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 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.

There are increasing calls for access to imperial archives and the project will participate in, and organise, events providing forums for debate about decolonisation, reparation and restitution, particularly in relation to colonial film archives. The project aims to create a record of the perspectives of contemporary filmmakers and visual artists working critically with colonial films, who seek to access the histories of colonialism embedded within their imagery. 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. The project will run two symposiums, at Centre for Developing Societies, New Delhi, India and at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and will culminate with an international conference and gallery exhibitions, at Birkbeck, University of London, and Wellcome Centre, where films drawn from the archival collections as well as short films produced within the project will be screened. Under the auspices of the Afrika Eye Film Festival, Bristol, the project will offer educational workshops. Other dissemination plans include a website, a co-authored monograph, an edited collection of conference papers, the publication of journal articles, and short films using film footage from the collections.

This project will open up the colonial film collections of four partner archives and will extend discussion and debate across academic communities of film and history, other groups of scholars such as medical historians and anthropologists, and contemporary filmmakers and visual artists, as well as a wider public. It creates a unique opportunity to delve deeply into four colonial film collections created in the British empire, when film became a powerful means of official and unofficial record that is yet to have wider focus in histories of British cinema. It is this gap to which this project seeks to respond.