FACES | VOICES
Production company: The Light Surgeons
“Faces|Voices” is a short documentary film collaboration with The Light Surgeons and anthropologist Paul Basu, commissioned as part of the [Re:]Entanglements project and funded by the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council. The project was re-engaging with a remarkable ethnographic archive assembled by the colonial anthropologist, N. W. Thomas, in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. The project involved bringing this archive back to the communities it was gathered from and inviting contemporary West African artists and local voices to respond to it.
This film was an initial experiment that focused on some of the photography in the archive and involved a group of invited participants from the West African community in London to reflect upon some of the portraits and characters captured in these images. The aim was to listen and to record their reactions and comments more generally on the significance of these archival images today.
I was invited to explore the wax cylinder audio recordings from the archive. I cleaned up and extracted musical segments and voices from these recordings. I used pops and clicks from these for the sound design and some longer segments as a subtle bed for the voices. I also tidied up the interview audio, and did the final mix and mastering.
Direction: Christopher Thomas Allen & Paul Basu
Interviewees: Ebony Francis, Robert Kelechi Isiodu, Kofi Mawuli Klu, Yvonne Mbanefo, Esther Stanford-Xose
Camera: Christopher Thomas Allen
Production Assistant: Pierre Bouvier Patron & George Agbo
Editor: Christopher Thomas Allen
Sound Design: Tim Cowie