Visual culture theorists have long connected visuality (the dominant image system of the western world that determines how we look and what we look at) and imperialism (Mirzoeff, 2014; Azoulay, 2019). From the late twentieth century, politically engaged artists’ moving image (AMI) has explored forms of countervisuality to address social and environmental justice issues. A strand overlooked in this context is AMI that appropriates or imitates cinema. This paper explores three examples of AMI that include iconic fragments from Hollywood films, proposing that these act as audiovisual metonyms for imperial visuality: In Deadpan (1997) Steve McQueen re-enacts a scene from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill (1928); in Zoo (2006) Salla Tykka imitates Madeline from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958); and in Zarathustra (2008) Jesse Jones uses Richard Strass’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ (1896), which is synonymous with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968). Disrupting conventions of what is sayable and seeable, these films give visibility to cinema’s minority bodies (the black man, the animal, the socially disadvantaged, and children in state care). In different ways, they surface the vestiges of colonialism to bring the marginalised and excluded into view and, in so doing, point to other ways of seeing and understanding.

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