Postcolonial Memory Films in the Dutch-Indonesian and German-Namibian Context: De Oost and Measures of Men (FMSP) | 5 November 2024

Tuesday, 5 November 2024 , 4.15 pm

Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

Dr. Arnoud Arps (University of Amsterdam) & Dr. Kaya de Wolff (Goethe University Frankfurt, TraCe)

In recent years, postcolonial struggles over memory have produced a wave of 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 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 had 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 these topics may seem to promise a decolonial perspective on history, we argue that the films’ selective narratives and stereotypical visual representation patterns impose 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 the cultural meaning of these postcolonial films is to analyse what Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka (2008) call “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, asking 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 its own way – 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.

Arnoud Arps is Assistant Professor of Extended Cinema, Film Heritage and Memory at the University of Amsterdam and Academic Staff Member at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Prior to this he was a Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial and Memory Studies at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Los Angeles. His work investigates how the colonial era is transculturally, transnationally, and cross-medially remembered in Indonesia and the Netherlands with a special interest in cinema, literature, and popular culture. More information can be found on his website: www.arnoudarps.com

Kaya de Wolff is a research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. As a media scholar, she engages critically with the intersections of memory, media and communication, (post)colonialism and social justice. Kaya gained her PhD with a dissertation on the struggle for recognition of the genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama in the German press coverage (published by Transcript, 2021, Open Access). She works – jointly with Prof. Dr. Astrid Erll – within the interdisciplinary regional research network “Transformations of Political Violence Centre – TraCe” (2022-2026). Her post-doctoral research project investigates collective memories related to the histories of enslavement, colonialism and dictatorship in Brazil. For more details, see her profile on Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform.