Documentary director Jürgen Ellinghaus re-examines Germany’s troubled colonial legacy in Africa using rare silent-era film clips in Togoland Projections. Travelling around Togo, which was under German occupation between 1884 and 1914, then split between the French and British following World War 1, the director screens this antique footage for audiences who have never seen it before, and digs into the darker reality behind the glib propaganda narrative that this small West African nation was Germany’s “model colony” of peace, prosperity and harmony.
World premiering at DOK Leipzig festival this week, Togoland Projections is a smart idea whose probing intentions and lightly experimental format are slightly undermined by its dry, dispassionate, detached delivery. With his earnest and sober approach, Ellinghaus never fully exploits the full potential storytelling spectrum of this playful, prickly dialogue between past and present, colonial and postcolonial worldviews. Even so, this absorbing time-travel history lesson should have connoisseur appeal in film festival and academic circles.
With Togoland Projections, Ellinghaus is literally following in the footsteps of early 20th century film-maker and adventurer Hans Schomburgk, who shot several features in Germany’s African colonies, many starring his future wife Meg Gehrts. Indeed, some the footage revisited here ended up in Schomburgk’s “ethnodramas” The White Goddess of the Wangora (1913) and A White Woman Among Cannibals (1921). But most of these archive clips, shot during an extended visit to Togo in 1913, are more like observational newsreels of ceremonial gatherings, the construction of a radio transmitter station, a kinetic display of Togolese calvary horses, locals working in borderline-slavery conditions, and so on.
In a smart piece of historical symmetry, Ellinghaus retraces Schomburgk’s journey around Togo, hosting public screenings and discussions of his film clips in makeshift cinemas, schools and municipal buildings. On encountering these antique visual documents of how their ancestors lived a century ago, Togolese viewers react with a mix of levity, bafflement, incredulity and anger. The lively audience debates that follow are far more interesting than the scratchy old footage. Some viewers share bitter memories of families crushed by colonial mistreatment, other remain cautiously positive about the legacy of German rule, notably roads and railways. In a fascinating but ultimately fruitless scene, a classroom full of deaf children attempt to lip-read the words of their ancestors from a silent screen.
Schomburgk’s lover, muse and travel cocompanion Gehrts helpfully kept a journal of their Togo trip, allowing Ellinghaus to include some first-hand narrative fragments (voiced by Manuela Weichenrieder) that lend the film a pleasingly personal texture. When she describes the oppressive gender imbalances that affect Togolese women using suffragette language, for example, Gehrts sounds like a surprisingly modern intersectional feminist. But in the next sentence she reassures herself that forcing these women to do hard, dangerous mining work is only a “mild form of slavery”. She also makes casual use of the N-word, which would have been the norm a century ago. Ellinghaus includes a trigger warning about racist language during the opening credits, but also rightly blanks out the word in both the audio track and screen subtitles. More revealing context is taken from the diaries of a former German colonial military officer, who weeps for his dead dog while coolly recording his official duties of plunder, pillage and genocidal violence.
A final screening session for a film club in the Togolese capital Lomé produces the most heated intellectual debate in Togoland Projections as impassioned young cinephiles deconstruct subjective viewpoints and clashing postcolonial narratives. Sadly Ellinghaus only treats this scene as a rushed coda. More commentary from politically engaged African voices like these would have added extra heft to a well-intentioned film which is, after all, largely concerned with reclaiming colonial history from the Eurocentric white gaze.
Director, screenwriter: Jürgen Ellinghaus
Cinematography: Rémi Jennequin
Sound: Caled Boukari
Editing: Nina Khada
Music: Eustache Kamouna
Production companies: Les Films de L’Oeil Sauvage (France), Maxim Film (Germany)
World sales: Andana, France
Venue: Dok Leipzig film festival (German documentary competition)
In German, Ife, French, Tem, Mina, Bassar, Kabiyé, Anufo, Dagbani, Konkomba
96 minutes
