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63 Making Sense of the Cinema in Late Colonial India William Mazzarella ”Cannibals Enjoy Comedies” In late 1927 or early 1928, the American Trade Commissioner in India, Charles B. Spofford, Jr., submitted an extraordinary memo to the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC), a commission of inquiry into the cinema appointed by the colonial government of India in the autumn of 1927.1 Hefty to the point of absurdity, Spofford’s memo comprised something like thirtyfive closely typed, single-spaced pages. Its purpose was to defend the cinema in general, and the American cinema in particular, against a rising tide of moralizing condemnation. Spofford was writing at a time when Hollywood films constituted approximately 80 percent of the movies being shown on Indian screens.2 Consequently , he was particularly keen to defuse any apprehensions about untoward ideological effects, to insist that the desire for entertainment was a basic aspect of human nature, and to explain that the cinema could provide such entertainment in a form that was far more universal than anything the world had hitherto seen. Responding to the mounting British suspicion that American films, with their eroticized egalitarianism, were undermining the civilizing mission, Spofford declared, There is no intention on the part of American film producers to fill their pictures with propaganda of a nature to subvert certain institutions in other countries. American films do not constitute a 4th International. Who really imagines that the images of humanity produced in Hollywood are likely to replace or blow everything native out of the soul of India or Europe?3 American films are only meant to entertain, whether in India or any other part of the world. (Indian Cinematograph Committee [ICC] 1928a, 4:298) The cinema, in its global diffusion, was bringing light—if not yet enlightenment —to the world’s hinterlands and, as we shall see, laughter to cannibals. t h r e e 64 Making Sense of the Cinema in Late Colonial India In the best evangelical style, Spofford reported the heartening testimony of an Arctic explorer “who told us how the Eskimos enjoyed their movies in the perpetual night which descended upon them in the Frozen North.” Under the subheading“Cannibals Enjoy Comedies,” Spofford then relayed the experience of a Presbyterian missionary to the Belgian Congo who had screened films in the rural interior to hundreds and even thousands of savages—some of them indeed still cannibals . . . . He told us how he puts up a canvas sheet in a clearing in the wilderness and how the natives sit by hundreds in front of this and in back of it. Of course, for those sitting in back, the lettering of the titles is reversed, but that makes no difference, since they are unable to read anyhow. They laugh as delightedly at the slap-stick antics of our screen comedians as do any of our American audiences, which shows, of course, that human nature is alike the world over. (4:305) This was not simply a matter of pacification through pleasure. Rather, the principle of universal entertainment was, in the final analysis, the true bedrock of social contentment. Building to a climax after a detailed description of the workings and capabilities of Hollywood (and not forgetting to mention its host of “canine histrionic talent” [4:330]), Spofford proclaimed, “The world must be amused. Men must have recreation and relaxation. . . . Just as you serve the leisure hours of the masses, so do you rivet the girders of society” (4:326). Indeed, It has always been so. Back in the days of Rome’s supremacy the cynical poet and satirist, Juvenal, said sneeringly of the Roman populace: “All they care for is their bread and their games.” He needn’t have sneered. The populace did care for their bread and their games—for life and relaxation from life. It was as it should be. Man, whatever his environment, has always felt the same. Therein again lies your explanation of Hollywood. (4:327) One of the recurrent themes in the literature on cinema in the colonial world is that Hollywood films of the silent period often occasioned a kind of moral panic. Some of this panic was simply an importation to India of anxieties and controversies that had already been circulating in Europe and the United States for several decades. The cinema was going to corrupt the young, the unlettered, women, or whatever other subaltern population seemed most likely to succumb to its curiously visceral charms. The cinema was tasteless, it was low, it...

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