ABSTRACT
Because cinema provides one of the major filters for images of the world’s ‘other’ (the so called ‘Third World’) it has become part of a global structure of postcolonial constituencies. It constructs the imaginative space of the other in the Western spectator’s mind. Furthermore, questions raised by ‘colonial discourse’ assume a greater urgency when discussed in relation to filmic representations of the other. The ‘perverse pleasures’ of cinema and its potential for pornographic exploitation have been studied exhaustively by feminist film theory. Issues of colour, ‘the epidermic schema’, to use Frantz Fanon’s (1986) suggestive phrase become all the more ‘visible’ in a visually oriented medium based on a creative play of light and darkness, the two binary elements which constitute, according to some postcolonial critics, the Manichean allegory of colonial discourse.
