CHAIR: Brett Bowles

Alexander Zöller and Roel Vande Winkel

“Sonderkommando Hensel”: Frank Hensel, the Reich Film Archiv and FIAF in the Second World War

This paper analyses the activities, before and during the Second World War, of Frank Hensel (1893-1972), who briefly headed the new German Reich Film Archiv (Reichsfilmarchiv) and co-founded the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in 1938. During the Second World War, FIAF was officially no longer active and Hensel was officially no longer connected to the Reich Film Archiv. Nevertheless, Hensel kept in close contact with archives such as the Cinémathèque Française. Moreover, research indicates that Hensel was leading a special unit, the so-called “Sonderkommando Hensel”, used to secure films that were of special interest to German military forces and the German film industry. This paper will try to reconstruct the activities of this secret unit which was active in neutral countries such as Belgium (before and after the German invasion of May 1940), Lisbon, Sweden and Switzerland. The paper is building further on previous research by film historians Rolf Aurich and Alexander Zöller.

Louis Fortemps

Propaganda and Collaboration : Using Judiciary Files to Study German Propaganda in Occupied Belgium and Northern France (1940-1944)

German propaganda in national-socialist Germany has already been the subject of a significant literature. However, its adaptation to German-occupied countries and their national specificities remain blurry. This is especially the case for Belgium and Northern France where a Propaganda-Abteilung Belgien was responsible for controlling public life, media and cultural life. It had to adapt to the specific situation of this geographical area encompassing different communities speaking Dutch or French and including parts of two countries. To do so, German propaganda relied heavily on collaborationist groups favourable to the New Order to form loyal editorial offices editing censored newspapers, managing censored radio broadcasting stations and leading cultural corporations. After the liberation, these collaborators were tried by Belgian and French Military justice. This contribution proposal aims to show how the study of those collaborators’ judiciary files  an offer a new and ground-breaking vision on German propaganda in occupied territories. This paper will deal with the often overlooked research possibilities offered by these kind of archives, the difficulties linked to their usage in Belgium and France, as well as their content. We will also discuss the methodological problems linked to the usage of such files, because they were created in a specific context for a clear purpose and obviously offer only a partial view of the situation of German Propaganda in occupied Belgium and Northern France.

Steve Hawley

Critical Remembrance: the Calling Blighty Films of WW2 and the Unsayable.

I have been working for seven years with a remarkable archive of 60 films, the Calling Blighty series, homed in Archives across the UK including the Imperial War Museum, BFI and North West Film Archive. These message films, made in Burma and India 1943-6 are the first where men (and a few women) speak openly and informally in their regional accents, sending greetings home to their loved ones in the UK. Sometimes emotional, but also stilted, cocky, funny, sarcastic and revealing in turns, film of some 1200 men remains of the 8000 originally filmed, in glorious 35mm and crisp sound, at the then cutting edge of technology. In recreating these screenings in regional cinemas as they would have been shown in 1943, but to the children and grandchildren of the men, it is apparent that what can be shown in terms of personal and national Remembrance is constrained. The war in Burma against the Japanese was to regain a lost colony, the Indians and Burmese who were part of the same 14 th Army remain literally in the background, the African colonial troops exoticized or demeaned, and although the Japanese surrendered this was due to action elsewhere. And Burma (Myanmar) became independent two years later. The presentation, with examples of these rare films, looks at what can be said and what cannot, in a context of remembrance, the heroic soldier, in a colonial war, seen for the first time speaking in sound and vision in their own voice.

Grazia Ingravalle

Beyond Archival Evidence: Theorising the Intermedial, Accidental, Transnational and Digitally Networked Colonial Film Archive

Building on research conducted at the Polish film archive (Filmoteka Narodowa) on the rare colonial propaganda film Polish Settlements in Brazilian Wilderness (Osadnictwo polskie w puszczach Brazylii, 1933), this paper theorises the colonial film archive as intermedial, accidental, transnational and digitally networked. By picturing the lives, toil and extractive presence of Polish settlers in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, Osadnictwo polskie w puszczach Brazylii is a testimony of Poland’s colonial ambitions during its short-lived independence between 1919 and 1939. Due to the Nazis’ destruction of swathes of Poland’s cultural heritage and lack of archival evidence, I mobilise several digital repositories and networks to read this record of colonial implications and interdependencies. The resulting colonial film archive cross-references Filmoteka Narodowa’s online archive and the Facebook page “Antigamente em Curitiba” (Formerly in Curitiba) – where descendants of the Polish-Brazilian diaspora helped identify locales in the film – as well as the digitised collection of the colonial propaganda journal Morze (Sea) and Video nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages), a video archive of Indigenous cinema. Reflecting on this research, I interrogate the paradigm of the modern European national state, pivotal to notions of national film heritage, archival evidence and provenance. By reimagining the colonial film archive as intermedial, accidental, transnational and digitally networked, this paper aims to decolonise historiographical epistemologies and methods.