Colonialism and Postcolonialism

EUROPEAN COLONIAL CINEMA

By the time cinema was invented, well over half of the world's land mass was under the control of a handful of European powers, and a complex network of trade and travel routes traversing the globe had already been established in order to ensure the transnational flow of populations, capital, raw materials, and consumer goods. As a result, the equipment needed to make and view film moved fairly freely between the European metropolises and various colonial outposts, enabling cinema to assume an important role in the expansion and consolidation of individual empires. While films like Indochina produced "armchair conqistadores" (Stam and Spence, p. 4) by providing viewers in Europe with an opportunity to visit virtually those territories captured first by conquest and then on celluloid, screenings of European films at public venues in the colonies were occasions for settlers to convene and thereby affirm ties with each other as well as the distant homeland on screen.

While the fact of film's global reach served colonialism by creating a sense of familiarity and cohesion among the disparate populations affected by it, the images

propagated and stories told in such widely circulated texts did so by perpetuating its logic. Initially, the European colonies were featured prominently in two related varieties of primitive cinema: travelogues and ethnographic films, which offered representations of cultural differences in the name of tourism and science, respectively. Once film was pressed into the service of fictional storytelling, however, the colonies came to play a role in narrative cinema as well, occasionally as dramatic subject but more frequently as colorful backdrop to stories revolving around characters who were European by birth. Despite differences of form, content, address, and intent, these three types of film—travel, ethnographic, and fictional narrative—typically represented the colonial mise-en-scène and, in particular, its non-white inhabitants, in similar ways for they were all informed by the narratives of racial difference being produced by the discipline of anthropology.

It is impossible to untangle the histories of anthropology and colonialism since it was precisely European encounters with native peoples in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific during the exploration and subsequent settlement of those lands that inspired certain individuals to forge a systematic study of human diversity. At its outset, anthropology was propelled by a positivist impulse, and its earliest practitioners conceived of it as an unbiased evaluation and classification of cultures other than that of the white Westerner; in practice, however, it often devolved into a version of "race science," which posited the white male as the crowning achievement of historical progress and the non-white native as the embodiment of his evolutionary past. For this reason it can be argued that while colonialism was the modus operandi of the "white man's burden" (that is, the imperative to civilize "savages"), anthropology, with its racial typologies, provided its rationale.

As a medium capable of documenting those superficial phenomena with which racial identity was associated, such as skin color, hair texture, and head shape, and saving for posterity visual records of those races considered to be already vanishing, film (like photography before it) was pressed in the service of anthropology very early in its history. In fact, ethnographic (pre-) cinema got its start as early as 1895, when a student of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), Félix-Louis Regnault, produced a variety of chronophotographic studies of West African performers at the Paris Ethnographic Exposition of 1895 in the hopes of describing human evolution in terms of physical locomotion. Subsequent anthropologists, some of the earliest and most pioneering of which were Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940) and Walter Baldwin Spencer (1858–1940), both of whom shot footage of indigenous Australians around the turn of the twentieth century, continued working in this vein by incorporating not only images of movement, but also moving images into their methodology. In doing so, they institutionalized observational practices forged in other contexts (such as museums, world's fairs, laboratories, and the anthropological "field"), offering up a non-white body as scientific spectacle for mass consumption by white scientists and laypeople alike. One of the most profound effects of this representational practice has been the production of a gaze that, à la Said, positions its bearer and object in oppositional and mutually exclusive ways. On the one hand, deprived of historical agency, individual voice, and psychological complexity, the native is reduced to a racial type and, moreover, a sign of that which exists outside of or, more accurately, prior to (white) history; on the other, the viewer, while exercising the power to scrutinize, is reassured of his/her superiority as the civilized and modern norm against which difference is measured.

The fact that so many films have inherited the racialized iconography produced by anthropological discourse and codified in films made for the explicit purposes of scientific research has led critics such as Fatimah Rony to expand the definition of ethnographic cinema to include not only documentaries like Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922), but also certain fictional narrative films, such as King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933). While such a rhetorical move may cloud distinctions that can prove useful, there is good reason nonetheless to consider traditional ethnographic films, particularly those made in the colonial era, as tutor texts. Indeed, many fictions likewise construct non-white characters as Other to a white, Western self, be that self a hypothetical spectator, film director, and/or fictional character. The group of narrative films that most capitalizes on colonial fantasies of the primitive Other includes films that were made by European adventurer-cum-filmmakers who sought to deliver engaging dramas about non-European characters as well as a measure of "the real" in the form of on-location shooting, the use of non-professional actors, and the inclusion of purportedly authentic customs and activities. Exemplary of this mode of filmmaking are certain works by Gaston Méliès (1843–1915), brother to the more well-known Georges, and Flaherty. While Méliès traveled to New Zealand in 1913 to make three films that featured exclusively Maori casts ( Loved by a Maori Chieftess , Hinemoa , and How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride ), Flaherty had a hand in the creation of two stories set in the South Seas: Moana (1926), which he both wrote and directed, and Tabu (1931), co-written with the film's director, the celebrated German filmmaker F. W. Murnau (1888–1931).

While these hybrid films were popular among European audiences because they packaged ethnographic material in a conventional narrative form and thus made the foreign accessible, more conventional genre films that reify the self-other dynamic proved compelling for different reasons. More specifically, they foreground that which was familiar, European stars and Eurocentric stories, while also capitalizing upon the exotic cachet of the colonial mise-en-scène ; thus they relegate the colonized to the edges of the film narrative and frame, and engage with colonialism from the perspective of the colonizer, who is typically constructed as a benevolent emissary for European civilization. The result is a series of texts that glorifies empire, thereby fulfilling an ideological function that had become quite pressing by the 1930s, when these types of films crested in popularity in both Britain and France. From the former country came, among others, The Drum (1938) and The Four Feathers (1939) by Zoltan Korda, as well as King Solomon's Mines (Robert Stevenson, 1937), and from the latter country, L'Atlantide ( Lost Atlantis , Jacques Feyder, 1920), L'Appel du silence ( The Call , Léon Poirier, 1936), and Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937). The last of these films, which stars Jean Gabin as a legendary French thief on the lam in Morocco, is particularly noteworthy because it exemplifies the key attributes of colonial fiction films with such flair: it exploits its setting abroad for all its exotic appeal, visual vitality, and narrative possibilities by constructing the Casbah as a "teeming anthill," with sensual pleasures around every corner and a "jumble of mazes" that neither the local law enforcement officers nor outsiders can navigate, while simultaneously characterizing France as the apex of cultural sophistication to which Pépé seeks return.