Important Dates

Leon Follert
PhD student, Leuphana University Lüneburg

“(Self-)Critical Whiteness: Anti-Racism and Decoloniality in Documentary Film”

Documentary film stands in a tradition of colonial continuities and thus runs the risk of reproducing racist and colonial ideologies. Many works by white filmmakers perpetuate Western perspectives on colonised regions and people under the guise of objectivity and factuality.
The films Fuck White Tears and Stop Filming Us by Annelie Boros and Joris Postema address this issue by focussing on the filmmakers’ positions as white individuals in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as the criticism they face during filming. Through the lens of self-critical whiteness, these works question colonial, neocolonial and racist structures and emphasise the role of whiteness as a social construct.
In contrast to the approaches of Anglophone whiteness studies of the 1990s, which understand whiteness as a critical category for analysing social power relations and systems, Fuck White Tears and Stop Filming Us rather depict a self-reflexive process that focuses on the filmmakers’ own actions and emotions.
In this lecture, Follert will discuss the presented (re-)productions of whiteness and analyse the filmmakers’ self-stagings, which are largely characterised by a mode of naivety. In addition, Follert will formulate a critique directed against racist essentialist reproductions of the films.

If you would like to attend this presentation online, please email Brady.C.Blackburn@uni-bayreuth.de or Claudia.Favarato@uni-bayreuth.de to request the Zoom link.