Empire and film / edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Grieveson, Lee, 1969-

MacCabe, Colin.

Series:

Cultural histories of cinema

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Imperialism in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Political aspects--Great Britain--History--20th century.

Motion pictures--Colonies--Great Britain--History--20th century.

Motion pictures--Colonies.

Motion pictures--Political aspects.

History.

Motion pictures.

Great Britain.

Colonies in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xii, 292 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan ; London : On behalf of the British Film Institute, 2011.

Summary:

At its height in 1919, the British Empire claimed 58 countries,400 million subjects, and 14 million square miles of ground. Empire and Film brings together leading international scholars to examine the integral role cinema played in the control, organisation, and governance of this diverse geopolitical space. The essays reveal the complex interplay between the political and economic control essential to imperialism and the emergence and development of cinema in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

Contributors address how the production, distribution and exhibition of film were utilised by state and Industrial and philanthropic institutions to shape the subject positions of coloniser and colonised; to demarcate between 'civilised' and 'primitive' and codify difference; and to foster a political economy of imperialism that was predicated on distinctions between core; and periphery. The generic forms of colonial cinema were, consequently, varied: travelogues mapped colonial spaces; actuality films re-presented spectacles of royal authority and. imperial conquest and conflict; home movies rendered colonial self-representation; state-financed newsreels and documentaries fostered political and economic control and the 'education' of British and colonial subjects; philanthropic and industrial organisations sponsored films to expand Western models of capitalism; British and American film companies made films of imperial adventure. These films circulated widely in Britain and the empire, and were sustained through the establishment of imperial networks of distribution and exhibition, including in particular innovative mobile exhibition circuits and non-theatrical spaces like schools, museums and civic centres. Empire and Film is a significant revision to the historical and conceptual frameworks of British cinema history, and is a major contribution to the history of cinema as a global form that emerged amid, and in dialogue with, the global flows of imperialism. The book is produced in conjunction with a major website housing freely available digitised archival films and materials relating to British colonial cinema, www.colonialfilm.org.uk, and a companion volume entitled Film and the End of Empire. Book jacket.

Contents:

Detailed synopsis

Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe eds., Film and Empire

1 Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, Introduction

The spaces of colonial cinema

2 Colin MacCabe, Colonial cinema: an introdution

3 Priya Jaikumar, Place/Map/Archive: Colonialism and Film Historiography's Spatial Crisis

Early cinema's encounter with Empire

4 Tom Gunning, Imagining the Primitive Spectator

5 Ian Christie, 'The Captains and the Kings depart': early imperial departure and arrival films

The State of Documentary

6 Lee Grieveson, The cinema and the (common)wealth of nations

7 Peter Bloom, Adult education and the documentary cinema of the Empire Marketing Board

8 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Rethinking Colonial Economics: Cinema, Textuality, and the Imperial Economic Conferences

Industry and empire

9 Tom Rice, From the Colonies to Britain (and back again): British Instructional Films and The Empire Series (1925-1928)

10 Scott Anthony, Rotha's empire: An Internationalist attempt to paint the British Empire red

Philanthropy and education

11 James Burns, The Rockefeller foundation and early colonial film making

12 Rosaleen Smyth, The cinema and Britain's African colonies in the inter-war years

13 Aaron Windel, The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment and the political economy of East and Central Africa

The home and the mission

14 Francis Gooding, Amateur The school, the hospital, and the collection box: British missionary priorities on film

15 Emma Sandon, Missionaries in India

Fictions of empire

16 Julie Codell, Hands across the empire: American and British films about Empire in the 1930s

17 Charles Musser, Paul Robeson and the cinema of empire.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1844574210

9781844574223

1844574229

9781844574216

OCLC:

751754525

Publisher Number:

99946104640