Abstract
In their 2011 edited volume Useful Cinema, Charles R Acland and Haidee Wasson argue that the majority of cinema scholarship misses an important feature of the medium by focusing on commercial public films. The 20th century, they note, witnessed not only the rise of entertainment cinema but also the creation of a vast universe of what the authors term ‘useful cinema’: educational and instructional films created by schools, public agencies, and private businesses. Such films – played on the walls of classrooms, exhibition halls, and offices – projected a different, yet equally important, vision of cinema’s place and purpose in modern life. Here, the medium was technology more than art: a tool for ‘making, persuading, instructing, demonstrating’ (Acland and Wasson, 2011: 6). To arrive at an accurate understanding of 20th-century film culture, they conclude, scholars must pivot away from theatrical releases and begin to consider film history’s entanglement with institutional history, exploring how cinema was ‘adapted to institutional directives, wielding influence outside of the multiplex and the art house’ (p. 13).
Tom Rice deploys ‘useful cinema’ as a foundational concept in Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire. The first in-depth study of the British Colonial Film Unit (CFU), it provides a meticulously researched survey of a cinema corps that has been largely neglected by historians of British film. In his choice of subject matter, Rice, who is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, heeds the advice of Acland and Wasson, joining a growing number of scholars focused on cinema’s 20th-century institutionalization and diffusion beyond the movie theater. Films for the Colonies analyzes film’s expediency to colonial administrators serving during the final years of the British Empire, ‘its usefulness [to] an empire in decline’ (p. 5). Rice showcases how film became a centerpiece of colonial administration, employed as an instrument of discipline and indoctrination; and he provocatively suggests that film’s ability to manage colonial populations and market empire – first identified in the interwar period – was largely responsible for the development of British nonfiction cinema writ large.
In Rice’s account, the CFU led a brief but revealing life, offering a useful ‘microcosm’ of the British Empire in its twilight decades (p. 12). Created in 1939 under the British Ministry of Information (MOI), the unit produced and distributed films for colonial audiences, before shuttering in 1955 amid mass decolonization movements. The first half of the book argues that the CFU’s activities during World War II formed a critical part of Britain’s last-ditch efforts to ‘foster imperialism and sustain’ their declining empire (p. 1); while the second half argues that, in the postwar, the unit played an important role in imperial dissolution, helping to ‘stage-manage’ Britain’s shift from a territorial empire to an agent of informal economic and cultural imperialism (p. 9).
The book’s five chapters proceed roughly chronologically, with chapter one providing a brief prehistory of the CFU that situates colonial propaganda film within a larger interwar movement to mobilize nonfiction cinema in the service of empire. According to Rice, notable precursors of the CFU include the Empire Marketing Board’s Film Unit (1926–1933), helmed by famed documentarian John Grierson, and British Instructional Films (1919–1932), a purveyor of pro-empire films aimed at English schoolchildren (p. 14). The creation of the CFU also arose out of colonial administrators’ ad hoc experimentations with the medium, in particular those of Rice’s protagonist, William Sellers. A sanitation inspector working in Nigeria, Sellers produced a number of disease-prevention movies for African audiences in the 1920s and 1930s – their popularity justified the necessity of a colonial-facing film unit, and landed Sellers the position of CFU director.
In revealing the shared heritage of documentary, educational, and colonial cinema, Rice makes one of the book’s key interventions, challenging film scholarship that has placed documentaries atop the hierarchy of nonfiction cinema (p. 17). Rice instead gives equal weight to documentary and instructional film, and even proposes that early British prestige documentaries be classified as ‘useful cinema’ – viewing them as ‘product[s] of interwar British imperial politics’ as much as inheritors of the filmic avantgarde (p. 15). Grierson, the celebrated father of the British Documentary Movement, and Sellers, a forgotten amateur filmmaker-cum-sanitation worker, are figures of equal importance to Rice, and ones whose careers he believes ‘run parallel’ (p. 14).
Pointing toward the common roots of documentary, educational, and colonial films does not, however, mean that films manufactured for metropolitan and colonial markets were identical. Although some CFU films carried messages similar to their English counterparts – promoting the empire and rallying support for the war effort – others were more explicitly patronizing in subject matter, advising colonial viewers on personal hygiene and home management, and touting the virtues of English domestic and sexual mores. For example, the popular 1940 CFU film Mr. English at Home centered on a typical English nuclear family, and issued, in the words of its director, a crucial ‘lesson [on] order and a clean home’ (p. 61).
Rice also explicates how CFU films were remarkably paternalistic in their style. Sellers thought colonial audiences too unintelligent and ‘illiterate’ to comprehend nuance and, as a result, he demanded that CFU productions be ‘simple’, that is, slow-paced and straightforwardly composed, with no abstraction or camera tricks (p. 65–66). Observing these dictates, Rice concludes that films made in the CFU’s first decade functioned as propaganda for the British Empire through form as well as content. In underestimating the visual literacy of colonial audiences, CFU films ‘assum[ed] British intellectual primacy’ (p. 65) and supplied colonial administrators with extra validation for their paternalistic presence overseas: who would teach Asian, African, and West Indian populations to become model spectators if not the CFU?
The CFU’s stance toward colonial subjects loosened after World War II, as the British Empire faced growing criticism from home and abroad, and as a new reformist Labour government assumed power. Rice concludes by demonstrating how the CFU shifted to decentralized and cooperative modes of filmmaking after 1946, setting up cinema units within Britain’s remaining colonies that provided training in film production to locals (p. 152). In the words of one CFU leader, speaking of the unit’s activities in Africa, the CFU would henceforth be ‘for Africans, with Africans, by Africans’, an ethos memorialized in the meta-movie A Film School in West Africa from 1949, showing a kindly, attentive white teacher instructing African pupils in film technique (p. 149). In Rice’s view, such films, which ‘idealiz[e] a developing partnership between colonizer and colonized’, are a large part of what made the CFU a critical player in the transition to independence (p. 185). Beyond launching filmmakers who would later lead postcolonial national cinemas – and thereby contributing to handover efforts – the unit worked to construct a flattering narrative of decolonization that established the peaceful transition of power as a defining achievement of the British Empire. With productions like A Film School in West Africa, the CFU preemptively whitewashed the violence and cruelty of the past decades, depicting British colonial rule as one that had been premised upon mutual aid and trust. ‘The films preceding independence’, Rice summarizes, ‘sought to obfuscate what empire had been, to simplify the narrative of “handover” by emphasizing cooperation, “British-led development”, and continued economic “partnership”’ (p. 230). In its turn toward developmentalism and globalization, the CFU offers a fascinating exemplar of the late British Empire, and of decolonization more broadly.
Rice effectively advances the CFU as an object worthy of critical inquiry by boldly placing it at the heart of British nonfiction film history, making his book a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of scholarship on nontheatrical cinema. But, although the story told here is excellent in its broad sweep, it falters a bit in its details – presenting at once too many and too few. Creating a work centered around ‘useful cinema’ requires Rice to balance the demands of institutional history and film history. Unfortunately, Films for the Colonies skews slightly toward the former, giving greater attention to ministers and ministries than to the movies cited in its title. Rice, for instance, devotes a large section of his third chapter to outlining skirmishes between the CFU and other film units housed in and around the MOI, but he dedicates frustratingly few pages to a thorough description of the competing films these bodies produced. While Rice provides a compelling overall hypothesis of how CFU films supported empire in both content and composition, his insights could be even more persuasive if better supported by evidence from the films themselves. Some films are mentioned by name only, and of those with comprehensive plot summaries, only a select portion receive satisfactory visual analysis. Beyond ‘simplicity’, one wonders, were there any other qualities of CFU films – unwitting or intentional – that marked them as inherently ‘colonial’? It would be helpful if Rice reflected more upon such topics. Adopting the framework of ‘useful cinema’ need not mean deemphasizing questions of form or neglecting art historical methodologies; and the book would be enriched with more close readings of scenes or frames from titles characteristic of CFU cinema. Nevertheless, Films for the Colonies provides a sturdy foundation for future studies of the CFU, one that scholars can build upon to shed further light on the unit’s rich, underexplored body of surviving films.