Medical propaganda as enabling device of the surveillance apparatus – decolonizing and anarchiving non-fiction at the eye film museum archive

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Western gaze instituted by the cinematographic apparatus constructs racialized subjects and supports processes of dispossession. My present transmedial artistic research project engages with the biopolitics of representation in archival film material, from a decolonial perspective. By drawing from academic and non-academic sources on relations between colonialism, capitalism, and technologies of control, this paper studies manifestations of surveillance in non-fiction film, to analyze the sub-genre of medical propaganda in former European colonies. Moreover, it proposes to scrutinize the long-term impact colonial cinema and its structures of representation had and still have on processes of subjectification, haunting present-day gender and race-determined profiling by mainstream film, CCTV, and drones.