Watching Africans watch films: Theories of spectatorship in British Colonial Africa

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 197-211

  Burns, James ^a  

^a CLEMSON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0013143517     PISSN: 01439685     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/713669717     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Quoted in Gus Silber, Dream factory, Frontline (June 1986), p. 81.
2. William Sellers, Making films in and for the colonies, Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, (1953), p. 101.
3. Rosalyn Smyth, The development of British Colonial film policy, 1927-1939, with special reference to East and Central Africa, Journal of African History 20 (1979), pp. 437-450.
4. William Sellers, The production of films for primitive people, Oversea Education: A Journal of Educational Experiment and Research in Tropical and Sub-Tropical Areas, (October 1941), p. 221.
5. Sellers, Making films in and for the colonies, Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts 101 (1953), p. 831.
6. Sellers, The production of films for primitive people, 1941, p. 223.
7. Sellers, Making films in and for the colonies 1953, p. 831.
8. L. M. Ross, Africans and propaganda films, United Empire, (February 1940), p. 65.
9. During the Second World War when Machi Gaba was shown throughout Africa by the CFU it was much criticised by information officers. The Kenyan information officer remarked on its poor acting. See File S935/36/2, Information Office: Kenya File II. Kenya Information Office: History of Activities 1 Jan to 31 March 1944, 14 April 1944, held in the National Archives of Zimbabwe, Harare [hereafter NAZ]
10. Interview with Louis Forsdale published as Comments on work with film preliterates in Africa, Studies in Visual Communication (Winter 1983), p. 31.
11. Interview with Louis Nell, Borrowdale, Zimbabwe, 14 March 1997.
12. Report of the Colonial Films Committee (London, 1927), p. 23. While Sellers first films were made in 1929 he was already experimenting with films in 1926 and, thus, may have been the inspiration for this comment.
13. L. A. Notcutt and G. C. Latham, The African and the Cinema (London, 1937).
14. Putting film to work in the colonies, Colonial Development, a Magazine Devoted to Development in the Colonies 2, 1 (Summer 1956), pp. 16-18.
15. George Pearson, Health education by film in Africa, Colonial Cinema 7, 1 (March 1949), p. 17.
16. George Pearson, Flashback: The Autobiography of a British Film-maker (London, 1957), pp. 211-212.
17. Timothy Burke, Our Mosquitoes are Not So Large, Paper presented at the Yale Conference on Colonial Representation, January 1997, p. 3. Cited with the author's permission.
18. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: colonial power and African illness (Stanford, 1991), p. 191.
19. Interviews with Lovermore Mahlahla, 18 March 1997 Laurence Moringay, 7 May 1997, and Ben Musoni, 17 March 1997, Harare, Zimbabwe. For an interesting discussion of the dissemination of similar tales of audience credulity in the early cinema in Europe and America see Stephen Bottomore, The panicking audience? Early cinema and the 'train effect', Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 19, 2 (1999). According to Bottomore early film shows in Western Europe and the United States were accompanied by stories of audiences panicking at the sight of oncoming trains. In these anecdotes, which were in most cases greatly exaggerated and often apocryphal, the agitated audience members were invariably outsiders: rural 'rubes' or newly emigrated minorities. Bottomore observed that early urban audiences disseminated these stories as a way of identifying themselves as sophisticated, modern and discriminating, in distinction to their uncouth rural and foreign neighbours. Similarly, tales of African credulity served to confirm to colonial observers their intellectual and technological superiority over the peoples they ruled.
20. Smyth, Movies and Mandarius, p. 442.
21. Davis, p. 381.
22. Notcutt and Latham, The African and The Cinema, p. 146.
23. 24 October 1939, S935/37/1, NAZ.
24. Rosalyn Smyth, Movies and Mandarins: the official film and British Colonial Africa, in British Cinema History (New York, 1983), p. 132.
25. L. Van Bever, The cinema in the Belgian Congo, Colonial Review 3, (September 1952).
26. See Smyth, Movies and Mandarins, p. 134. According to Captain Dickson, 'Practically 100% of films sent out by the Ministry of Information proved quite impossible for Africans . . . The "angles" of photography are entirely European, and are either unintelligible or pointless to Africans'.
27. Quoted in The Use of Mobile Cinemas in Fundamental Education (Paris, 1949), p. 162.
28. Alan Izod, Some special features of colonial film production, The Film in Colonial Development (London, 1948), p. 28.
29. A. R. Baetta, The two worlds, Sight and Sound, 17, 65 (1948).
30. John Grierson, Film in British Colonial development, Ibid. , p. 3. Grierson, the father of the British Documentary Film Movement, took an active interest in colonial cinema and was considered briefly as a candidate to head the Central African Film Unit. See my doctoral dissertation Cinema and empire in Colonial Zimbabwe (University of California, South Barbara, 1998), p. 73.
31. G. Odunton, One step ahead, Colonial Cinema 8, 2 (1950), p. 29.
32. Champion of Kenya quoted in The Use of Mobile Cinemas, p. 82.
33. 28 June, 1951, Z S3269/61/4 PRO(51)29, Films - audience research (note by Colonial Film Unit), NAZ.
34. P. Morton Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria: a field study of the impact of fundamental-education films on rural audiences in Nigeria (Ibadan, 1953).
35. S932/34/1, Central African Council correspondence, Gale to the Secretary of the Central African Council, 2 January 1946, NAZ.
36. Rhodesia Herald, 12 February 1948, Copy in NAZ.
37. S926/F56, 1947-1952 Central African Film Unit (precis of work to be circulated to departments) 30 November 1948, NAZ.
38. Harry Franklin, The Central African screen, Colonial Cinema 8, 4 (December 1950), p. 86.
39. S926/F56, 1947-1952 Izod to C. Lawrence re Colonial Film Unit 17 October 1950, NAZ.