By Fatmir Terziu
Film, documentary and Empire depicted historical and natural events which help films exoticed people and place. It can be said that they always had been important elements to keep alive memory of the past into bizarre, spectacular, natural and picturesque films. According to MacKenzie “film represented a technological revolution” (1984:69). For Constantine “the influence of the cinema is the greatest advertising power in the world’ (1986:208). Lurking beneath on theory Landsberg argues that film is “the dialectic of memory, politics of empathy”, while for Jameson, Huyseen and Elsaesser it is “more problematic view, more negative politics of nostalgia”. Cinema is central to the mediation of memory in modern life. This essay aims to show how film, documentary and Empire attitudes and performances influenced to explore films exoticised people and place. Further it tries to analyse the film Song of Ceylon and some of the films related to the theme.
The early 20th century was a time when “documentaries had inspired early film makers” and the propaganda looked rich throughout the British Empire (MacKenzie, 1984:69). Particularly for film makers who had been caught in the mood of opposition to established culture in this period, it seemed that the formal victories won against traditional forms of documentary in those years held the key to a host of new aesthetic possibilities. And yet by 1903 “fictionalised film began to dominate with its narrative, plot and action” that were far in advance of documentary techniques (Owen: 2006, Lecture 3 Film and Memory).
The imperial idea in documentaries was in the first place articulated through the travelogue and exploration film. Films such as Mesopotamia – examples of ancient architecture (1918) are very personalised and reflexive; to some extent they can almost be enigmatic to the viewer as a result. These films also often have a very minimal structure since they are going to be shown to friends and family by the filmmaker who will be able to supply their own commentary. They tried to match the entertainment value of fiction film and focused on the spectacular, the bizarre and the exotic. These films were not about conquest that had already happened. The Empire was relatively ‘mature’ and indeed, was moving towards crisis. Evidence can be found of this strain in the films of this period, but they are few and far between. This is because documentary film was used to sustain the idea of Empire. This idea was seen as a method of training and educating all the peoples of the Empire in citizenship, work and other.
The Imperial Conference of 1926 accepted a sub-committee report which claimed that ‘the Cinema is not merely a form of entertainment but…a powerful instrument of education…’ (Constantine, p: 208). This didactic use for documentary film also promoted British imperial values abroad. Later, documentaries were used by corporate sponsors and government to proselytise the imperial idea. “By 1926 the power of film to influence public opinion, action and consumer taste widely assumed in official circles. According to Thompson cinema had “a powerful influence on the public’s views on the Empire” (Thompson, 2005:89). This powerful influence in films such as British Community in Cairo, 1935-40 therefore, was either about colonial life or where colonial life and native life met. It was never about life for the ordinary ‘subject’ people, and mostly in these films demonstrates precisely how distant relations were between the two groups.
The 1930s represented an extraordinary rebirth of the imperial adventure tradition. One other great technical innovation in popular culture, the wireless, made an equally effective and ubiquitous impact. Few developments contributed more to the conversation of pride in Empire into a domestic emollient. Films such as Song of Ceylon (1934) impart the message that nature and native traditions can coexist harmoniously with modernity. Song of Ceylon proposes a benign, rather than ruthless, message of progress, stressing the benefits of technological innovations. The first two sections, The Budha and The Virgin Island, focused on native rituals and working practices. The third section of this film, The Voices of Commerce, is contrast of other sections, while in the last section, The Apparel of a God, the viewers return again to the natives partaking in another ceremony. Song of Ceylon was made by the GPO Film Unit and sponsored by both the Empire Tea Marketing Board and the Ceylon Tea Board. Song of Ceylon is not promoting idea of Ceylon, but promoting the product. This film explores the local culture and traditions. It randomly is called travel book of Ceylon and is one of the most critically acclaimed products of the documentary film movement. Song of Ceylon received the award for best film at the International Film Festival in Brussels, 1935. The film is a sophisticated documentary, notable for its experimentation with sound. The music is composed by European composer.
To sum up, film, documentary and Empire attitudes and performances influenced to explore films exoticised people and place. I have clearly argued that film and documentary crucially underpinned the whole operation of British Empire. Further I have tried to examine the help of the documentary, film and Empire in detail especially the ways that they helped to create films exoticised people and place. The particular proposition is that in this period of British imperialism, the help of the cinema and documentary were brought together by a British commitment to reproduce overseas the kind of hierarchical society that, all believe, existed in Britain. The general proposition is that the help of film, documentary and Empire to create exotic people and place is inseparable and must be studied as a seamless whole.
Reference:
Constantine, Stephen (1986) Bringing the Empire Alive quoted in Mackenzie’s Eds. Imperialism and Popular Culture (1st Ed) Manchester: Manchester University
Press, p. 208.
Jameson, Huyseen, Andreas and Elsaesser (2006) Mention by Dr. Jenny Owen in Lecture 3: Film and memory.
Landsberg, Alison (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, London: Routledge.
MacKenzie, John M. (1984) Propaganda and Empire The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960 (1st Ed) Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 69-90.
Thompson, Andrew (2005) The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-nineteenth Century (1st Ed) London: Longman, pp. 89- 90.
Also read some research about Cultural Memory:
Andreas Huyseen:
Huyseen suggests that the struggle for memory is ultimately also a struggle for history and against high-tech amnesia. He is worried about the power of media. The high-tech according to Huyseen has elements of apocalypse and panacea, and it does profound effects on the ways we think and live cultural memory. There are widespread debates about memory in the cultural, social, and natural sciences. Huyseen focuses his argument on the problem of the national identity, which increasingly discussed in terms of cultural or collective memory, rather than in terms of the assumed identity of nation and state.
Memory is not simply a function of the fin de siecle syndrome, but it is a sign of the crisis of that Huyseen called structure of temporality that marked the age of modernity with its celebration of the new as utopian, as radically and irreducibly other. At last for Huyseen there is evidence for the view that capitalist culture is inherently amnesiac. The difficulty of the current conjuncture is to think memory and amnesia together rather than simply to oppose them. In retrospect we can see how the historical fever of Nietzsche’s times functioned to invent national traditions.
Alison Landsberg:
Memory is not commonly imagined as a site of possibility for progressive politics. More often, memory, particularly in the form of nostalgia, is condemned for its solipsistic nature, for its tendency to draw people into the past instead of the present. Landsberg sees this as a case in Bigelow’s 19995 film Strange Days, in which the use of memory - usually another person’s memory - is figured as form of addiction. Avoiding the criticism Landsberg revealed that the commodification of memory as depicted in Strange Days, only exacerbates this problem.
In 1913, Max Scheler published The Nature of Sympathy, in which he attempts to explore the contours of sympathy, empathy and fellow –feeling. For Landsberg one of the most dramatic instances of how mass media generate empathy is through the production and dissemination of memory. Such memories bridge the temporal chasms that separate individuals from the meaningful and potentially interpellative events of the past. Landsberg called this prosthetic. ‘Prosthetic memories’ are ‘personal memories’, but because they are not natural they conjure up more public past, a past that is not at all privatised.
According to Landsberg there are four reasons. First they are not natural, second they are worn of the body, third signals their interchangeability and exchangeability, and last they feel real.
Anna Reading:
Film and television programmes about the Holocaust are generally perceived by critics as more controversial and problematic in relation to history and memory that written autobiographical account. For Reading films are key medium in our social inheritance of the history and memory of the Holocaust. But moving images, present us with a translation of events; whether propaganda, liberation footage, documentary or feature films, they are not historical documents.
At the same time, film and television are recognised by many as major forms through which Holocaust history enters collective memory. What is also significant about this can be seen in the arguments that Reading reveals about Memory of the Camps. Reading argues ‘the Jewish identity of prisoners is rarely mentioned’. However Reading argues that the viewing of programmes about the Holocaust on TV has pulled the subject into everyday thoughts and feelings of millions of viewers. At last it is important to understand that documentary films about Holocaust from a gendered perspective is not counting heads or giving emphasis to women’s perspectives: it is about recognising that sometimes the gendered facts of Nazi genocide can only be articulated by visual absence, made manifest by the filmed witness of men’s words and faces on the screen.
Daniel Rubinstein:
For Rubenstein call phones are known to sprout with inessential accessories. The phone that can take digital photographs did not seem to be principally different from these other crossbreed implements. The images obtained from these cameras were only good to ‘muck about’, in the words of the first advertising campaign for these phones.
The growing popularity of camera-phones redefines not only mobile communications but also familiar models of acquisition and dissemination of visual information. Rubenstein argues with facts from Japan, USA, South Korea and Scotland. For him also cameraphone added a new pose to the vocabulary of street styles. Until recently, the use of a camera in public life was subject to a very strict social code. However photography enters everyday not because the everyday is now more photogenic but because the camera as a separate entity is no longer needed for the act of photography. Rubinstein is looking from manipulation to evidence, explaining that the cameraphone photograph has an authenticity that is absent from most other types of photographic images. At last the camera is instantly available whenever we are faced with the prospect of dead time on our hands; you look around to see if there is anything to take picture of. From the process of looking you differentiate between sites, selecting some, rejecting others.
Film, documentary and Empire depicted historical and natural events which help films exoticed people and place. It can be said that they always had been important elements to keep alive memory of the past into bizarre, spectacular, natural and picturesque films. According to MacKenzie “film represented a technological revolution” (1984:69). For Constantine “the influence of the cinema is the greatest advertising power in the world’ (1986:208). Lurking beneath on theory Landsberg argues that film is “the dialectic of memory, politics of empathy”, while for Jameson, Huyseen and Elsaesser it is “more problematic view, more negative politics of nostalgia”. Cinema is central to the mediation of memory in modern life. This essay aims to show how film, documentary and Empire attitudes and performances influenced to explore films exoticised people and place. Further it tries to analyse the film Song of Ceylon and some of the films related to the theme.
The early 20th century was a time when “documentaries had inspired early film makers” and the propaganda looked rich throughout the British Empire (MacKenzie, 1984:69). Particularly for film makers who had been caught in the mood of opposition to established culture in this period, it seemed that the formal victories won against traditional forms of documentary in those years held the key to a host of new aesthetic possibilities. And yet by 1903 “fictionalised film began to dominate with its narrative, plot and action” that were far in advance of documentary techniques (Owen: 2006, Lecture 3 Film and Memory).
The imperial idea in documentaries was in the first place articulated through the travelogue and exploration film. Films such as Mesopotamia – examples of ancient architecture (1918) are very personalised and reflexive; to some extent they can almost be enigmatic to the viewer as a result. These films also often have a very minimal structure since they are going to be shown to friends and family by the filmmaker who will be able to supply their own commentary. They tried to match the entertainment value of fiction film and focused on the spectacular, the bizarre and the exotic. These films were not about conquest that had already happened. The Empire was relatively ‘mature’ and indeed, was moving towards crisis. Evidence can be found of this strain in the films of this period, but they are few and far between. This is because documentary film was used to sustain the idea of Empire. This idea was seen as a method of training and educating all the peoples of the Empire in citizenship, work and other.
The Imperial Conference of 1926 accepted a sub-committee report which claimed that ‘the Cinema is not merely a form of entertainment but…a powerful instrument of education…’ (Constantine, p: 208). This didactic use for documentary film also promoted British imperial values abroad. Later, documentaries were used by corporate sponsors and government to proselytise the imperial idea. “By 1926 the power of film to influence public opinion, action and consumer taste widely assumed in official circles. According to Thompson cinema had “a powerful influence on the public’s views on the Empire” (Thompson, 2005:89). This powerful influence in films such as British Community in Cairo, 1935-40 therefore, was either about colonial life or where colonial life and native life met. It was never about life for the ordinary ‘subject’ people, and mostly in these films demonstrates precisely how distant relations were between the two groups.
The 1930s represented an extraordinary rebirth of the imperial adventure tradition. One other great technical innovation in popular culture, the wireless, made an equally effective and ubiquitous impact. Few developments contributed more to the conversation of pride in Empire into a domestic emollient. Films such as Song of Ceylon (1934) impart the message that nature and native traditions can coexist harmoniously with modernity. Song of Ceylon proposes a benign, rather than ruthless, message of progress, stressing the benefits of technological innovations. The first two sections, The Budha and The Virgin Island, focused on native rituals and working practices. The third section of this film, The Voices of Commerce, is contrast of other sections, while in the last section, The Apparel of a God, the viewers return again to the natives partaking in another ceremony. Song of Ceylon was made by the GPO Film Unit and sponsored by both the Empire Tea Marketing Board and the Ceylon Tea Board. Song of Ceylon is not promoting idea of Ceylon, but promoting the product. This film explores the local culture and traditions. It randomly is called travel book of Ceylon and is one of the most critically acclaimed products of the documentary film movement. Song of Ceylon received the award for best film at the International Film Festival in Brussels, 1935. The film is a sophisticated documentary, notable for its experimentation with sound. The music is composed by European composer.
To sum up, film, documentary and Empire attitudes and performances influenced to explore films exoticised people and place. I have clearly argued that film and documentary crucially underpinned the whole operation of British Empire. Further I have tried to examine the help of the documentary, film and Empire in detail especially the ways that they helped to create films exoticised people and place. The particular proposition is that in this period of British imperialism, the help of the cinema and documentary were brought together by a British commitment to reproduce overseas the kind of hierarchical society that, all believe, existed in Britain. The general proposition is that the help of film, documentary and Empire to create exotic people and place is inseparable and must be studied as a seamless whole.
Reference:
Constantine, Stephen (1986) Bringing the Empire Alive quoted in Mackenzie’s Eds. Imperialism and Popular Culture (1st Ed) Manchester: Manchester University
Press, p. 208.
Jameson, Huyseen, Andreas and Elsaesser (2006) Mention by Dr. Jenny Owen in Lecture 3: Film and memory.
Landsberg, Alison (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, London: Routledge.
MacKenzie, John M. (1984) Propaganda and Empire The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960 (1st Ed) Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 69-90.
Thompson, Andrew (2005) The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-nineteenth Century (1st Ed) London: Longman, pp. 89- 90.
Also read some research about Cultural Memory:
Andreas Huyseen:
Huyseen suggests that the struggle for memory is ultimately also a struggle for history and against high-tech amnesia. He is worried about the power of media. The high-tech according to Huyseen has elements of apocalypse and panacea, and it does profound effects on the ways we think and live cultural memory. There are widespread debates about memory in the cultural, social, and natural sciences. Huyseen focuses his argument on the problem of the national identity, which increasingly discussed in terms of cultural or collective memory, rather than in terms of the assumed identity of nation and state.
Memory is not simply a function of the fin de siecle syndrome, but it is a sign of the crisis of that Huyseen called structure of temporality that marked the age of modernity with its celebration of the new as utopian, as radically and irreducibly other. At last for Huyseen there is evidence for the view that capitalist culture is inherently amnesiac. The difficulty of the current conjuncture is to think memory and amnesia together rather than simply to oppose them. In retrospect we can see how the historical fever of Nietzsche’s times functioned to invent national traditions.
Alison Landsberg:
Memory is not commonly imagined as a site of possibility for progressive politics. More often, memory, particularly in the form of nostalgia, is condemned for its solipsistic nature, for its tendency to draw people into the past instead of the present. Landsberg sees this as a case in Bigelow’s 19995 film Strange Days, in which the use of memory - usually another person’s memory - is figured as form of addiction. Avoiding the criticism Landsberg revealed that the commodification of memory as depicted in Strange Days, only exacerbates this problem.
In 1913, Max Scheler published The Nature of Sympathy, in which he attempts to explore the contours of sympathy, empathy and fellow –feeling. For Landsberg one of the most dramatic instances of how mass media generate empathy is through the production and dissemination of memory. Such memories bridge the temporal chasms that separate individuals from the meaningful and potentially interpellative events of the past. Landsberg called this prosthetic. ‘Prosthetic memories’ are ‘personal memories’, but because they are not natural they conjure up more public past, a past that is not at all privatised.
According to Landsberg there are four reasons. First they are not natural, second they are worn of the body, third signals their interchangeability and exchangeability, and last they feel real.
Anna Reading:
Film and television programmes about the Holocaust are generally perceived by critics as more controversial and problematic in relation to history and memory that written autobiographical account. For Reading films are key medium in our social inheritance of the history and memory of the Holocaust. But moving images, present us with a translation of events; whether propaganda, liberation footage, documentary or feature films, they are not historical documents.
At the same time, film and television are recognised by many as major forms through which Holocaust history enters collective memory. What is also significant about this can be seen in the arguments that Reading reveals about Memory of the Camps. Reading argues ‘the Jewish identity of prisoners is rarely mentioned’. However Reading argues that the viewing of programmes about the Holocaust on TV has pulled the subject into everyday thoughts and feelings of millions of viewers. At last it is important to understand that documentary films about Holocaust from a gendered perspective is not counting heads or giving emphasis to women’s perspectives: it is about recognising that sometimes the gendered facts of Nazi genocide can only be articulated by visual absence, made manifest by the filmed witness of men’s words and faces on the screen.
Daniel Rubinstein:
For Rubenstein call phones are known to sprout with inessential accessories. The phone that can take digital photographs did not seem to be principally different from these other crossbreed implements. The images obtained from these cameras were only good to ‘muck about’, in the words of the first advertising campaign for these phones.
The growing popularity of camera-phones redefines not only mobile communications but also familiar models of acquisition and dissemination of visual information. Rubenstein argues with facts from Japan, USA, South Korea and Scotland. For him also cameraphone added a new pose to the vocabulary of street styles. Until recently, the use of a camera in public life was subject to a very strict social code. However photography enters everyday not because the everyday is now more photogenic but because the camera as a separate entity is no longer needed for the act of photography. Rubinstein is looking from manipulation to evidence, explaining that the cameraphone photograph has an authenticity that is absent from most other types of photographic images. At last the camera is instantly available whenever we are faced with the prospect of dead time on our hands; you look around to see if there is anything to take picture of. From the process of looking you differentiate between sites, selecting some, rejecting others.
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