BROKEN VIEW

A cinematographic and poetic essay on the colonial gaze and the magic lantern. One of the very first image projectors, the magic lantern was used in Belgian colonial propaganda to highlight the good works of the Church, the State, and industry. The images on glass plates that the lantern projected were effectively used to sell the colonial project to a somewhat reluctant Belgian public. As fragile as these plates are, several thousand have survived. Often sumptuously hand-painted, their horrible images helped shape the way Europeans saw, thought, spoke about, and treated the colonial Other. This tension between aesthetic experience and the reverberations of colonial ideology is at the heart of the film. Through associative collages and assemblages, the film attempts to grasp the colonial gaze, as well as the way it persists through time and influences the way we see, think, and speak about the past.