Colonial Film Research Articles

Colonial film markets in the early 20th century Mediterranean

ABSTRACT By examining the various scales of film trade in the Mediterranean up to the late 1910s in all their intricacies, this article seeks to shed new light on the history of film circulation across the French, Italian, and British Empires. It uncovers the Mediterranean dimension of itinerant exhibitions and the early stages of film rental, revealing a remarkable variety of routes across the ‘White Middle Sea’ (from Greece to Algeria; from Sicily to Malta and Tunisia; from Egypt to Algeria; from Tunisia to Sardinia; and from Catalonia to western Algeria, among others), as well as previously overlooked trade nodes. Focusing on Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt, the study underscores the tensions between regional circuits – sometimes incorporating pre-colonial networks – and imperial markets, as the institutionalisation of distribution gradually led to the centralisation and hierarchisation of exchanges. In addition to investigating the movement of films within this interconnected region, the article addresses the lack of comparative analysis between colonial empires, each approaching the film industry in distinct ways, in order to elucidate what may be common to a colonial cinema economy.

Centre as periphery: learned coloniality in colonial Korean filmmaking

ABSTRACT In 1939, with the implementation of a new film law in Japan, Korean filmmakers in colonial Joseon Korea were seeing a preview of the regulation that their own industry would face come 1940. By examining the roundtable debates, editorials, and articles by Joseon film directors and producers at this time, we can observe not only the predicament of film workers, but also the predicament of producing films as a colony within an empire. In close-reading these film workers' writings on cinema across the empire, I triangulate the different positions of the colonial film industries and the film industry of the metropole, in terms of film control, production, and market. In doing so, I attempt to illuminate the way that colonial filmmakers in Korea understood the varied power dynamics of film production in the empire, and through their perspective, reconfigure conventional notions of power, colony, and representation.

Ethnographic Film, Fourth Cinema and Situated Knowledge Practices—from Colonial Film to Collaborative Research

The text attempts to understand the development of collaborative audiovisual knowledge practices in anthropology as situated and diffractive knowledge (Haraway, Barad, Smith). By considering specific stages in the history of collaborative and participatory projects, the article argues that collaborative filmmaking is not only a decentering of one-sided authorship and one-sided modes of representation, but also a media-specific form of knowledge that is bound to and embedded in social contexts. Through the example of colonial film, the article describes stations of demarcation and attempts to decolonize film. Current film experiments with marginalized groups have their origins in “shared anthropologies” (Rouch) and have further developed this approach through more consistent forms of Fourth Cinema and power sharing with Indigenous communities. Film is thus also able to depict amateur knowledge practices within collaborative research projects.

Hand in hand? Documentary film and the paradox of a Belgo-Congolese union at Expo 58

The 1958 World’s Fair, held in Brussels and known as Expo 58, was an apotheosis of Belgian colonial cinema and propaganda. Simultaneously, it harboured a paradox at the core of late colonial Belgium. In various ways, Belgium developed a dubious reconstruction of the past in an attempt to uphold a strong connection between metropole and colony in the burgeoning Atomic Age. This article explores how the idea of a Belgo-Congolese union was constructed and represented in documentary films screened at Expo 58, and how discussions about documentary cinema challenged that idea in a complex encounter of politics and poetics. In analysing the inextricable interweaving of ideas and representations, this article employs archival research as well as close reading of film and written texts. Through its multifaceted approach, this article shows how the paternalistic tone of colonial films Tokèndé (Gérard De Boe, 1958), Main dans la main (Inforcongo, 1958) and Pour un monde plus humain (Georges Baudouin, 1957), and the discourse in which they thrived, ran contrary to the progressive humanism the World’s Fair wanted to display. This ‘progressist’ stance clashed with the global process of decolonisation (including in Congo), which was largely neglected during the World’s Fair. At the ‘Rencontres Internationales. Le Cinéma et l’Afrique subsaharienne’ conference, held at Expo 58 to evaluate film production about and destined for Africa, the paradoxes of paternalistic colonial filmmaking were very much present. Developments in ethnographic filmmaking, however, challenged the colonial discourse that promoted a one-sided Eurafrican community and the colonial cinema that advanced this idea. Though not beyond criticism, cineastes-ethnologists Luc de Heusch and Jean Rouch defended a more participatory and reflexive approach to ethnographic filmmaking, expressed in Rouch’s Moi, un noir (1958). By specifically focusing on a hand in hand metaphor, this article demonstrates how film documentaries created, as well as challenged, the myths that rewrite history

Black extras and actors in Francoist cinema

ABSTRACT While colonial cinema has been studied as an epic and propagandistic text of the Franco Regime (Elena, 2010. La Llamada de África, Estudios Sobre el Cine Español Colonial. Barcelona: Bellaterra), the presence of Africans in Spanish filmography before 1975 has gone unnoticed. Few saw their names in a movie’s credits. When an African had some lines due to script requirements, the role was offered to African American and Afro-Latin actors, or it was performed by sinister blackface actors without the slightest qualm. In this game of masks, the African Negro is at the bottom of an absurd melanocratic classification that dissociates race and color. Invisible as mute bodies and faceless ghosts, the extras, a non-detachable part of the set, do not act but are “acted out” (Didi-Huberman, 2012. Peuples Exposés, Peuples Figurants. L’œil de l’histoire, 4. Paris: Minuit). In this article we examine the hierarchy underlying a racializing assemblage (Weheliye, 2014. Habeas viscus. Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press) indissociable from Spanish (self)exoticism, as well as the conditions that exceptionally allow the presence of African characters played by African actors.

Voicing the Malayan Emergency: Ventriloquizing Subjectivity in British Colonial Film and Radio

British colonial film and radio broadcasting initiatives are described as a foundational context for shaping the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). The development and deployment of counterinsurgency techniques become a means by which to wage war against what came to be identified as the Communist insurgency, previously trained and allied with Anglo‐American forces against the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. Key British figures associated with propaganda tactics during World War II, such as Hugh Carelton Greene, were instrumental in developing a new array of techniques for postwar propaganda. This article considers the extent to which film and radio programming were elemental to managing popular aspirations for independence just as economic and political authority became increasingly consolidated within the terms of Anglo‐American economic and political interests. It considers how film and media programs contributed to the construction of the “Communist terrorist” by reference to several radio segments and films that were produced during this period. A significant part of the Malayan Emergency was associated with a large‐scale population resettlement program known as the Briggs Plan. It was conceived as an effective population‐centric strategy of political control that relied upon a biopolitics of security that became integral to Cold War political objectives. It is within the terms of a Cold War media complex that this discussion addresses the context for “radio‐cinema governmentality.”

Preserving the Imperial Project: Documenting Film Censorship Practices in the Gold Coast (Ghana)

The British colonialists employed cinema from two key viewpoints; the first was the use of cinema in consolidating and promoting the economic and political agendas of the imperial project. Secondly, cinema became a critical medium through which the moral and social welfare of the natives in the British colonies were promoted. The considerably scattering of scholarly works on African cinema have explored colonial film censorship in some parts of Africa, however, the specific case of the Gold Coast (Ghana) has been an under-studied subject. The article engages a critical dialogue on how early film censorship was practised and further seeks to interrogate the nexus between the imperial project and the British colonial film censorship activities in the Gold Coast. While this paper does not claim an exhaustive treatment of the field of film censorship practices in Ghana, it endeavors to lay out an initial inroad, generate interests and critical debates in this neglected field.

Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia by Sandeep Ray (review)

Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia by Sandeep Ray (review)

Intercultural Encounters in Colonial North Africa: the Unmorphed Imagery of Colonial Cinema, the Narratives of Legitimatization, and the Inchoate Politics of Broken Subjectivities

The representational politics of European colonial cinema was effectively decisive in shaping the values and ideologies of the articulated discourse of colonialism in representing cultural encounters and racial differences. This article attempts to analyse and explore how the colonial cinema of the early twentieth century produced a biased politics of representation and persistent modes of constructing North Africans within the confines of an orientalising colonial imaginary that turns cultural encounters into a display of power and superiority. It addresses the ways cinematic representation of North Africans accentuates the homogenising discourse of domination, the legitimization of conquest and the articulation of intercultural encounters on a stereotypical and judgmental basis. While a part of this cinema kept (re)visiting the same classical tropes of exoticism and racial inferiority of the native cultures, favouring the stereotypical portrayals and racial prejudices of “others” that blatantly rest on the “us and them” dichotomy, the other part tried to introduce a sort of paradigm shift that complicates the unquestionable presence of colons in North Africa and interrogates the parameters of their colonial identity. This article argues that colonial cinema of the 1930S has introduced a range of Western protagonists and colons with complex forms of identifications, questionable moral consciousness, and conflicted colonial subjectivities.

Medical propaganda as enabling device of the surveillance apparatus – decolonizing and anarchiving non-fiction at the eye film museum archive

ABSTRACT The Western gaze instituted by the cinematographic apparatus constructs racialized subjects and supports processes of dispossession. My present transmedial artistic research project engages with the biopolitics of representation in archival film material, from a decolonial perspective. By drawing from academic and non-academic sources on relations between colonialism, capitalism, and technologies of control, this paper studies manifestations of surveillance in non-fiction film, to analyze the sub-genre of medical propaganda in former European colonies. Moreover, it proposes to scrutinize the long-term impact colonial cinema and its structures of representation had and still have on processes of subjectification, haunting present-day gender and race-determined profiling by mainstream film, CCTV, and drones.

The allegorical re-presentation of colonial cinema in Sammy Baloji’s Pungulume (2016)

This article analyses artist Sammy Baloji’s video installation Pungulume (2016) with a focus on its recycling of film clips extracted from an archival colonial film from 1912. Inspired by art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s anachronic approach to art history, and through a sketch of the history and present-day social and political context in the Congolese Katanga region, this essay contends that these archival clips speak primarily about the present and contain a topical significance. As the author demonstrates, this topical significance can solely be assessed when the viewer is knowledgeable about current political and social debates taking place in the former Katanga province. Additionally, this present-day relevance of the archival film clips also exists in terms of the video installation’s reception – the archival film clips reflect dynamics occurring in the spaces in which the video installation was conceived and continues to be exhibited. Through this reading that ultimately causes the ‘re-presentation’ of the anachronic archival film clips (while acknowledging its indebtment to Congolese popular painting), the author recalls the necessity of considering the historical production context in scholarly analyses of artworks – even when artworks reuse archival documents that stem, for example, from colonial cinema.

Digitisation of audio-visual archives at the National Archives of Zimbabwe

This research pursues bringing to light the modern landscape of administering audio-visual archives at the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) and getting it on the journey towards digital preservation. The Victorian era paved the way to analogue technological evolution in the audio-visual archiving fraternity. A technological breakthrough initiated by a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, led to the invention of a photographic image on a silver-coated copper plate medium in 1839. Again, in 1927, the outstanding Thomas Alva Edison positively documented audio on a rotating tin foil cylinder carrier. The form of documented memories in many African archives is mostly in conventional formats. Nonetheless, in the contemporary past, NAZ combined audio-visual archives and television archives that were raised up by the United Kingdom, which was the colonial supremacy during the period of 1890 to 1979. The British administration established the Colonial Film Unit at the commencement of the Second World War, in 1939, as part of political creativity focused on colonies. The NAZ audio-visual unit was born in 1988 under the library section to assist the information desires of the establishment, through the creation, purchase, organisation, preservation, and dissemination of audio-visual archives. The researcher used a qualitative case study methodology with an interpretivist perspective where the main focus of the research was on the NAZ’s Harare head office. Interviews, document analysis and observations were used as the major data collecting tools. The results showed that the institution houses audio-visual materials and is still struggling to preserve all the formats digitally. Lastly, the study recommends the adoption of digital preservation mechanisms to facilitate the proper care and access of these precious non-conventional records as declared by UNESCO.

Not the Songs but the Singing: Sounding Sense in Colonial Films from British Mandate Palestine

This essay considers how Palestinian history and experience might be reclaimed from colonial films from British Mandate Palestine, and how sensory and synesthetic attention developed in experimental filmmaking might bear on archival footage. Analysis focuses in particular on the possibilities of sound. My reflections draw heavily on a current work in progress, Partition, which makes extensive use of found footage from Britain’s imperial collections and sound recordings made with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and across the sites of their displacement. The film attempts to harness the disruptive potential of refugee voice to make visible the continuity of Palestinian presence in colonial archives and to deconstruct and reconstruct archival authority and colonial history.

Algeria and the crisis of theimage-mouvement: checkingcinéma colonial’s imperial gaze inMuriel ou le Temps d’un retour(Resnais, 1963)

One of the most cryptic characters in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) is a returning veteran who edits his own amateur video footage of North Africa while contending with his traumatizing memories of torturing a young woman in Algeria. This article’s fundamental argument is twofold: first, Bernard’s experience of editing and watching his footage is co-extensive with his private interrogation of the reductive, propagandist images of Algeria that he viewed in classic colonial cinema prior to serving in the war; second, Resnais’s portrayal of this process provokes spectators to reassess their own consumption of retrograde colonial culture and its impact on their perception of the colony. Key to this analysis is the imperial gaze that E. Ann Kaplan associates with colonial cinema’s reductive construction of the female colonial “other,” Stanley Cavell’s understanding of how film spectator’s “check” their engagement with cinematic narratives, and Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of politics in the image-temps. This article ultimately aims to deepen present understandings of questions regarding preservation, research, and interpretation that Muriel continues to raise sixty years after the signing of the Évian Accords.

Framing Emotions: White Romance and Colonial Melodramas During Francoism

This article examines two lesser-known colonial melodramas released during the Francoist period, Obsesión (1947) by Arturo Ruiz Castillo and Piedra de toque (1964) by Julio Buchs. Melodrama is not a genre prominently associated with colonial cinema, but it was the most popular style within the Spanish cinematographic production on Equatorial Guinea. In this article I explore why directors privileged this genre in representing the Spanish colony, and I examine how the white love triangle served disparate purposes in these films, from conveying subversive meanings to reinforcing normative ideologies.

Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia by Sandeep Ray

Reviewed by: Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia by Sandeep Ray Thomas Barker Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia. By Sandeep Ray. Singapore: NUS Press, 2021, 232 pp. ISBN: 978-981-325-138-0 It is always rewarding when a book on a Southeast Asian topic offers material that can shake up established disciplines and knowledge. Sandeep Ray's book Celluloid Colony does just that: it offers a history of Dutch colonial non-fiction film that challenges fields such as documentary, colonial history, Indonesian history, all while offering new directions in the use of audio-visual material for the study of history and ethnography. Until now, the Dutch colonial non-fiction film has rarely been discussed and Ray proposes that the Dutch non-fiction film is less shaped or influenced by propaganda and are 'rarely embellished or sensationalised' (p. 15) compared to the more prominent British colonial film which has been the subject of a number of studies. Ray's book challenges some of the accepted history of non-fiction film which has been dominated by figures like John Grierson and Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North, 1922) and further opens up the space to use these Dutch films as ethnographic resources. Ray's book follows a short but important period of Dutch colonial history in Indonesia from 1912 to 1930, covering the final decades of Dutch rule. It is a period that has come under renewed focus across a range of disciplines, including studies on urban modernity, Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920–1960 by Freek Colombijn and Joost Coté (2014) and on media such as Karen Strassler's book Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (2010) and The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 by Matthew Isaac Cohen (2006). [End Page 123] Divided into three substantial chapters, bookended by chapters on the significance of colonial documentary and their historical positioning, Ray discusses the Colonial Institute films as products of a newfound fascination to capture images of the colony, corporate films with a focus on plantations and their labour, and films made by missionaries in Eastern Indonesia. Ray provides detailed readings of the films in the context of their production, aided by other archival material including promotional flyers, correspondence, and newspapers. The overall argument is that the Dutch filmmakers were less encumbered by either the dictates of entertainment or the propaganda trends in other European countries and as a result their films reveal more ethnographic truth. Ray's selected films reveal encounters between film and the colonial system, and bring to life behaviours, bodies, and rituals that hitherto may only be written about. Within the footage Ray observes child labour on tobacco plantations, the arrival of indentured labour in Deli (North Sumatra), and the Garebeg Mulud ceremony amongst others. These moving images represent a world lost to us now but in Ray's reading reveal new insights into the operations of the Dutch colonial system and the 'overlapping space' between the oppressor (Dutch) and the oppressed. A reader might have expected more outrage at the colonial system since many of the filmmakers come across as innocents in the structures of colonialism, and this might not sit well with some. But it is to Ray's credit that the account of colonialism is a sober one that recognises the complexity of the colonial encounter and social organisation that it relied on. It is hard to feel outrage or anger at how the Dutch colonial enterprise is presented in these pages, though an understanding of colonialism's division of labour, exploitation, and civilising mission, does linger as an overall observation throughout the book. More might have been made of the ways in which documentary was being deployed for knowledge creation to further the colonial state, or the ways in which film was used to know and therefore govern the population. Ray is also part of a generation of scholars taking advantage of the renewed attention placed on archives and the preservation of cinemas, especially in its digitisation which removes specialised projection needs, and makes the...

The representation of colonials and natives in French colonial cinema from 1918 to 1945

In spite of having an empire that was second only to Britain's by 1914, the French people remained mostly unconvinced by and mistrustful of the colonial idea. There is no better proof of this than the French colonial films between 1918 and 1945 which depicted the empire in a particularly unattractive way while seemingly advocating the colonial cause. The paradox is all the more surprising given that the negative image that emerges from the films made in France around the colonial theme was not the manifestation of an anti-colonialism subtly disguised to avoid governmental censorship, but the mere expression of the general feeling of the French about their colonies. The lack of Gallic enthusiasm for the empire translated on screen into an intrinsic mistrust for what was regarded as the epitome of danger and despair.

Orientalism on the screen: contextualising colonial cinema in Morocco

ABSTRACT In colonial Morocco, cinema was effectively dynamic in reflecting the interests and values of the dominant players in the film industry: Europeans. Colonial cinema was, thus, instrumental to Westerners, whereas Moroccans were at best consumers of the moving images or, when represented, seemed to be exotic, distorted and voiceless. This article explores the ways how colonial cinema visually produced the Moroccan native reality on the screen. By questioning the grammar of representation, the focus here is to see the extent to which colonial filmmakers were associated with the colonial project and were actually vulnerable in front of its demands and political dictates. The main argument is that colonial cinema—though pre-supposedly was about the extra-European reality—continued to articulate an orientalising discourse that regarded the native characters not beyond the limits of the colonial imaginary, but within its predefined boundaries. To understand how colonial cinema operates stylistically, it will be appropriate to analyse it in the light of Edward Said’s theorisation of the concept of representation with respect to the Self/Other dichotomy.

Indian or British Film Heritage? The Material Life of Britain's Colonial Film Archive

This article examines selected titles from a collection of colonial films shot in India between 1899 and 1947, preserved at the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archives. It tracks these films' changing cultural value from the time they entered the archive to their recent digitization and recontextualization in curatorial projects such as the 2017 UK-India Year of Culture. As part of this yearlong program, British Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri repurposed these same films in her archival documentary Around India with a Movie Camera (2018). By subverting their intended meanings, Suri's film expands the BFI's curatorial discourses and advances what this article reads as a powerful experiment in decolonizing the film archive.

BOOK REVIEW: Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia, by Sandeep Ray

SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.