Review: Tom Rice, Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire

In their 2011 edited volume Useful Cinema, Charles R Acland and Haidee Wasson argue that the majority of cinema scholarship misses an important feature of the medium by focusing on commercial public films. The 20th century, they note, witnessed not only the rise of entertainment cinema but also the creation of a vast universe of what the authors term ‘useful cinema’: educational and instructional films created by schools, public agencies, and private businesses. Such films – played on the walls of classrooms, exhibition halls, and offices – projected a different, yet equally important, vision of cinema’s place and purpose in modern life. Here, the medium was technology more than art: a tool for ‘making, persuading, instructing, demonstrating’ (Acland and Wasson, 2011: 6). To arrive at an accurate understanding of 20th-century film culture, they conclude, scholars must pivot away from theatrical releases and begin to consider film history’s entanglement with institutional history, exploring how cinema was ‘adapted to institutional directives, wielding influence outside of the multiplex and the art house’ (p. 13).