Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections

From the beginnings of cinema in 1895, film cameras accompanied excursions into colonial worlds and recorded the activities of colonial officers, missionaries, anthropologists and various personnel such as doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and their families. The role of film in the making of empire has only recently been gaining traction in film history. Whilst official film histories have been most prevalent, unofficial film production has had less attention. ‘Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections’ overturns this trajectory by focusing on the colonial film collections in four unique archives, the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, the British Film Institute, Royal Anthropological Institute and Wellcome Collection. The project, funded by the UKRI, is a collaboration between three scholars who are specialists in the field and have worked together in a research network for several years.

The research will cover the period from 1920 up to 1980, by which time many British colonies had gained independence. The project will analyse colonial film held in the four archives in relation to the historical contexts of the countries and locales where they were produced. We will explore the infrastructures, networks and technologies that their production drew upon and the means by which they circulated. We will expand the production histories and contexts of films, identifying the people involved in their making and their positions in colonial offices or other colonial enterprises. The project is especially interested in the representations of colonialism that the films in these collections embody, particularly in relation to race, gender, ethnicity, and culture. The project will achieve an in-depth view of the films held in each collection that will extend knowledge and understanding of film and its role in the making of the British empire.

‘Colonial Reels’ is a response to increasing calls for access to imperial archives and to debates about decolonisation, reparation and restitution. To this end, the project also focuses on questions of archive, particularly as it pertains to histories of colonial film holdings and how archives matter both historically and in relation to the world in which we live.

Researchers

PI: Jacqueline Maingard, Associate Professor in Film and Television, University of Bristol.

Co-I: Samantha Iwowo, Principal Academic in Directing Drama for Film and Television, Bournemouth University.

Co-I: Emma Sandon, Researcher in Film and Television, Birkbeck, University of London 

British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, Kosten collection 9, ‘Dosing the River Niger with DDT in the campaign against river blindness’, 1963.