Output details

Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire

Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire was a major AHRC-funded project, co-directed by Professor Colin MacCabe (Birkbeck) and Dr Lee Grieveson (UCL). The primary outcome of this project was a website database detailing the colonial films held by the BFI, the Imperial War Museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. I was commissioned to write one hundred 1,000-word 'enhanced entries' about selected films from this database, work that was considered to be the core of the project. These essays were broken down into context and analysis of the films and were reviewed by archivists at the relevant institutions, as well as by the project's co-directors. My work was primarily focused on films about India, and I undertook the first detailed study of the films made by the Film Advisory Board and Information Films of India. The aim of the work was to interrogate the colonial history that is depicted in the films and also to shed new light on the companies and individuals who made them. The majority of these films were not previously widely known, so this work addresses a significant gap in Indian film history.

See portfolio for the full set of essays that form this output.