Forgotten potential

Nuotama Frances Bodomo’s interview about her short film Afronauts offers the perspective of a film maker who identifies as a migrant and does not see themselves as a local to anywhere. She decided to take this element of her life and put it into her work, by using an Albino black woman, she was able to create a character who understands otherness in a country where everyone does not look like you. Bodomo being a migrant who constantly moved from place to place, felt this as she traveled. 

            I have not yet seen the film, but based off her choice to make the whole thing in black and white to evoke the feeling of ethnographic images that were taken of colonized Africa; she is able to establish an “otherworldliness” as she calls it. The affect of black and white in popularized films and pictures is astonishingly powerful. The lack of color not only makes the viewer focus more on light contrasts, when it it comes to pictures, it can create a sense of age. Black and white will always be associated with the vintage or old. Even newer images can instantly become relics of the past just by using a black and white filter. What quickly comes to mind is pictures of protest in the modern era. To me it seems like a form of manipulation of the public because its meant to try and push the events back into your mind so as to make them less relevant. 

            I don’t think Bodomo was trying to do that here, instead she was trying to create a timelessness with the gray scale. It makes the short look like something that happened long ago and is the foundation of something in the stories she tells. Considering she wants her films to be shown to African people in a way that they are used to seeing film, I think she is taking this artistic direction to build that foundation for Africans, in the Afrofuturist sense. She’s giving them a “what if” scenario and artificially dating it with her filmography and chosen aesthetics. This also allows for her to address topics she finds important as well. Which is a key feature in Afrofuturism.