A Film Program of the Project DARE (DECOLONIZE ANTI-ASIAN RACIST ENTANGLEMENTS)
Asian Presences in the Colonial Metropolis of Berlin
Localizing Decolonialization - Dekolonialisierung lokalisieren
Movies - Lectures - Discussions
Curator and project leader: Dr. Kien Nghi Ha.
Venue:
SINEMA TRANSTOPIA
11.04. - 20.06.2023
Lindower Str. 20/22, House C
13347 Berlin-Wedding
Info: sinematranstopia.com
About the Film Program
After the end of Imperial Germany, colonial-racist fantasies and ambitions were increasingly transformed into an imaginary coloniality. Their cinematic stagings not only delighted a mass audience, but also led to an ambiguous overlapping of fiction and reality. Not only film sets but film production and consumption also became cultural colonial spaces. This film, lecture and discussion program is a pioneering exploration of the “wild cosmopolitan metropolis Berlin in the Golden Twenties” as a colonial cultural space with (anti-)Asian references. At the same time, the decolonial debate will be expanded to include anti-Asian racism and orientalism, and thus becoming more multi-perspectival. A book is planned for the end of 2023 (Assoziation A).
Speakers
Joshua Kwesi Aikins is a political scientist, co-author of the Afro Census and a research associate in the Department of Development Policy and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel. His research interests include cultural and political representation of the African diaspora, coloniality and the politics of memory.
Sun-ju Choi studied literature at the University of Cologne and screenwriting at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. Her dissertation, Vater Staat und Mutter Partei: Familienkonzepte und Repräsentation von Familie im nordkoreanischen Film was published in 2017. She serves as an honorary member of the board of directors for ndo e.V. and korientation e.V.
Dr. Kien Nghi Ha, cultural and political scientist, is a Postdoc researcher of Asian German Studies at the University of Tübingen. Numerous publications on postcolonial critism, racism and migration. Most recently he edited Asiatische Deutsche Extended. Vietnamesische Diaspora and Beyond (Assoziation A, 2012/2021). https://uni-tuebingen.de/de/208381
Anujah Fernando is a cultural scholar based in Berlin. Her work centers on topics related to migration and colonialism in research-based exhibitions and publications as well as in documentary film projects. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition Despite All: Migration to the Colonial Metropolis of Berlin at the FHXB Museum.
Merle Kröger works as a writer and dramaturge in Berlin and is part of pong Film. She is a university lecturer in Halle and Mainz and works as curator for the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art. She has published five novels, including Grenzfall (2012), Havarie (2015), and Die Experten (2021). www.merlekroeger.de
Jürgen Kurz is an improvisation artist. After studying at the Hochschulefür Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin, he made a name for himself as a composer, theater musician (including Volksbühne) and pianist.
Yumin Li is a cultural historian whose dissertation examines Anna May Wong's career spanning several decades on four continents. Together with the collective andcompany&Co. she is developing the theater performance Shanzhai Express, which playfully deals with Anna May Wong (premiere 10.6.2023 at Volksbühne Berlin).
Tobias Nagl is a film and music critic, DJ and since 2007 has been Associat Professor of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Publications: The Uncanny Machine: Race and Representation in Weimar Cinema (2009) and European Vision: Small Cinemas in Transition (2015).
Dr. Subin Nijhawan is a research associate at the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is specialized in didactic research on global justice, cosmopolitanism and sustainable development, including decolonial approaches to world history
Philip Scheffner is part of the Berlin production platform/collective pong. His feature-length artistic documentaries The Halfmoon Files (2007), The Day of the Sparrow (2010), Revision (2012), And-Ek Ghes... (2016), Havarie (2016), and Europe (2022) have been screened worldwide and won numerous awards. He is professor for Documentary Practices at the KHM Cologne.
Qinna Shen is Associate Professor of German at Bryn Mawr College. She is currently working on two monographs: Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion and Film and Cold War Diplomacy: China and the Two Germanys, 1949-1989, as well as co-editing a volume New Narratives of Asian-German Film History.
Dr. Gülşah Stapel studied urban and regional planning at the TU Berlin with a focus on historic preservation. Her research expertise lies in the study of identity and heritage construction in public space and Berlin
urban history. Since 2020, she has worked as an outreach curator for the Berlin Wall Foundation.
Hito Steyerl is professor of experimental film and video at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is a media artist, filmmaker, cultural critic and theorist. Her internationally renowned media-, technology- and culture-critical works have been awarded numerous prizes. Dr. Kimiko Suda works at the Technical University of Berlin on institutional racism in Germany. She is an active member of korientation e.V. and interested in decolonial/antiracist memory culture. From 2011-2017, she co-directed the Asian Film Festival Berlin with Dr. Sun-ju Choi.
11.04.2023 at 19:00: Das indische Grabmal – Die Sendung des Yoghi (1921) by Joe May, OmU, 132 Min.
“The world’s greatest film” – this large-scale production with colonial ambience was a crowd puller. In it, Joe May conjured up mystical India, transforming the film city of Berlin-Woltersdorf into an “Indian” space with magnificent temples and palaces, populated by dummies in fantasy costumes and elephants. Enriched with sexualized female exoticism, it tells an intricate story in which the evil maharajah seeks revenge on his native wife and her British lover. This setting was so fascinating that after a German remake in the 1930s, Fritz Lang, who was already involved in the first production, filmed this narrative again in 1959.
Introduction by Dr. Subin Nijhawan:
British Empire, German Illusion – Über Tiger und Grabmale in der Kolonialzeit
Moderation: Anujah Fernando / Kien Nghi Ha
25.04.2023 at 19:00: Die Herrin der Welt – Die Freundin des gelben Mannes (1919) by Joe May, OV, 90 Min. With live music by silent film pianist Jürgen Kurz
Immediately after the loss of the non-European colonies, a monumental colonial epic comprising eight parts was made in the now forgotten film city of Berlin-Woltersdorf. Shot at great expense, it tells the adventurous story of Maud Gregaards, a young woman as beautiful as she is white. In the first part of her world-spanning journey, the educator falls into the clutches of the brutal brothel owner Hai-Fung in the southern Chinese city of Canton. She is freed with the help of Dr. Kien Lung, who, however, also turns out to be a dubious character.
Introduction by Dr. Tobias Nagl (via Zoom)
Entfreundet: Die Freundin des gelben Mannes (1919/20), asiatische Präsenz und antirassistische Filmproteste in der Weimarer Republik
Moderation: Joshua Kwesi Aikins / Kien Nghi Ha
09.05.2023 at 19:00: Sumurun (1920) by Ernst Lubitsch, OmeU, 103 Min.
Unlike Joe May, Ernst Lubitsch was not only a master of Weimar cinema, but also became a star director in Hollywood. In his early film work, he repeatedly used Oriental and Roma stereotypes to advance his career in the entertainment industry. Already filmed and dramatized by Max Reinhardt for the theater in 1910, just ten years later Lubitsch staged the material again in a monumental manner with a star cast at the Ufa studios in Berlin-Tempelhof. Sumurun is Lubitsch’s version of One Thousand and One Nights – a jealousy drama set in the pre-modern Orient that plays with European fantasies about the harem, enslaved dancers and oriental despotism.
Introduction by Prof. Dr. Qinna Shen
A Berliner's One Arabian Night: Lubitsch Orientalist Parody
Moderation: Sun-ju Choi / Kien Nghi Ha
23.05.2023 at 19:00: Piccadilly – Nachtwelt (1929) by Ewald André Dupont, OmeU, 109 Min.
Unlike the other films in the series, “Piccadilly” is not set in an imaginary Asia, but takes place in the heart of
modern London with exotic excursions to Chinatown. Despite this setting, the stereotypical roles remain virtually
unchanged: in this tragic drama of love and jealousy, the US star Anna May Wong embodies a Chinese woman
who, with ethnic chic, rises to become a sexually desirable showgirl in a nightclub but meets a tragic end. She is an
Asian migrant worker who, as a seductive femme fatale, threatens but also satisfies the White man whilst at the same time becoming a victim of her own cultural origins.
Introduction by Yumin Li
Anna May Wong – ein chinesisch-amerikanischer Hollywoodstar in Berlin
Moderation: Kimiko Suda / Kien Nghi Ha
20.06.2023 at 19:00: Halfmoon Files (2006) by Philip Scheffner, OmeU, 87 Min.
Not far from Berlin, the voice of the British colonial soldier Mall Singh was recorded on December 11, 1916 in the
prisoner of war camp Wünsdorf. The recordings, commissioned by the military, science and entertainment
industry, were part of the sound archive “All Peoples of the World”. Today they are housed in the sound archive of the Humboldt University Berlin and refer to the colonial character of the First World War and the camp: In order to
present itself as a caring colonial power, Germany’s first mosque for religious practices was built in the halfmoon
camp for African, Arab and (South) Asian prisoners. At the same time, the camp and its inmates were used as film sets for German colonial propaganda. Halfmoon Files traces these blurred colonial connections in the Berlin area.
Talk with Philip Scheffner, Merle Kröger, Kien Nghi Ha
06.06.2023 at 19:00: Hito Steyerl Special: Babenhausen (1997), 4 Min., Die leere Mitte (1998), 62 Min. Normalität 1-X, (1999-2001), 37 Min. With OmeU.
This trilogy of Hito Steyerl's early work can be read in many different ways. It is not only a document of contemporary history and an artistic and activist positioning, but also an outstanding film essay. Created between 1990-1998, the impressive long-term study “The Empty Center” examines the invisible connections between anti-Semitism, colonialism and racism in Berlin's cultural and urban spaces. One example is the history of the “Haus Vaterland” located at today's Potsdamer Platz. At the same time, these films also focus on migrant protest movements and Asian-diasporic voices resisting colonial continuity and racist violence.
Talk with Hito Steyerl, Gülşah Stapel, Kien Nghi Ha
Program for Download
Imprint
Curator and project leader: Dr. Kien Nghi Ha.
In cooperation with bi'bak e.V., korientation. Netzwerk für Asiatisch-Deutsche Perspektiven e.V. and the
Department of Korean Studies, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Tübingen.
With films from the holdings of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation (www.murnau-stiftung.de) in Wiesbaden.
Funded by the program Promotion of Contemporary History and Remembrance Culture of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.