TONY DOWMUNT
A WHITED SEPULCHRE
A contemporary video travel diary contrasted with a colonial Victorian written
diary: a practice-as-research project on the place of the first person movingimage narrative in an investigation of (colonial and post-colonial) history
This country is clothed with luxuriant vegetation, and strikes you from a
distance as being bright green. If Sierra Leone is the white man's grave, it is
certainly a whited sepulchre, very fair to look upon outside. However, before
long I shall have plenty of opportunity of seeing whether there is anything
particularly foul within the fair exterior.
So wrote my great-grandfather, on arriving as a young Lieutenant in the British
Imperial Army in Sierra Leone in the 1880s. When I was a teenage boy I found
his hand-written diaries in an old bookcase in a dark corner. Two of the vellumbound volumes covered his time in Africa. They are both a detailed account of
his daily life as an army officer and a frank record of his initial, brief questioning,
then whole-hearted embrace of the racism underpinning British colonial rule.
Me (in 1957) and my great-grandfather, great uncle and grandfather (in 1898).
Accompanying this text is the first two minutes of a video which draws on the
stories of two journeys: my great-grandfather’s account in his diaries of his
posting to Sierra Leone and some of the things he experienced and wrote about
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there, and my own ‘video diary’ of a trip that I made in December/January 2004–
05 following in his footsteps, but seeking a different understanding of Africa and
of myself as a white ‘Englishman’.
A WHITED SEPULCHRE is my video diary project with another (written) diary at
the centre of it: my great-grandfather’s. These contrasting autobiographical
discourses (stretched between two historically situated, divergent, but connected
subjectivities) will call into question some of the more traditional aspects of the
autobiographical form:
lnsofar as autobiography has been seen as promoting a view of the subject
as universal, it has also underpinned the centrality of masculine — and , we
may add, Western and middle-class — modes of subjectivity (Anderson,
2001: 3).
The project explores whether and how the more personal/confessional ‘video
diary’ mode contrasts with the more formal, ‘objective’ tone of the written diaries.
However, part of this research is also an attempt to discover aesthetic strategies
within (and beyond) the ‘video diary’ mode that will enable the piece to reveal and
represent complex issues of identity formation — my own and my greatgrandfather’s. I am experimenting with a video diary form that is about history, as
well as the present, and that uses the confessional immediacy and ‘authenticity’ of
the video diary in a context which to some extent also calls it into question, reveals
it as another ‘performance of the self’.
Among the questions/issues the project raises are:
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How does the video-diary mode deal with binaries such as the public and
private, historical/personal, the past/present, memory/actuality?
And what is the function of the varied aesthetic strategies of video diary
making: the 'to-camera' piece; the camera as 'mirror' in the performance
of the self; filming of the self and/vs filming others; the effects of shooting
diary footage and editing later; and of using stills, music, more 'poetic
devices’ with diary footage?
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