Sawyer Seminar Session Number One: Empire’s Institutions & Documentary Economies
In “Documentary and the Long Twentieth Century,” Lee Grieveson examined how the cinema was enmeshed with the global expansion of capitalism and imperialism between 1880 and World War 2. Drawing from case studies that included early cinema’s documentation of the Spanish American War of 1898, the mobile film units directed by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) throughout the nation’s rural regions during the teens and twenties, and, later, the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE) that unfolded in English East Africa in the mid-1930s, Grieveson showed how film culture was utilized for a variety of purposes in support of the state and its geopolitical designs. It displayed technological, infrastructural and military might, contributed to pedagogical imperatives to socialize the body politic and stimulate economic growth, and helped regulate the laboring body to ensure maximum productivity. Moreover, he advocated for an expanded understanding of “documentary”—one pliant enough to include a volatile mixture of actuality footage, dramatization, and narrative, a mixture common among non-theatrical and pedagogical films produced prior to John Grierson’s christening of the form in 1926. By pushing against normative—and at times constraining—definitions, Grieveson provocatively set out to reclaim the term “propaganda” from film studies’ lexical dustbin. The methodological effect unmoors film study from close analysis of style and form or contextual inquiry into audiences’ phenomenological encounters with media to prioritize the institutional frameworks that marshaled the cinema as an infrastructural support to territorial and economic imperialism.
“Quite simply,” stated Grieveson, “the state began to systematically make use of the supposed affective or pedagogic power of film, as well as its mobility, its status as emblematic of a machine made economic modernity, and its figural articulation of government to position movie watching as a technique of government management to facilitate the conditions for capital accumulation.” While English colonialism aided territorial expansion and U.S. economic imperialism operated through “softer” measures that culminated in Hollywood’s culture hegemony, both nonetheless laid the infrastructural groundwork for the adoption of liberal economic and social values that condition today’s global economy. And yet Grieveson likewise questioned the efficacy of the state’s cinematic imperatives, noting that the English experiments failed to forestall their empire’s impending collapse. Asking, however, whether propaganda “worked” seems to invest too heavily in cultural causality, i.e. one’s encounter with a particular film, especially given Grieveson’s erudite emphasis on the global networks of exchange that powered the movement of men and material, goods and resources, from the center to the periphery and back. In fact, I would suggest, given the racial ideologies undergirding organizations such as the USDA or BEKE, that examining the exhibition contexts and ideological aporias of non-theatrical cinema allows for a dialectical historiography—one that places the operations of the base in dynamic relation to the superstructure and is capable of more supple understandings of film’s “supposed affective or pedagogical power.” What is more, in spaces of colonial subjugation, it reopens questions about cultural agency where economic exploitation reigned.
While Lee Grieveson expounded upon documentary’s involvement in the consolidation of imperial infrastructures, Priya Jaikumar’s screening and discussion of colonial and post-colonial films from India demonstrated how the purported rupture of independence in fact evidenced the continued legacy of colonial media’s institutions. Her emphasis on Indian national cinema’s development out of its colonial institutions proves the past’s inextricable imbrication with the present and thus future when forming national identity. Moreover, it allows for a more “fine-grained” (to borrow Greg Waller’s term) inquiry into local cinematic practices.
Jaikumar’s selections, which included The Outcast (1943), Coronation in the Himalayas (1953), Wives and Wives (1962), I Am Twenty (1967), and Kahankar : Ahankar (Story Maker : Story Taker) (1996) indicated such changes and continuities within filmmaking institutions and styles across the historical divide that was independence in 1947. Furthermore, the films were a glimpse into how the cinema shaped the social and political imaginaries of the new nation. Wives and Wives, for instance, an animated short about how best to choose a wife, reinscribed normative gender roles and promoted a thrifty homemaking ethos. While such retrograde messages are unsurprising, what makes the film ultimately fascinating is how it frames marriage as an act of consumerism, a doubtless response to India’s growing modernity, desire for commodity cultures, and inability to escape the ideological sway of the neoliberal agenda so evocatively described by Grieveson.
This desire for modernity manifest as a key component of national identity in I Am Twenty, a tapestry of youth captured with direct cinema techniques that set out to give voice and visibility to India’s first postcolonial generation. Traveling from city to country, the film juxtaposed the old and the new of a nation in flux—lingering economic inequity abuts new industrial initiatives while men and women express desires for national development, consumer goods, and careers in burgeoning economic sectors. Some strive to be a great scientist or general in the military. Another, without irony, wishes to obtain job security within the state bureaucracy and his superior’s daughter’s hand in marriage. By contrast, a seemingly carefree hippie abjures money, disdains work, and appears content to sing The Beatles, an equally ironic embrace of the former colonial masters’ global cultural hegemony. India’s social heterogeneity, rendered by I Am Twenty through an editing logic that seeks to produce unity out of the nation’s disunity, manifests ultimately as the liberal ideological gesture par excellence—for this generation, modernity may emerge unevenly, but progress nonetheless indicates a fundamentally stable, if not equitable, status quo that ensures the fulfillment of desire and the incorporation of multiple lifestyles under the aegis of the postcolonial state.
Jaikumar further elaborated on the role of ideology in Indian post/colonial cinema in “Film Space and State Space in Documentary Cinema.” Focusing, in part, on landscape documentaries such as N. S. Thapa’s Everest (1968), about the first Indian mission to scale the peak, Jaikumar explored how India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting produced films that helped naturalize the nation as territorially and symbolically equivalent to its land. This was especially challenging given the variegated nature of the India’s topography and the need to educate its heterogeneous population. To attend to this diversity, state-sponsored documentaries employed a range of discourses and drew from a polyglot assortment of styles that ultimately resulted in a “catalog aesthetic” where scientific, spiritual, literary, and ethnographic materials would be supplemented by recycled footage. Jaikumar’s spatial heuristic, in fact, expands beyond state-sanctioned sites of production towards the imaginary horizons enframed on screen. “[Films] shape and invade our spatial imaginaries, representing and reconstituting our encounters with locations,” she offered. “Films are also spatial because they are material ‘things’ that circulate within, and are functionally defined in relation to the state, civil society, and the market, whose contours they also express,” she continued. To think of how films emerge from and reside within countless social spaces—from production through exhibition, at work and home—is to see space and thus our subjective relationships to it as multiple, overlapping, and historically layered.
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