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. The Gulf war revealed not only the continued reign of the imperial imaginary, but also the limitations of certain variants of postmodernism. Indeed, it is most significant 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. The immediate origins of the cinema in Western science meant that filmic exhibition also entailed the exhibition of Western triumphs. The cinema combined narrative and spectacle to tell the story of colonialism from the colonizer's perspective.
