From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa: Transnationalism and imperialism in British intellectual film culture of the late 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores a revealing instance of the historical intersection of transnationalism and imperialism: the initial British reception of the Soviet film Storm Over Asia (1928). It brings together for the first time previously separate strands of research on transnationalism within British film culture, and British cinema and empire. It uses a range of primary, secondary and theoretical sources to explore a pivotal moment of transition in British film history, while also contributing to what Tim Bergfelder envisions as a future ‘transnational history of European cinema [that] might focus precisely on the strategies and practices by which filmic texts “travel” and become transformed according to the specific requirements of different cultural contexts and audiences’ (2005: 326). More generally, this case study also stands as a prime example of the importance of attending, in both historical and contemporary contexts, to what Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim describe as ‘difficult questions about transnationality, such as those pertaining to (post) coloniality’ (2010:16).