Postcolonial Cinema Studies

Sandra Ponzanesi, Marguerite Waller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136592041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented, not as a rigid category, but as an optic through which to address questions of postcolonial historiography, geography, subjectivity, and epistemology.

Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple, diverse, and overlapping histories of European, Soviet, U.S., and multi-national imperial ventures. With interdisciplinary expertise, they discover and explore the conceptual temporalities and spatialities of postcoloniality, with an emphasis on the politics of form, the 'postcolonial aesthetics' through which filmmakers challenge themselves and their viewers to move beyond national and imperial imaginaries.

Contributors include: Jude G. Akudinobi, Kanika Batra, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Shohini Chaudhuri, Julie F. Codell, Sabine Doran, Hamish Ford, Claudia Hoffmann, Anikó Imre, Priya Jaikumar, Mariam B. Lam, Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Richard Rice, Mireille Rosello and Marguerite Waller.

Part I

Cinemas of empire

Cinema’s late colonial period embodied the ambiguities, possibility and fears generated by two historical paradoxes: that of colonialism’s moral delegitimization before its political demise and that of its persistence in shaping modern postcolonial societies well after the end of a formal empire.

(Priya Jaikumar, 2006, p. 2)

The chapters in this section explore the complex inter-implications of colonialism and postcolonialism. They focus on cinemas of empire that orchestrated sensations of visual mastery and also offered occasions for its undermining. Film as a medium is endowed with particular formal and aesthetic properties, which can be used to promote a variety of ways of seeing. Empire films tended to legitimate the domination by metropolitan centers over colonial peripheries. Colonial images of gender, race, and class carried ideological connotations that confirmed imperial epistemologies and taxonomies, depicting natives as primitives and savages, subjects outside modernity. However, the chapters in this section analyze not only the production and naturalization of colonial epistemes, but also occasions when these epistemes are undermined by departures from dominant representational practices and the perhaps inadvertent intrusion of alternative visual codes.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out that the term empire cinema is not found in Italian film scholarship. Specialists of early French and Italian cinema prefer to speak of “colonial cinema.” Though the two terms tend to be used interchangeably, many scholars feel that it is important to differentiate between colonialism and imperialism. Colonialism refers to the practice (conquering of the land and exploiting its resources) and imperialism to the idea driving the practice (political and economic control, but also an ideological investment). Cinema was a perfect medium with which to convey these ideological discourses, whose legacies continue to shape political and cultural landscapes long after the official end of colonization.

For Mussolini, cinema was the strongest weapon (Reich and Garofalo, 2002; Ben-Ghiat, 2001), and it was strategically used as part of an orchestrated political propaganda campaign that was meant to manufacture consent. Colonial films imaged Roman grandeur and supported Italy’s model of racial superiority and virility, especially during the conquest of Ethiopia (called Abyssinia before 1935). They put the new technology at the service of imperial policies, which were glamorized by the spectacles offered to Italian audiences at home.

Empire films, which focused on glorifying the British Empire were, as Julie Codell writes, popular on both sides of the Atlantic. British actors played older British officers and American actors played younger officers, metaphorically figuring the passing of the “white man’s burden” from Britain to America. Codell explores such paradoxes as the British film industry’s casting of Paul Robeson, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance and a prominent advocate of African American civil rights, as the savage “other,” thereby using the same body to project both Western moral rectitude and the African “savagery” that legitimated Western domination. Similarly, the use of blackface in some empire films both signified and yet curiously de-essentialized racial difference.

Cinema served both to consolidate empires and to dismantle them. As Priya Jaikumar writes in her book Cinema at the end of Empire, quoted in our epigraph, cinema played a very paradoxical and ambivalent role on both sides of the imperial divide. The beginnings of cinema corresponded with the apogee of colonialism, but also to the proliferation of anti-colonial independence movements. Jaikumar, in her Postface to this volume, explores the intersection between a dying ideology, that of imperialism, and the rise of a new medium whose transportation to the colonies as an innovative technological tool resulted not only in the assimilation of its language and codes, but also the possibility of its appropriation, offering new nations a powerful tool for self-representation and decolonization.

This section concludes with an empire of a different kind, not linked to Western European dominance, but to what Bakic-Hayden (1995) calls the “nesting orientalisms” involved in the political imaginary of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Empire is just the latest phase in a history of imperial struggles over a terrain that has been multiply conquered, and where rulers and subjects often shifted roles. Anikó Imre’s chapter reflects on a series of historical epics produced between the 1960s and the 1980s in the Eastern bloc, perceiving a postcolonial pattern in the thematic and ideological overlaps among them. Following a remarkably similar formula, these films consolidate “East” European nationhood vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire, each nation portraying itself as a defender of Europe against the “Eastern” infidels. For many viewers, the Ottoman Empire was envisioned as a precursor to the Soviet Empire. Thus, these films, while intended to bolster loyalty to national communist regimes, implicitly challenge Soviet domination, ironically through a self-colonizing identification with the West. East and West, Europe and nonEurope, emerge as highly charged, but always relative terms whose use in these films uncannily prefigures economic and cultural developments in the region since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Imre’s skillful integration of post-Soviet and postcolonial perspectives unveils the workings of Cold War and post-Cold War orientalisms, and critically expands the postcolonial notion of “empire film.”

Bibliography

Bakic-Hayden, M., 1995. Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review, 54(4), pp. 917–931.

Ben-Ghiat, R., 2001. Fascist Modernities. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ben-Ghiat, R. and Fuller, M. eds., 2005. Italian Colonialism. New York: Palgrave.

Jaikumar, P., 2006. Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Reich, J. and Garofalo, P. eds., 2002. Re-Viewing Fascism. Italian Cinema,1922–1943. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Chapter 1

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Italian Fascism’s empire cinema

Kif Tebbi, the conquest of Libya, and the assault on the nomadic

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

The history and consequences of Italian colonialism were until quite recently little known in Italy and abroad. Italian expansionism is usually linked to the aggressions in Ethiopia (1935–1936), which was called Abyssinia before 1935, of the Fascist regime led by Benito Mussolini (1922–1945) but the foundations of this empire were laid in the liberal period, with the occupations of the East African countries of Eritrea (1890) and Somalia (1908) and the seizure of Ottoman-held Libya in 1912 (Labanca, 2002; Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, 2005; Palumbo, 2003; Andall and Duncan, 2005). This neglected history has translated into an obscured film history: the dozens of documentary and feature films made on imperial themes are little studied, apart from historical colossals such as Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914) and Scipione l’Africano/Scipio the African (Gallone, 1936) (Gili and Brunetta, 1990; Elena, 1999; Hay, 1987; Coletti, 2006). The present essay discusses the 1920s, when the Fascists laid the groundwork for the acquisition of territories that would transform the Mediterranean from Italy’s “prison” into the hinge of an empire that stretched from the Levant to Africa and the Red Sea (Fuller, 2007). In the realm of cinema, the 1920s is normally considered a period of crisis; World War One decimated Italy’s previously profitable and prolific national industry, dispersing underemployed Italian film professionals to the film capitals of Europe. Yet research over the last decades has revealed a more robust filmic landscape than previously imagined, as well as the influences of Italians’ years abroad on their future film aesthetics, production methods, and directing styles (Ricci, 2008; Martinelli, 1978; Farassino, 2000, pp. 83–106).

I bring these filmic and imperial histories together in my discussion of the silent movie Kif Tebbi (Camerini, 1928), which is set and partly shot in the Tripolitanian region of Libya. It forms part of the international Orientalist trend in filmmaking, but also testifies to Mussolini’s impact on Italian male stardom and the need to justify a next wave of Italian occupation that would inaugurate new levels of European colonial violence. While Kif Tebbi is also of interest as an antecedent for empire films of the sound era, Italians are entirely absent from its narrative; the point of view narrated is that of a Tripolitanian notable (played by the Italian actor Marcello Spada) in love with a young nomad. Such a film could not have been made a decade later, when heightened racial and pedagogical demands mandated narratives that revolved around the Italian male who resists local temptation. As such, Kif Tebbi offers a window into the continuities and ruptures of Italian imperial ideologies and iconographies from early to late Fascism and from silent to sound cinema. As for other European colonizers, empire served the Italians as an agent of nation-building and international prestige. Yet in both the liberal and Fascist periods, imperial ideologies were fueled by a particular Italian discourse of ressentiment: empire would correct a history of marginalization by the “Great Powers,” giving Italy the power to refute perceptions of Italian “backwardness” (Bosworth, 1996; Fuller, 2007). The obsessive display of communications, military, agricultural, and medical technology in empire films has its origins here, and also explains why Italian colonialists demonstrated little of the “melancholy discourse of nostalgia” for the disappearing “exotic Other” that Ali Behdad has found in the French case. Any “belatedness” that haunted Italians was largely about their late start at colonization with respect to other Europeans (Behdad, 1994, p. 92).

The Mediterranean was the field of action upon which these imperial agendas depended. As Mia Fuller observes, the Mediterranean was a means of achieving Italian autonomy from Europe, as well as being central to the revival of Rome as a model of imperial power (Fuller, 2007, pp. 39–62). The Fascist construction of the Mediterranean as mare nostrum, a space “saturated with a timeless Roman and Italian essence,” required its elision as a site of “cultural crossovers, contaminations, creolizations, and uneven historical memories” (Fuller, 2007, p. 40; Chambers, 2008, p. 28). The splitting off of the “Roman” Mediterranean from the “Oriental” Levant was one strategy to this end. In the case of Libya and Italy’s Dodecanese Island possessions, this translated into a desire to “reclaim” Rhodes and other territories from Turkish influences, the Turk standing in for an unacceptable history of Oriental backwardness and lassitude. Yet this “other” Mediterranean surfaces in Fascism’s empire cinema, which is haunted by the basin as a “fluid and unstable archive” of the kinds of wanderings and intercultural fusions the Fascists feared. The Mediterranean crossings that figure in almost every Italian empire film initiate travelers into unstable realms of cultural translation and personal transformation. The personages of these films about settlement never really settle, and for male protagonists the narrative lies in their confrontations with their new surroundings and in the struggle to render the body free of temptation and serviceable for Fascist goals. In these films, the frontier is thus not only a space “of interactions and interviews,” as Michel De Certeau describes it, but also a space of interdictions (Chambers, 2008, p. 39; De Certeau, 1984, p. 127).

These prohibitions come to the fore in Fascist empire films when the male protagonist encounters nomadic figures. The nomad was not only a metaphor for mobility, but stood for all that the colonial occupier hated about the “messiness” and unpredictability of the colonial encounter (Atkinson, 2007, 1999; Gabriel, 1988). In empire films, this figure and its values are referenced obliquely but consistently, through a series of personages who represent transience and restlessness, and are located outside Fascist schemes of hierarchy and allegiance. European colonial discourses often romanticized the nomad as a function of a parallel mythologizing of the desert as a zone outside Western spatio-temporality, and in the postcolonial age the nomad and the nomadic have continued to serve as foils for contemporary theorizations of identity and the power of perpetual displacement (Marks, 2006; Kaplan, 1996; Deleuze and Guattari, 1986; Miller, 1998 pp. 171–208). Although similar Orientalist visions of the desert run through Italian imperial texts, including Kif Tebbi, empire films also assert a reterritorialization of the desert as a space for the staging of Fascist modernity and as a place where men can recover from “nomadic” influences. The colonies thus become ideal “homelands,” as described by James Clifford: safe spaces where mobility can be controlled, within and across borders, and where the values of stasis and purity are asserted against the historical forces of movement and contamination (Clifford, 1997, p. 7).

The conquest of Libya and the negation of the nomadic

Libya was not Italy’s longest-held colony, but it was the one the Fascists had the highest ambitions for in terms of tourism and mass resettlement, as well as the one that posed the greatest resistance to Italian rule. The brutal General Rodolfo Graziani was given the mandate of extirpating a resistance that had prevented the Italians from expanding beyond the coastal regions. The 1923 novel (with the same title) from which Kif Tebbi is adapted is a product of this moment. Its author, Luciano Zùccoli, traveled with Graziani’s troops in Tripolitania as he did his research, reachin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Cinemas of empire
• Postcolonial cinemas Unframing histories
• Postcolonial cinemas Postcolonial aesthetics
• Postcolonial cinemas and globalization
• Index