Decolonial Dovetailing: Potential Encounters and Archival Elisions in Thorold Dickinson’s Archive

In this paper Adami adopts film director Thorold Dickinson’s rhetorical device of dovetailing – the suturing or juxtaposition of images taken from different reels – in order to apply it to the director’s own archive at the UAL’s Archives and Special Collection Centre.

In dovetailing, the paper aims to expand on what is not in the archive and to deconstruct what is there.

---

Warplanes brushing the sky / strewn with corpses the land Skirt white clouds / exhales billows of mustard gas

In December 1937, at the London Film Society, Thorold Dickinson and Ivor Montagu presented a programme that dovetailed alternate reels from Italian and Russian propaganda films showing the Fascist invasion of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then called).1 The Path of the Heroes, 1936, the bombastic official account commissioned by the Fascist regime, was juxtaposed with Abyssinia, 1936, a Soviet counter-propaganda film documenting the war from the opposite side. The crass glorification of Italian military and technological prowess was placed side by side with its murderous consequences on the ground; the use of poison gas, atrocities and mass murder that were conveniently removed in the sanitised Fascist version. The horror undercut the pomp. SHOT/COUNTER-SHOT

The programme was titled ‘Record of War’. Although the accompanying notes shied away from any compromising political reference, its intention was clear. Fascinated by the aesthetic and political principle of montage, Dickinson and Montagu applied a spatialised version of cinematic montage by bringing together the reels of two documentary films. In doing so, the propaganda of Mussolini’s regime was turned against itself and the brutality of the Italian imperial aggression was put on display.

Decolonising Archives is a programme developed by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute in partnership with UAL Library, Archives and Special Collections. It sets out to explore institutional histories, memories and what it means to decolonise the university from within. We welcomed our first 4 researchers in residence in January 2020: Dr Elisa Adami, Dr Khairani Barokka, Dr Mohammad Namazi and Dr Ana González Rueda. They shared their research projects in an online symposium on 2 December 2020. Each of the researchers focus on a specific collection, aspect of a collection, or particular materials within the UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre and London College of Communication library; the Central Saint Martins Museum and Study Collection and the Special Collections at Chelsea College of Arts library.