Terms and Conditions: Jean Marie Teno in conversation with titre provisoire

This recorded video conversation between Jean Marie Teno and titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster/Marcel Dickhage) was part of the screening program Terms and Conditions #02: Continuity of coloniality and (neo)colonial legal processes in October 2024 at Kino Arsenal / Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. in Berlin, organized as the second part of a program presented by the Harun Farocki Institut at Arsenal as part of Terms and Conditions: The Legal Form of Images.

We presented It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus (2019), a short film by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, which looks at the administration of migration in Germany and asks how the law relates to people who come up against the borders of nation states where they are turned to numbers in bureaucratic processes, alongside Le malentendu colonial by Cameroonian filmmaker Jean Marie Teno (2004). Providing knowledge about certain patterns in the administration of immigration in contemporary Germany as well as regarding German colonial history in Namibia, both films are situated in the context of image production and the postcolonial indictment which takes place as part of processes that are mainly carried out outside of legal institutions. Aljafari and Teno provide us with specific questions and consequences, such as: What is our role as those who see and know through them? How have we become blind for the way in which we are involved in violence? What can we do with this knowledge? What is our responsibility?

Le malentendu colonial raises the question how a complaint is made, how an accusation is performed; how the memory of German colonialism is repressed and how it is finding its administrative continuation in today’s institutions. Teno’s film examines the connections between the church and German colonialism in Namibia using the example of the Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft. It addresses the extralegal processes that often straddle along the paths of acknowledgement, knowledge and understanding. This concerns the conditions of rights and the equality as to articulating and negotiating them.

Jean Marie Teno has been producing and directing films about the colonial and post-colonial history of Africa for over forty years. In preparation for the screening at Arsenal, we were able to meet him for a Zoom conversation on September 26, 2024, thanks to the kind help of David Hoffmann (EZEF). The one-hour conversation has been edited into a 20-minutes version. Our questions relate to Jean Marie Teno’s experiences in working in a context where the memory of colonial history in Germany is being suppressed, as well as to the specific content of Le malentendu colonial. Moreover, we were interested to learn to what extent Teno considers his long-standing practice in terms of a legal process by visual means.