Visualizing the Other in Colonial Films

Through a corpus of colonial films, this study aims at questioning the gaze placed upon local cultures in the colonial context. Rather than focusing on imperial fictions, this corpus is composed of ethnographic and touristic films, from the Lumière operators to the end of the colonial effort, that underline the use made of the camera as a colonial tool. Through the camera it was possible to produce the exotic societies that colonizers wished for, and that would justify their claim to civilizing the conquered countries. With a special focus on the Middle East, but also including films from East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa, British, French and Italian, this study allows to better understand how exoticism was created for the camera, from a cultural and political standpoint.

Together with the exotic aspect, the framing of these films allow to question the part played by the "in-between" of the colonial order : translators, soldiers, guides, who belonged to local societies, but were as necessary as they were not deemed exotic enough to fit the frame of these films for the most part. This means that this study is also a study about invisibility, about the framing of these films, as well as about silence with local voices being silenced (in all senses of the term) but for the few moments when they were thought to fit the colonial order. Arguaably, the colonial empires were for a great part imagined and recreated empires, with images made to fit the idea that the colonizers had previously developed about their imperial conquests. Through this, I intend to better understand the ways of making visible and invisible the local people and the culturalism and means of domination that were at stake.