Archival reenactments: decolonising a documentary convention

Abstract

This article is an attempt to invigorate decolonisation discourse in Film and Media Studies, particularly with regard to Documentary Studies. It does so by centring a screen installation work, by a filmmaker whose formal preoccupations have returned repeatedly to the fictions and limitations of archival documents. Peripeteia (John Akomfrah, dir. 2012. Peripeteia. UK: Smoking Dogs Films.) imagines an encounter between two people, 'lost to the winds of history'. In its use of objects including sketches, photographs and written quotations, the film constructs an elliptical narrative with archival fragments. Locating its actors in a placeless landscape, wrenched from their point of origin and dependent solely on superficial images for context, Peripeteia reanimates its barely known subjects to perform a critique of the coloniality of the reenactment form, which has been used deceptively throughout the history of films defined as 'non-fiction'. Coining archival reenactment as a mode which (1) utilises a self-critical rehearsal of historical gestures to interrogate documentary film's archival function, and (2) employs archival fragments to both build and trouble the depth of its own representation, this article centres Peripeteia as a template for the decolonial critique of an over-familiar convention in the documentary mode.