ABSTRACT
The colonial domination of indigenous peoples, the scientific and esthetic disciplining of nature through classificatory schemas, the capitalist appropriation of resources, and the imperialist ordering of the globe under a panoptical regime, all formed part of a massive world historical movement that reached its apogee at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is most significant for our discussion that the beginnings of cinema coincided with the giddy heights of the imperial project, with an epoch where Europe held sway over vast tracts of alien territory and hosts of subjugated peoples. (Of all the celebrated "coincidences" - of the twin beginnings of cinema and psychoanalysis, cinema and nationalism, cinema and consumerism - it is this coincidence with the heights of imperialism that has been least explored.) Film was born at a moment when a poem such as Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden" could be published, as it was in 1899, to celebrate the US acquisition of Cuba and the Philippines. The first Lumiere and Edison screenings in the 1890s closely followed the "scramble for Africa" which erupted in the late 1870s; the Battle of "Rorke's Drift" (1879) which opposed the British to the Zulus (memorialized in the film Zulu, 1964); the British occupation of Egypt in 1882; the Berlin Conference of 1884 which carved up Africa into European "spheres of influence"; the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890; and countless other imperial misadventures.
