Film expedition and historical sound archives of Africa

The historical recordings from the European colonies of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, for example, were and are a source of inspiration for composers and the archive cooperated with prominent European artists and composers such as Albert Schweitzer and Béla Bartók (e.g. Simon 2000, Kalibani 2024). As can be seen from documents of the Berliner Lautarchiv, cooperations with film companies were also planned during the transition from silent to sound film in order to provide the voices of the “others”, e.g. in travel and expedition films, as authentically as possible with the existing archive holdings (some of which were created in and through colonial contexts). In addition, the archive planned projects which, as a by-product of the film expeditions, envisaged the production of new so-called “Lautplatten” at the expense of the film producers.
Sound recordings in former colonies were also explicitly commissioned by filmmakers for a film, as the example of the British colonial film Men of Two Worlds (1946) shows. For this film, the director commissioned a colonial officer to make music recordings of local groups in what is now Tanzania, which were then sent to England to serve as the basis for the composition of the film music. This can be reconstructed from the reports on the film production.
In this lecture I would like to present the challenges of reconstructing the use of historical sound archives in my newly started research project on the sonic imaginaries of Africa in German film and discuss audiovisual media as archives of colonial heritage and possibilities of decolonization.