ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which institutional policies and practices that generally define the production of advertising films have also informed certain British colonial film productions such educational films as well as amateur, travelogues, and missionary films that are now generally studied within the wider ideological and stylistic cannons of the Empire Cinema genre. The ubiquitous promotional campaigns across the British Empire and beyond have been directly and unrelentingly attending to the imperial audiences’ expectation of specific normative cultural representations - a visual literacy drawing on promotional strategies and product-placement policies also present in the case studies explored here alongside Empire Marketing Board productions. Apart from David Ciarlo’s detailed discussion of various media records considered as effective means of advertising the German Empire, current scholarship addressing this theme within the British imperial visual culture is still seldomly and only succinctly addressed. Thus, it could be argued that this chapter presents perhaps the first detailed analysis of several British colonial films that mirror the traditional aesthetic guidelines and standardized production policies specific to the British imperial advertising and consumer culture.
