Christine Sprengler

Christine Sprengler is a Professor of Art History and an Affiliate Member of Film Studies at Western University, Ontario. She is the author Screening Nostalgia (2009), Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (2014), and Fractured Fifties: The Cinematic Periodization and Evolution of a Decade (under contract with Oxford University Press). She has published articles and essays on cultural memory and nostalgia in film and television, contemporary cinematic art, and the relationship between cinema and the visual arts.

PASTS REFRACTED: HISTORY ON FILM BEYOND THE CINEMA IN CAROLINE MONNET’S MOBILIZE (2015)

Cinema’s tremendous capacity to revive, mobilize, activate, and complicate the past has initiated productive debates about its ability—grounded in both narrative and aesthetic strategies—to generate historical knowledge, affect, and engagement. Single notable films may challenge our perception of a significant event while, over time, the evolution of representations of an era can produce a rich collectivity of images that exposes the multifaceted and discursive nature of any historical period. But the sequences and scenes considered by both scholars and publics for what they can accomplish historically and historiographically sometimes enjoy a life beyond their cinematic origins. They become unmoored from their base and circulate elsewhere and to other ends. This paper looks at one such instance where scenes representing history—drawn from archival and ethnographic cinema primarily—have been activated anew in Anishnaabe/French filmmaker Caroline Monnet’s short film Mobilize (2015), commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada for their “Souvenir” series.  

In what follows, I will first consider a range of terms proposed to help make sense of creative film and video practices by Indigenous artists invested in confronting historical representations of Indigenous peoples and ethnographic cinematic archives specifically. This section, which briefly introduces a few works aligned with Monnet’s film in historiographical intent, will be situated in recent scholarly work on the archive that interrogate it as a repository of history and as source material for creative intervention. From here, I turn to an analysis of Mobilize itself that considers one of its key reception contexts (i.e., the NFB website) and the way in which it refracts existing footage, complicating notions of history and temporality in the process. The result is a work that not only showcases in a nuanced way what Monnet hoped to celebrate, namely Indigenous labour and knowledge, but also reveals a number of pertinent historiographic questions that emerge out of a confrontation with the limits imposed by the NFB’s commission of this film. In other words, Mobilize highlights the nature of the parameters instituted for this project in ways that challenge viewers to consider history and its filmic representations, state archives, historicity, and a range of historiographic issues surrounding access to and commemorations of the past. In this respect, Mobilize offers a form of historical scholarship in its own right, generating knowledge in ways that written records cannot through its affectively charged interrogation and recalibration of archival images.