‘Remember the empire, filled with your cousins’: Poetic exposition in the documentaries of the empire Marketing Board

Abstract

ABSTRACTThrough an analysis of Basil Wright's Windmill in Barbados (1933) and Song of Ceylon (1934), this article observes how the use of distinct formal and aesthetic modes resonates with particular policies in the management and marketing of empire during the British documentary film movement of the 1930s. It argues that the production of a distinctive brand of poetic and expository documentaries were symptomatic of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB)'s project to change the connotation of ‘empire’ from one of exploitation to one that suggested a cooperative familial relationship between metropole and colony. A closer study of these films, however, reveal a deeper tension between the Board's new attempt to market the empire as ‘one family’ and the existing nature of economic exploitation between colony and metropole.