The Colonial Institute
To the Online Course
Presence and Absence in Documentary Film - Not only a theoretical question
The question of presence and absence in documentary film is by no means a question that is only dealt with theoretically. From the shooting schedule to the editing room, and on to the festival stage, questions of presence and absence accompany the filmmaker. Sometimes it's about the presence and absence of certain images, or quite trivially the question of whether one is able to capture certain images with the camera or whether the archive makes certain images available; sometimes it's about the absence and presence of power, social conditions or invisible causalities that characterize what we see in the pictures without revealing themselves to the eye or ear; and sometimes it's about the presence or absence of the narrator's voice, the positioning of the enunciator and the question of self-reflection about this presence in the film.
I would like to explain this everyday handling of questions like these by means of a report on my own documentary film project. The project in question bears the title The Colonial Institute. In 2019, the University of Hamburg is celebrating the centenary of its founding. It is (quite rightly) proud of being the first university to be founded in the new, democratic Germany of the Weimar Republic. What it forgets, however, is its previous history, which accompanies it, in many ways to this day, as a gloomy shadow.