The Cinema and the (Common) Wealth of Nations

Grieveson, Lee

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-92498-1_5

Cited by 18 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Colonial subjects emerged in this transition even more clearly as economic subjects, whose needs and desires had to be understood and attended to in order for capital to continue expanding and for their nations to start 'developing'. 105 This was precisely the task assigned now to postcolonial national bureaucracies and the 'ethos' that core nations and international institutions wanted to instil in them via the 'education' of their elites and the delivery of 'technical advice'. 106 Formal imperialism further contracted, during these years, as 'it had once expanded, as a variable function of integrating countries into the international capitalist economy'.…”

Section: Empire On the Movementioning

confidence: 99%

The Moving Location of Empire: Indirect Rule, International Law, and theBantu Educational Kinema Experiment

Eslava¹

2018

Leiden Journal of International Law

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Between 1935 and 1937, the International Missionary Council conducted the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. The objective was to produce silent educational films and screen them to ‘native’ people via mobile cinemas in the British territories in East and Central Africa. Embracing the principle of ‘indirect rule’, and its role in training colonial subjects in economic self-sufficiency and political self-rule, as then advocated by leading colonial figures and the League of Nations, the films strived to capture ‘the native point of view’ through an ‘ethnographic sensitivity’ towards local cultures, concerns and needs. Hoping to educate the natives from ‘within’, they used local actors, familiar locations and pedagogical instructions that were believed to meet the target audience's cognitive capacity. Though in many respects unsuccessful, the experiment cemented the use of cinema in the late colonial project and, more importantly, embodied the clear move at the time towards a more dynamic and disaggregated, yet perhaps never fully post-imperial, international order. I argue in this article that the Bantu Experiment is thus a telling instance through which to examine both the mobility and multiplicity of late imperial locations and the system of modern international administration that emerged during the interwar period. I suggest that this mobility and multiplicity continue to characterize the workings of today's international order, indicating the key role that ‘indirect rule’, as a silent principle of international law, still plays in its functioning today.

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Section: Empire On the Movementioning

confidence: 99%

The Moving Location of Empire: Indirect Rule, International Law, and theBantu Educational Kinema Experiment

Eslava¹

2018

Leiden Journal of International Law

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“…Lee Grieveson has noted the tendency of documentary empire films produced by the EMB and GPO film units after 1928 to juxtapose modern technology, presented as the domain of the British, against the tools of the indigenous population, presented as primitive and inefficient. 18 The same can be said about Kidston's amateur production, which crucially predates films by the GPO such as Song of Ceylon (1934) and Cargo from Jamaica (1933). Beville, Glover, and Kidston's footage of Mombasa's port-yards capture in the same frame wooden canoes and modern steel ships, emphasising for the viewer a sense of contradiction between the two ships and, by extension, the two cultures.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Empire, Repetition, and Reluctant Subjects: British Home Movies of Kenya, 1928–72

Grandy

2017

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

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In 1928, Lieutenant Commander Glen Kidston, a renowned racecar driver, pilot, and playboy, visited Kenya with a group of male and female companions from Britain. Amongst Kidston's companions was a friend and cameraman who took a series of 'home movies' or amateur film of the group's safari. Shot in black and white, without sound but including intertitles throughout, these films document the group's activities, including luxurious travel by boat, expansive lunches, and the wildlife they encountered. The footage is punctuated with images of vast landscapes, Maasai housing, and a long scene of a laborious crossing of a river by car. In 1972, 44 years after Glen Kidston visited Kenya with cine-camera in tow, and 9 years after Kenya gained independence from Britain, David Lean, the successful British director, also visited Kenya and made a series of home movies while there. Accompanied by his then mistress and future wife, Sandra Hotz, Lean visited a number of luxury lodges, taking extensive footage on his cine-camera. Lean and Hotz went on safari as well, dined in the wilderness, and produced metres and metres of film of the surrounding landscape, including Maasai homes, river crossings, and wildlife. Indeed, the differences between the amateur 1928 footage by Kidston's party and the footage of a critically acclaimed director are scarce. Other amateur films produced by Britons visiting Kenya in this same period follow similar visual patterns. Ultimately, what stands out in these films shot over four decades by multiple men, including the five amateur film-makers examined here, is the sheer repetition of imagery on screen. These films are both remarkably similar and 2 remarkably undisturbed by the formal end of empire. The holiday films produced by a range of Britons visiting Kenya seem to follow a clear visual pattern that remained static in the 20 th century. Locating the repetitive aspects of culture produced by Britons while abroad in the empire is not a particularly new discovery for those engaged with empire studies, even if that repetition has seldom been the subject of sustained examination. One need only have a passing familiarity with John MacKenzie's 'Studies in Imperialism' series and other key works on the culture of empire to note the persistent similarities in material such as film, fiction, posters, soap advertisements and the like. 1 This imperial culture collectively fosters narratives that, at times, verge on an exhausting pastiche. 2 It is certainly the case that 'culture,' widely conceived, produced by metropolitan-based imperialists, travellers as tourists, and settlers, made for a series of cultural conventions of empire that are striking in their similarities. These conventions, and what we could even identify as a formula, underpin various terms used by scholars, such as the 'imperial gaze,' the 'imperial eye,' the 'colonial order', or, in an acknowledgement of the fixed nature of this trope, concepts of 'colonial nostalgia,' as Anna Bocking-Welch has argued. 3 The repetitive, stylized, and pe...

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Negation of the Negation

Yamamoto

2021

A Companion to Documentary Film History

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The Cinema and the (Common) Wealth of Nations

Cited by 18 publications

References 11 publications

The Moving Location of Empire: Indirect Rule, International Law, and theBantu Educational Kinema Experiment

The Moving Location of Empire: Indirect Rule, International Law, and theBantu Educational Kinema Experiment

Empire, Repetition, and Reluctant Subjects: British Home Movies of Kenya, 1928–72

Negation of the Negation

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