Conference | Talking Pictures: Terrae Incognitae – The Sea as a Colonial Space in Cinema

Serious Topics

The sea is always a political space in historical and adventure cinema. From a ship’s departure and passage to its arrival at foreign shores, film history marks the steps of colonial expansion as a sequence of maritime thresholds: the port as a place of departure and return, the ship as a floating order of hierarchy and violence, the open sea as a space of dissolution, the coastline as a scene of first encounters, and finally the mainland as territory to be mapped, explored, and conquered. The talk analyzes how cinema stages these steps and makes colonial power relations visible, focusing on maritime expeditions as founding scenes of colonial appropriation: conquistadors’ voyages, imperial naval campaigns, the slave transports of the Middle Passage – each journey distilling the logic of colonization. Rivers lead into the unknown interior, coastlines are frontlines of appropriation, and land surveying completes what seafaring has begun. Piracy sometimes became a counter-economy to imperial trade; these structures persist into pop culture, as shown in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, where the East India Company acts as an antagonist displaying colonial power logic while making it consumable. Starting from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as key texts, the talk covers expedition films from the silent era to Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), Peter Weir’s Master and Commander (2003), Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), Mati Diop’s Atlantique (2019), and the series The Terror (2018) which tells the failed Franklin expedition in the Arctic as a parable of imperial hubris. Through these and other examples, the talk shows how cinema envisions the sea as a political, economic, and mythological space—how film itself becomes a medium for both colonial and anti-colonial imagination.