Cinema and Empire: Technologies and Practices

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, Lecturer in Film and Media, UCL

Decolonising in Technicolor: Post-war Colour Cinema in Britain and India

This talk considers the relationship between colour and coloniality in post-war cinema by examining films not only as images but also as material objects. It argues that the legacies of British colonialism were not just represented on the surface of colour film but inhered in colour film’s raw materials and technical processes. The talk will focus on how the dyeing technique used at London’s Technicolor film laboratory helped Britain imagine its sustained global hegemony during an era of decolonisation. The British Technicolor lab was an international hub for processing colour film from the 1930s to the 1960s, dyeing film shot all over the world. This gave Britain unparalleled control over the aesthetics and economics of global colour cinema which had acute resonances in India where Britain’s colonial regime had historically operated through the violent management of dyes and textiles. Technicolor’s system for dyeing celluloid film (a substance derived in part from cotton) operated as a potent echo of the system for dyeing fabrics and therefore became a highly politicised technology in Anglo-Indian relations. Although a newly independent India began regularly making colour films in the 1950s, Britain’s continued control of the dyeing process that imbued these films with their colours heightened the importance of cinema as a contentious site for expressing Indian and British post-colonial identities. This talk explores these themes through the case study of Jhansi Ki Rani (Sohrab Modi, India, 1953), the first Technicolor film made by an Indian director, which was printed and dyed at the London Technicolor laboratory.

Erica Carter, King’s College London

White cinema/colonial pink

This paper derives from my current project on white cinemagoing in the British colonial territories after World War II. The route I take though cinema history is an intimate one, drawing on my own family history as the starting point for a histoire croisée of cinemagoing practice amongst white British colonials in tropical environments. In the paper, I use an imagined journey (my mother’s) through post-war downtown Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, to explore the pertinence of categories more familiar from digital screen studies – navigation, immersion and performance – to histories of cinemagoing in segregated white expatriate milieux. My focus is on the practice of cinemagoing as a mode of “atmospheric spectactorship” (Chenshu Zhou); I centre this talk especially on colour in the urban environment, specifically, on the prominence in downtown Nassau of the colour known as “colonial pink”, and on its association with colour in contemporary visual practice including amateur photography and filmmaking, as well as moviegoing experiences in the city’s whites-only shorefront cinema, The Savoy.

Listing image caption: Souvenir programme for Jhansi Ki Rani (India, 1953). Image courtesy of William K. Everson Collection, New York University