COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 23 them,” Landry says. “It also attempts to discover the identity and the history of a number of colonial prisoners whose voices were recorded and part of this project.” For Landry, Scheffner’s film and an array of others are examples of the nexus of history and media, where materials of the past come alive in the present through remediation, as new media revisits the old. Landry believes that this process forces us to recognize all of the layers of misrepresentation that were in place when the recording occurred, so that we can at least begin to try and get a clearer, more authentic picture of the subjects as they were. “The act of remediating sound recordings in documentary film can serve to unsettle their original meaning and intentions,” Landry says. “By placing these materials within a new context, we might begin to listen to these recordings differently. This becomes part of a decolonizing process of unlearning.” ● to think about how sound might become decolonized through documentary film.” Of particular interest to Landry is the way in which ethnographic sound recordings are remediated in various documentaries and how this process of remediation offers a method of what she describes as “decolonizing the ear.” In media studies, remediation is a general framework for considering how media is continually changing and all media constantly borrow from and refashion other media. Landry’s starting point for her book was a 2007 documentary film called The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, by Philip Scheffner, which examined the audio recordings in the Berlin Sound Archive. The film is Scheffner’s own audiovisual research project on the entanglements of politics, colonialism and media technology. “This is an experimental documentary that goes back and listens to a lot of the recordings and spends time analyzing and scrutinizing RICHARD BORGE / THEISPOT.COM “I ’m using this specific project as a paradigmatic example of colonial listening. But ultimately I wanted to think about how sound might become decolonized through documentary film.”
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