the magic-lantern pictures taken in the Congo as part of colonial propaganda, I realised that the production of both personal and public images was part of the same process of constructing an idyllic version of Africa, with similar scenes and similar pseudo-ethnographic aesthetics. They sprang from the same colonial gaze and had the same objective: to mould a colonial mindset.

In the film, you show how this colonial gaze was devised and also imposed on the Belgian population, as a form of propaganda. The same tools of control used in the Congo were tested in Belgium, on the lower classes.
The magic lantern was used frequently for screening images, often in very small towns, as a tool of propaganda, but also as a source of entertainment or satire. Belgium was a very well-connected place but, at the same time, a very provincial, Catholic country engrossed in capitalism, and the technology available at the time was used both by the bourgeoisie and by the socialist party – the only difference was the quality of the images produced. But I do not mean to compare the oppression of the working classes in Belgium with colonial oppression; I just wanted to show what was happening simultaneously in both countries and highlight the efforts of the Church to present an image of a wealthy Belgium while Flanders was one of the poorest regions in Europe during that period.

How did you proceed when researching the images?
I was struck by the beauty of these images, but I knew that this aesthetic sensation was in stark contrast with my historical consciousness, and I wanted to work with this tension. I was not only impressed by the quality of these images, but also by the quantity – more than 20,000 individual slides that we know of in Belgium. As I am not a trained historian, I had the opportunity to work with historians, who helped me find my way through the archives. I wanted to convey this sensation of being exposed to a vast number of images. I was seeing them for the first time, but simultaneously, they felt all too familiar. All of these tensions and paradoxes functioned as a compass in trying to understand the complex process of the construction of the colonial mindset – the construction of history and the construction of a film, as two colliding complexities.