Abstract
Since the early 1990s, research on European colonialism has highlighted the ways that states have relied on the exercise of cultural technologies to govern native populations and make imperial territories serve larger projects of modernization and nation-building.1 The cinema must be counted among these cultural technologies, and both democracies and dictatorships employed it to facilitate imperialist projects of charting and policing territories, races, and national and social identities.2 The relationship of cinema and colonialism thus encompasses not only the making of films on colonial themes but allows us to explore the importance of the category of the visual within colonial culture, the ways that colonial images legitimized metropolitan discourses about class, nation, and gender, and how cinematic representations helped to shape popular and ethnographic conceptions of the primitive.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See on this Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992);
Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
See Prem Chowdhry, Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000);
David Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France (1919–39) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001);
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 1 (1996): 127–144;
Ella Shohat, “Imagining Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire,” Public Culture 3, no. 2 (1991): 41–70.
Studies that touch on these issues include Assenka Oksiloff, Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema (New York: Palgrave, 2001);
Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference. Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn of the Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001);
Christopher Faulkner, “Affective Identities: French National Cinema and the 1930s,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3, no. 2 (1994): 3–29;
Robert Stam and Louise Spencer, “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction,” Screen 23 (1983): 4–20;
Hamid Naficy and Teshome Gabriel, eds., Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (Langhorne, PA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993);
Robin Pickering-Iazzi, “Structures of Feminine Fantasy and Italian Empire Building, 1930–1940,” Italica 77, no. 3 (2000): 400–417.
On the visual culture of Italian colonialism, see the essays in Nicola Labanca, ed., L’Africa in vetrina. Storie di musei e di esposizioni coloniali in Italia (Paese, Treviso: Pagus, 1992). On Italian colonial film, see
Jean Gili and Gianpiero Brunetta, L’orn africana nel cinema italiano (Trent: La Grafica, 1990);
James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 181–200.
See Jessica Dubow, “From a View on the World to a Point of View in It: Rethinking Sight, Space, and the Colonial Subject,” Interventions 2, no. 1 (2000): 87–102;
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992);
Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993). For a collection of newer approaches to spectatorship, see the essays in
Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, “Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New Order’ Java,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 1 (2000): 4–48, 6.
On the place of cinema within fascist strategies of mass reeducation, see Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, eds., Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002);
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy; and
Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film. The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1930–1943 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
See Barbara Sörgoni, Parole e corpi. Antropología, discorso giuridico epolitiche sessuali interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea 1890–1941 (Naples: Liguori, 1998);
Gianni Dore, Antropología e colonialismo italiano (Bologna: Miscellanea, 1996);
Francesco Surdich, L’esplorazione italiana dell’ Africa (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1992); and David Atkinson’s chapter in the present volume. On the Exhibition of Overseas Territories, see Gianni Dore,”Ideologia coloniale e senso comune etnografico nella Mostra delie Terre d’Oltremare,” in Labanca, L’Africa in vetrina, 47–65.
The phrase “uncontrolled visual field” is from David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 69;
Marc Ferro, “The Fiction Film and Historical Analysis,” in The Historian and Film, ed. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 81. See also
Leslie Devereux and Roger Hillman, eds., Fields of Vision. Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Peter Ian Crawford and David Turton, eds., Film as Ethnography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); and
Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture. Explorations of Film and Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
On this film see Robin Pickering-Iazzi, “Ways of Looking in Black and White: Female Spectatorship and the Miscege-national Body in Sotto la Croce del Sud,” in Re-Viewing Fascism, ed. Reich and Garofalo, 194–222; Ben-Ghiat, “Envisioning Modernity,” 135–142; and Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus. Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–1943 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 197–200.
For such contradictions within Italian fascist colonial films, see Ben-Ghiat, “Envisioning Modernity”; and the essays by Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Giorgio Bertellini, and Cecilia Boggio in A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). On film stars and their audiences in fascist Italy, see Stephen Gundle, “Film Stars and Society in Fascist Italy,” in Re-Viewing Fascism, ed. Reich and Garofalo, 315–339; on female spectatorship more generally see
Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994).
Ambler and Vasudevan conclude that spectatorship in situations of linguistic blockage resembles the visceral and interactive viewing modes of the silent screen’s “cinema of attractions”: Ambler, “Popular Films and Colonial Audiences,” 89; Vasudevan, “Addressing the Spectator,” 319; and, for the concept behind it, Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI Pub., 1990).
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.
See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990);
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1978); and
Luisa Passerini, Torino operaia e fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 1982).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ben-Ghiat, R. (2005). The Italian Colonial Cinema: Agendas and Audiences. In: Ben-Ghiat, R., Fuller, M. (eds) Italian Colonialism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8158-5_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8158-5_16
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-60636-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8158-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)