Travel Cinematography and the Indian City: The Imperial Spectacle of Geography at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article looks at the ways in which early films, as much as photography and colonial exhibitions, transported the spectators to a version of India existing in great part as the creation of unchecked British imagination. Late Victorians and Edwardians stepped into this exotic world through different media, and cinematic exposure to the East would soon dominate visual culture and consolidate the East as a product of European imagination.It investigates the ways in which at the end of the so-called long nineteenth century a very Victorian passion for geographical spectacle migrated to early films of urban spaces in colonized territories, and reassess the part played by early films in the imperial project by investigating the cinematic image of Indian cities between 1895 and 1914.