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The second volume, Film and the End of Empire, focuses on the years 1939 to circa 1966, encompassing the Second World War, the decline of the British formal empire (starting with India in 1947), and the transition to the Commonwealth through policies of colonial development and warfare that (in part at least) maintained structures of colonial hegemoney. Authors address these films as complex historical records about the end of empire; the way cinema was used to buttress the bonds of empire in the context of global conflict; the place of cinema in international formations of colonial governance; and in the emergence of state objectives within India and Africa; the role of the Colonial Film Units in England and overseas in fostering ideals of welfare and developmentalism to colonial audiences; the distribution, exhibition, and reception of film against the backdrop of anti-colonial movements within East and West Africa; and fiction cinema and its reception. The book concludes with two essays on the legacies of colonial film footage, and the resistances glimpsed in the reviewing of those images. The historical focus of these volumes is complemented by engagement with broader conceptual questions about the formation of colonial vision, and the place of cinema in mapping space, sustaining imperial networks, and enacting social and political control. The authors gathered together here take the colonial archive as a site for the investigation of the way culture enacts governance; and the way that the colonial films and institutions under investigation enact power relationships, albeit at times fragile and contested. These books bring together many of the most important scholars from around the world working on colonialism and cinema to address the visual history of colonialism and its continuing resonance. In doing so they respond to the widely acknowledged blind spot in British history; and the less well noticed blind spot in British and world cinema history.
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