‘To the ends of the earth’: Culture, visuality and the embedded economy

In 1940, aboard the S.S. Mariposa en route to Australia, John Grierson, a figure key to the early use of film across the Anglo-American world, wrote to his friends in Canada andBritain about the dramatic possibilities of documentary film. Imagining the newworld that would emerge after the war, Grierson identified film as the art that would be most central to the new order to come. It was film – what Grierson referred to as ‘a medium with its own special art’ – which could both deliver a world fromwar and help construct a post-war order in which cooperation would predominate.