Specialised Technique

William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit—a propaganda and educational film production organization established by the British government in 1939—developed a framework for colonial cinema. It included slow edits, no camera tricks, and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance to this rule set. In an effort to recuperate black dance from this colonial project, Specialised Technique attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.

The film is presented on e-flux Film alongside Her Name in My Mouth (2017) for the July 2023 edition of Staff Picks featuring Onyeka Igwe. Both films are part of Onyeka Igwe’s trilogy No Dance, No Palaver (2017-2018, on view at the artist’s solo show at MoMA PS1 through August 21, 2023), which covers research into the Aba Women’s War of 1929. All of the films in this trilogy use the first major anti-colonial uprising in Nigeria as an entry point to experiment with colonial moving images relating to West Africa during the first half of the twentieth century. No Dance, No Palaver serves as an attempt to use critical proximity: being close to, with, or amongst the visual trauma of the colonial archive to transform the way in which we know the people it contains.

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