19/12/2024: Bettina Malcomess
weighted down by gear (they left the dead to bury themselves) (2022) and Still (Nooitgedacht/Never Thought) (2024) from the film cycle Sentimental Agents
Welcome Again
This is the second of our newsletters that’ll accompany the Afterimage screening programme. The primary aim of this newsletter series is to commission writers to document, unpack, and interpret each screening. The ancillary aim is to keep those (sane) individuals without social media accounts in the loop for upcoming screenings and bookings.
This week’s newsletter contains:
a piece written by Lucienne Bestall on Bettina Malcomess’s screening that took place on the 19 December 2024 at The Labia.
an update on our next screening, with information on how and where to book.
On Bettina Malcomess’s Sentimental Agents
by Lucienne Bestall
The most recent Afterimage event, the second in a series of eight screenings, was held on Thursday, 19 December, at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town. The programme, curated by Mitchell Gilbert Messina and Ben Albertyn, with support from the National Arts Council, invites South African artists to present moving-image works alongside a selection of excerpted references. The ambition is both to offer a more attentive engagement with video art in the setting a cinema affords and to locate a given practice within a broader context of time-based media across disciplines and genres. In the Q&A that follows each screening, artist and audience think through the complexities of the filmic form together. The cumulative effect is instructive: a lesson in the technicalities of the medium, in the challenges and opportunities particular to duration as a compositional element, and in the role of influence and its registers (oblique, blatant, or otherwise).
This second screening turned on two films from Bettina Malcomess’s Sentimental Agents cycle, the culmination of seven years research towards their PhD in Film Studies at King's College London: weighted down by gear (they left the dead to bury themselves) (2022) and Still (Nooitgedacht/Never Thought) (2024). The former was included in the first iteration of the artist’s exhibition at Wits Art Museum, which opened in March 2024; the latter a later addition to the show’s shifting contents. These two films, reworked as standalone, single-channel projections (where originally they were part of a multi-screen staging), were followed by four excerpts taken from Charlie Chaplin’s His Musical Career (1914), Jonas Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), Filipa César’s Spell Reel (2017), and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), respectively, as well as Onyeka Igwe’s short video work No Archive Can Restore You (2019) played in full.
Taken together, Malcomess’s weighted down by gear and Still trace “the entanglements of cinema within the nervous system of empire, an immersive information field of signals, light, sound and transmission,” as the artist writes of the Sentimental Agents cycle. From the largely undocumented black concentration camps of the South African War to abandoned cinemas in downtown Johannesburg and Accra, the appearance of Charlie Chaplin shorts in ‘morality’ films produced by the South African Commercial and Educational Film Services for African mineworkers in the 1930s, and Victorian lantern slides in the Imperial War Museum, London, Malcomess draws into relation intricacies and incidents of colonial mythologies as reflected in national film and photographic archives. For the most part, however, the artist resists restaging archival images, showing only photographs held up to the lens, pictures in pictures. Neither film portrays violence, instead offering an indirect vantage of the war as told by its more benign artefacts. The only dead shown are horses, metonyms for countless other bodies that remain everywhere present yet explicitly absent.
“The South African War was one of the first wars to be captured on film,” Malcomess writes in the text written to accompany their exhibition at WAM. They continue –
I was following the routes of these cameramen into the veld. In an incident during the war, a Boer general had captured a bunch of film reels en route to Britain to be processed. The soldiers had removed the reels from their casings and left them in the sun, where they would inevitably have caught fire, an auto-ignition caused by the exposure of highly flammable celluloid nitrate to heat.
Celluloid formats tend towards destruction. In addition to being flammable, they are given to vinegar syndrome (an effect of heat and humidity so called because of the acidic smell), fading, ‘embrittlement’, and all manner of degradation – a fact poignantly apparent in Igwe’s non-narrative study of the archival holdings of the Nigerian Film Unit, originally the Colonial Film Unit, to which both pre- and post-independence exercises in state-sponsored filmmaking were consigned to moulder. Other archives are subject to intended destruction. In the Q&A that followed the screening, Malcomess recalled the Ghanaian government’s burning of much of its colonial and post-independence film archive, the state embarrassed by how badly damaged its records were after decades of neglect. Continuing this theme, the excerpt from César’s film considers the fate of Guinea Bissau’s national film archive after independence, which was followed by protracted civil conflict. She first learnt of its degraded holdings from Chris Marker, whose Sans Soleil includes a passage on the overthrow of Portuguese rule in Guinea Bissau and who contributed to the country’s archive by mentoring local filmmakers (a gesture that was not without its complexities).
A more lasting archive, insensible to ideas of nationhood and less vulnerable to flames, might be the camps’ ash heaps that Malcomess, as filmmaker and ‘sentimental agent’, visits; those sparse middens that recall something of the individual lives overlooked by mute monuments and sanctioned photographs. Sentimental agent – agent, as in acting individual, as in developing agent, chemical transmutation, the tracing and fixing of light on cellulose substrate. Sentimental as in affective, but also afflicted, the character’s narcolepsy perhaps sublimating a forbidden nostalgia, a longing for return (a desire resonant with Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania). Narcolepsy renders the sentimental agent a slippery storyteller, the discontinuity of their affliction (sudden attacks of excessive daytime sleepiness) reflected in the non-linear logic of the films, which shift between the real, imagined and mythic, between documentary and staged scenes. To the agent, Charlie Chaplin is offered as analogue: untrustworthy and bungling, redeeming in his ambitions and ineptitudes, an accidental cypher of Empire.
weighted down by gear and Still are a demonstrative sign: proof of work. I witnessed. We, in turn, witness the witnessing. Malcomess’s presence recurs as filming self, as performing self, as seeing self, the hand that reaches into frame to hold up a photograph. To these places I travelled, on this ground I walked, these things I touched, and to this cast of characters I deferred as guides. The films both attest to research and assume the form of the researched objects, made with the outdated mediums they take as subject (16mm and 8mm film). The agent, an amateur historian and technician of dysfunctional equipment, frames the history of photographic technology as the history of the mediation and modulation of the world. Central to this enquiry is an unresolved tension: preservation and the object’s will to destruction. Questions crowd in. What is it to revive an archive of colonial subjugation? Can histories of exclusion and erasure be re-ascribed? Records made to stand for that left unrecorded? Or should the void remain? His Majesty’s cinema, hermetically sealed; reels of film in tins rusted shut; tape without sprockets; metres and metres of footage left unregarded; war-ration soup in its asbestos casing. “Archives need to be complicated; they need to remain complicated,” Malcomess offers. “They need to be constantly contested, questioned... And perhaps sometimes they do need to be allowed to rot.”
To be painstakingly restored from blight only to be again forgotten – this seems the likely fate of national archives. Much like the war graves at Bethulie that Malcomess visits, moved during the construction of the Gariep Dam in the 1960s to persist in relative obscurity someplace higher up the hill (this being preferable, apparently, to the dead being pressed under the weight of water). The site summarily cut and paste. A compulsion of care rather than care itself. Bone dry under the scorched earth; ‘embrittlement’ again. To this, the sentimental agent offers a sacrament, pouring a can of condensed milk onto the ground (milk, the subtitles read, with the water removed.)
Updates
This Thursday (9th January 2025), Xhanti Zwelendaba will be screening Umfuyi Walamaxesha (Modern-day Farmer) and IsiXhosa 2nd Additional Language (How to Click). The films will be accompanied by excerpts from other films and media.
The screening is free and open to the public with a seating capacity of 48 people. Booking will become available from 9am on Tuesday, 7 January 2025, and can be made via Quicket
Xhanti Zwelendaba is a multi-disciplinary artist working in a diverse range of mediums such as sculpting, print-making, installation, performance art and video art. Zwelendaba’s work deals primarily with the complexities and tensions surrounding Xhosa culture and the modern day culture of contemporary capitalism and nationalism - and embedded within these is the legacy of colonialism and apartheid. This pursuance is largely spurred on by having to balance in-between these cultural paradigms, often simultaneously.
Afterimage is a film screening programme, funded by the National Arts Council and run by Mitchell Gilbert Messina and Ben Albertyn. Each screening has an artist share a work of theirs alongside some of the short films and reference material that informed it. The programme aims to spotlight artists working with film and video, demystify their making, and reveal the traits they share with works that came before.