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Screening Dirt: Colonial Film Audiences and the Problem of Spectatorship

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Stephanie Newell

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Abstract

From the inception of colonial film-making in British West Africa in the early 1930s, dirt and the cinema were closely connected. Numerous educational movies were produced to show Africans the economically, physically and morally degrading consequences of “dirty habits.” By the early 1940s, the Colonial Office had come to realise that, within the cinema spaces created by mobile health units across Africa, intended audiences processed images and messages through their own aesthetic, spiritual, moral, economic and political value systems.These systems exceeded colonial projections and defi ed assimilation into colonial categories of dirt. This article focuses on the complexity of intended audiences’ responses to the simple ideological formula of colonial health and hygiene films. It argues that the presence of local aesthetic tastes and values in media archives on public health and hygiene in colonial Africa represents a vital space of mediation that must be considered alongside film content and film-makers’intentions.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Newell S

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Social Dynamics

Year: 2018

Volume: 44

Issue: 1

Pages: 6-20

Online publication date: 01/03/2018

Acceptance date: 01/06/2017

ISSN (print): 0253-3952

ISSN (electronic): 1940-7874

Publisher: Routledge

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2018.1434602

DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2018.1434602


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