Colonialism in the dictionary of western cinema/The image of imperialism on the silver screen

Fars News Agency – Cinema Group: Western colonialism has been one of the topics and sometimes one of the popular themes of European and American films since the beginning of the cinema industry. Cinema continued the 19th-century trend of Western Europe and America in telling romantic, xenophobic, and patriotic stories of expansion, conquest, and increasingly the mission or delivery of the benefits of “civilization” to “inferior races.” Such stories have already been told in paintings, popular books, museums, illustrated magazines, juvenile literature, and comics. Throughout the decades of the 20th century, films with “imperial” and “colonial” themes celebrated and glorified imperial adventures and colonial triumphs and crises. Popular films about the nature of colonialism, especially as experienced from the perspective of indigenous Africans and Asians, were more myth than reality.

Francis Saundersthe famous American journalist and researcher writes in the book “Cultural Cold War: The CIA Organization in the Field of Culture and Art”.Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (one of the top CIA experts and famous producers) stated that for what I have to produce as a series of American films with the idea of ​​a crusade for freedom, I intend to show the characteristics of America to the people so that our audiences around the world They will be influenced by these features and see it as the only way to freedom.” He writes: “In addition to promoting the crusade for freedom, these films were supposed to honor the supremacy of the heroic man (an American myth) by expressing the requirements of Americanism, conscientiousness, response to orders.” On April 23, 1953, “Cecil B. DuMille” (a famous filmmaker) was appointed as a special consultant to the government in Hollywood cinema and created an organization called MPS to distribute the works of the Pentagon and the CIA, with facilities of 135 service posts in 87 countries. It created a huge distribution network for American films and cinema.

Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi A member of the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution says about Western cinema: Those who create works in the name of entertainment are not just looking for entertainment, but they are looking to induce a thought to their audience. 25% of US GDP is for public opinion. Whether creating a story or producing a film, etc., what Western cinema is looking for is to humiliate reality to scare people, which is pursued with specific goals.

* Colonial confrontations between Europeans and non-Europeans

After World War II (1945-1939), and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, Western filmmakers began to depict colonial encounters in more sophisticated and nuanced ways. In the first decade of the 21st century, cinema around the world, both from the point of view of the filmmakers and the audience, was attracted to the themes of Western colonialism and especially the difficult issues and problems arising from the colonial confrontations between Europeans and non-Europeans.

*1900 The beginning of colonial themes in Western cinema

Colonialism in motion pictures began at the dawn of the cinema industry in the late 1900s. Fifty-second film reel about the French colony of Anam (central Vietnam) in Indochina by Gabriel Verre (1936-1871), an associate of the Lumiere brothers (August [۱۸۶۲-۱۹۵۴] and Louis Jean [۱۸۶۴-۱۹۴۸] Lumiere (inventor of cinema in Europe) was made in 1897. Entitled Enfants annamites ramassant des sapeques devant la pagode des dames, the short film shows two French women giving money to a group of Vietnamese children who scramble and fight for every penny.

* Highlighting the barbarians for the purpose of comparison and colonial influence

Only a small fraction of French films made in the 1920s and 1930s had colonial or exotic themes. Franco-Moroccan films of the 1920s respected local Berber customs, and the best “colonial” French films of the era were Le Sang d’Allah (Blood of God, dir. Levitz Morat, 1922), Ito (dir. Jean-Benoit Levy, 1934 ) and “Pépé le Moko” (directed by Julien Duvivier, 1937) presented realistic and ethnographic representations of North Africa. The crime film Pépé le Moko was popular in America. The film was remade by Hollywood as Algiers (dir. John Cromwell, 1938). These films helped cement the exotic Casablanca in the American imagination and helped lead to the success of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) starring Humphrey Bogart. American cartoonist Chuck Jones (1912-2002), who joined Warner Bros. in 1938, was apparently inspired by Pepe Le Moco to create his own character, Pepe Le Pio, a cynical character.

* Contribution of the French from colonial cinema

French critics constantly praised French filmmakers for their attention to reality, much like 19th-century art critics praised the North African paintings of French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) for their authenticity and clarity. French film critics, of course, reacted to American and English French Foreign Legion films of the period, such as The Sheik (dir. George Melford, 1921), The Sheik’s Son (dir. George Fitzmaurice, 1926), Spahi (1928) (Espahija) and Beau Geste (dir. Herbert Brannon, 1926; and William Wellman’s 1939 remake). However, French filmmakers produced their share of colonial adventure stories that reinforced the idea of ​​empire and idealized the Foreign Legion as a symbol of the “thin white line” defending civilization against the Arabs. David Henry Slavin lists fifty such films in 1920s and 1930s North Africa that legitimize the racial privileges of European workers, divert attention from their exploitation, and focus on motives of solidarity with women and colonial society.

* The establishment of censorship in British cinema a hundred years ago

The British, with the motto of an empire on which the sun never set, had countless colonial subjects and stories that provided themes for popular feature films from before the First World War (1918-1914) to the 1950s. The British and colonial Cinematograph Company began film production in 1908 and produced a number of films in colonial territories. The British Board of Film Censors, established in 1912, ensured that controversial issues were avoided and that only healthy imperial sensibilities were screened in the three thousand theaters operating in Britain in the late 1920s, as agreed by the Prime Minister of the Monarchy in 1926.

By 1929, more than 80% of the world’s feature films were produced in Hollywood, California. Despite its expansion across the transcontinental West, its conquest of Native American lands and Mexican provinces, and its late 19th- and early 20th-century adventures in overseas conquests of Hawaii, Cuba, the United States has long considered itself an anti-imperialist nation. American filmmakers, and apparently American audiences, were not interested in any American “empire” other than the “Wild West” and cowboys and Indians.

The 1930s became the golden age of British colonialism in Hollywood and spectacular action-adventure classics. The 1980s and 1990s saw a new wave of what are commonly called rich and complex colonial narratives in films. Colonial themes have appeared in many Third World films, although, perhaps surprisingly, this theme has never been dominant.

Colonization continues…

For students and teachers, researchers and readers, and film fans and history buffs, the filmmakers of the world have produced many works on colonialism that are much more than can be mentioned in this short entry. It is necessary to mention that today the form of colonialism of the Western world under the leadership of the United States has remained unchanged in the same proportion, but the form and media of presenting this thought and totalitarianism have undergone a great transformation and in seemingly beautiful and sophisticated formats in the vast virtual world and They continue to promote the colonial thinking with new and attractive clothes and image.

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