Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire by Tom Rice (review)

Tom Rice’s Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire is an impressive study of the Colonial Film Unit (hereafter CFU), a British government agency that made movies for British imperial subjects in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean from 1939 until 1954. It is exhaustively researched, drawing on archival materials, published works, interviews with CFU staff, and extensive analysis of the films produced by the unit. While many scholars have described the work of the CFU in Africa and elsewhere, Rice’s book is the first to document its rise, fall, and aftermath in detail. In producing the definitive account of the unit’s history, he makes significant contributions to multiple lines of historical inquiry. Films for the Colonies will prove essential reading for the growing community of scholars interested in the history of media in European colonies. But Rice sees the story of the CFU as having relevance beyond its imperial context. He locates the unit’s history within the broader field of British film history and seeks to contribute to recent scholarship on “useful” cinemas: that is, studies that examine “nontheatrical exhibition, educational, industrial, and instructional film,” the institutions that produced them, and the agents who disseminated them.¹ Finally, as the title suggests, Rice also contends that the CFU’s history can tell us a great deal about the transition from Empire to Commonwealth that transpired rapidly in the wake of the Second World War. Rice persuasively argues that the CFU played a role in refashioning the relationship between Britain and her colonies, helping to “enact new models of empire that often continue to this day.”²

Chapter 1 explores the interwar origins of the unit. The key figure here is William Sellers, a civil servant who made several pioneering films for African audiences in British Nigeria during the 1920s. Sellers was a sanitation officer with no technical film training who began making movies for use in public health campaigns. He became the head of the CFU at its inception in 1939 and led the unit continuously over its fifteen-year life span. As head of the CFU, he became an influential “expert” on filmmaking for rural audiences around the world in the postwar era. Rice carefully documents Sellers’s early experiences in Nigeria, which strongly influenced his subsequent work for the CFU. During the 1930s, Sellers was one of several officials pressing the Colonial Office to fund filmmaking for colonial peoples. These proposals were met with a tepid response as government officials viewed these initiatives as amateurish, and the Colonial Office could not justify financing film production during the depression. But as war emerged on the horizon, the British government began to take a greater interest in film propaganda in the colonies and placed Sellers in command of the newly created CFU in late 1939. The other figure looming over these interwar conversations was John Grierson, who was working for the Empire Marketing Board during the 1930s and was called to head film propaganda efforts for the British government in Canada during the war. Grierson’s interest in storytelling influenced a generation of British documentary makers. Though Grierson and Sellers held quite different philosophies of filmmaking, Rice observes that these two figures “[b]oth represent efforts at this precise moment to institutionalize film and make it useful for an imperial project.”³

Chapter 2, “Film Rules: The Governing Principles of the Colonial Film Unit,” analyzes the approach to filmmaking that Sellers implemented at the CFU. He insisted CFU films had to utilize a simplified film language because he believed Africans would be confused by sophisticated cinema techniques. He had developed this approach while making films in Nigeria. “These early experiments,” Sellers explained in 1941, “proved conclusively that if films were to be successful in conveying a story or teaching a lesson to these people they...