What We See What We Understand: Visual Images of the Colonial Experience (1920-1922

Abstract

Through the comparative analysis of the representation of colonial subjects in a Catholic British missionary film and a Catholic Italian missionary film, this study reconstructs the imperial imagination that these two religious associations constructed in the early 1920s. This analysis reveals emblematic traits of the British and the Italian ways to colonialism in which the missionaries had a crucial part. Missionary cinema is here considered as a pivotal primary source to understand colonial rules and located in the larger context of early 1920s ethnographic films portraying indigenous people from the African territories