Films for the Colonies examines the British Government’s use of film across its vast Empire from the 1920s until widespread independence in the 1960s. Central to this work was the Colonial Film Unit, which produced, distributed, and, through its network of mobile cinemas, exhibited instructional and educational films throughout the British colonies. Using extensive archival research and rarely seen films, Films for the Colonies provides a new historical perspective on the last decades of the British Empire. It also offers a fresh exploration of British and global cinema, charting the emergence and endurance of new forms of cinema culture from Ghana to Jamaica, Malta to Malaysia. In highlighting the integral role of film in managing and maintaining a rapidly changing Empire, Tom Rice offers a compelling and far-reaching account of the media, propaganda, and the legacies of colonialism.
Tom Rice is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan.
“It is deliciously ironic that an institution created to administer an empire through film should become the exemplary case of imperial cinema’s dissolution. Tom Rice’s account, which has the potential to be a touchstone for institutional and imperial histories, shows us how the British Colonial Film Unit was precisely such an organization.”—Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space and Cinema at the End of Empire
“Brings to light a treasure trove of archival sources and films in a synthetic perspective that clarifies lingering mysteries regarding the organization of the British colonial film units. This remarkable book adds significant complexity to our understanding of government-sponsored documentary cinema.”—Peter J. Bloom, author of French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism
360 pp.6 x 9Illus: 41 b/w photographs
9780520300385$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Sep 2019