Academic Ontologies is an online conversation series initiated for students and early career scholars, by the Humanities Across Borders (HAB) and Fellowship programmes of the IIAS, Leiden, The Netherlands.  

With this digital platform, we offer an open space for the coming together of a transdisciplinary, online network for sharing intersectional, multilingual, multi-media narrative research and teaching strategies for the next generation of scholarship. Given the dominance of language-based, colonial and postcolonial modalities and cartographies of knowledge within academe today, we propose a shifting of attention towards the material, and the sensorial in general, as a way of being (and learning) in the world.. Our aim, therefore, is to draw upon non-textual forms of expression, like storytelling (oral, visual, spatial, temporal), embodied practices and performances, including those mediated by new technologies, as legitimate modes of knowledge-making and transmission.  

In June this year, we focused on different practices of mapping as a strategy for community-enmeshed research. In the November session, we will discuss how film/making as a medium is intertwined with the practice of storytelling – the teller, the audience, the context, and intent, with which the two come together in a brief, but meaningful, inter-personal exchange. Deploying films and filmmaking for historical and contemporary research is a growing trend within academia. Yet all three speakers go beyond this usage to demonstrate films as tools, not only to enrich historical narratives, but also to show how films are a sensory medium and mirror of society; they provide a space for critical dialogue and experiential pedagogies; they challenge dominant narratives with their capacity for manipulation, and assertion; and have the capacity for solidarity building through engaged viewership.

Speaker Abstracts 

A Wider Weave : : How Cinema Shows Up…
Rachel Thompson (IIAS Leiden)

Departing from an etymological understanding of text as “woven thing,” this presentation engages in a practice of live montage to consider how cinema shows up across varied fields of endeavor. I trace the trajectory of my cinematic work over a span of twenty years through focus on shifting conceptions of method—a word also returned to its etymological root as “path” or “way.” Methods which endeavor to configure ways of working, ever attuned to the inextricable entwinement of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. As I center the notion of an essayistic impulse, which propels my practice, I highlight the work of Trinh. T. Minh-ha and Kidlat Tahimik, two renegade filmmakers who have indelibly marked my ethos and approach. Finally, I narrate how an expanded notion of cinema—linked to dramaturgy and spectacle—shows up within the tense, political scenes around which my research currently orbits. Scenes that take (their) place in Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the intervals between.

Film-sāzī: mediations on film, history, pedagogy and practice
Sarah Niazi (FLAME University India/IIAS Leiden)

This presentation explores filmmaking through the lens of the Urdu term ‘film-sāzī’, which conjugates film with ‘sāz’, a word that signifies creation, harmony, and apparatus. By examining the nuances of this term, the presentation highlights the intrinsic relationship between filmmaking, history, pedagogy, and knowledge production. In the first part, I engage with film as a creative expression of history, focusing on how film archives can be used to narrativize and memorialize the past. I examine the complex ontologies of cinema and its influence on our perception of the world. In the second part, themes of harmony, rhythm, and sound within the context of the Urdu film archive are analyzed to investigate their interconnections with cinema in India. Finally, I discuss the potential of film as a pedagogical tool, advocating for an educational framework that intertwines creative practice with critical inquiry and theoretical methods. This approach enables us to appreciate film as both an art form and a vital medium for understanding the present through the past.  

Acoustic Internationalism in Solidarity Media Networks
Ling Zhang (SUNY Purchase/IIAS Leiden)

This presentation explores the circulation of film sound and acoustic culture between socialist China, Southeast Asia, and North Africa during the Cold War, facilitated by film exhibitions, radio broadcasting, and documentary filmmaking. These media mobilities, supported by solidarity networks such as public-owned film studios, progressive festivals and conferences, fostered alternative routes to profit-driven commercial film industry, promoting anti-colonial and anti-imperialist third world solidarity. Documentaries and newsreels produced by Xinying (Central Studio of Newsreel Production) in China were central to this effort, documenting Third World alliances and serving as instruments for people’s diplomacy. From 1960 to 1976, Xinying produced over 100 films, including the Chinese-Somalian coproduction The Horn of Africa (1961), Unyielding Algeria (1963), and Premier Zhou Enlai visits West Africa (Ghana, Mali, Guinea, 1964). This significant Sino-African legacy remains largely overlooked in contemporary scholarship. This presentation examines sonic practices such as the Malayan Communist Party’s radio station in China (1969-81) and voice-over narration in Chinese documentaries made in Africa, accentuating their contributions to acoustic internationalism and its contemporary repercussions.

Header Image Credits:

Left: Central Studio of Newsreel Production
Center: Rachel Thompson
Right: National Film Archive of India (NFAI) collection