Spectres Screening at 98 Weeks
As part of the ‘Spectres Of: Part 2’ screenings, the 98 Weeks Project Space is hosting a screening of the film “Spectres” by Sven Augustijnen.
In this film essay, the title of which is derived from Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International” (1993), Sven Augustijnen presents a controversial view of Belgian colonial history, but with questions that go beyond these national colonial events. How does a country or an individual deal with a colonial past? How does a nation process the suffering it has inflicted, dubious political acts or moral bankruptcy?
“Spectres” focuses on one of the darkest pages in the colonial history of the Belgian Congo in about 1960 in a documentary thriller, set to the music of Bach’s St. John’s Passion. Augustijnen follows Jacques Brassinne de La Buissière, a French-speaking Belgian who is now 82 years old and who was a high-ranking official when the prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered in 1961. With his delicate psychological portrait, Augustjnen shows how the friction between personal involvement and an objective writing of history, between fact and fiction, truth and conviction, wholly obscures the question of guilt which arises.
