'This important new volume reconstructs the forms of production,
distribution and exhibition of films made in and about the
colonies. It then ties them to wider theoretical issues about film
and liberalism, spectacle and political economy, representation and
rule. The result is one of the first volumes to examine how
imperial rule is intimately tied to the emergence of documentary as
a form and, indeed, how the history of cinema is at the same time
the history of Empire.' BRIAN LARKIN, Barnard College 'This superb
collection of new scholarship shows how cinema both communicated
and aided the imperialist agenda throughout the twentieth century.
In doing so, it shows film can be understood as one of the tools of
empire, as much as the technology of weaponry or modes of
administration: a means of education and indoctrination in the
colonies and at home.' TOM GUNNING, University of Chicago 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.
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