Colonial Cinema in the Open Air: Dr Nadine Chan Film Studies Speaker Series

Dr Nadine Chan (University of Toronto) will present her research in a talk entitled: ‘Colonial Cinema in the Open Air: Ambient Governmentality and “Atmosphere of Mind”‘. This event is part of the Film Studies Department's Speaker Series.

In the 1930s, the Rural Lecture Caravan, a mobile cinema operated by the Malayan government, travelled widely across the Malay peninsula screening educational films on financial and agricultural improvement. Uncontained by physical walls, their outdoor film shows emitted a vibrant energy that not only mesmerized its immediate viewers but fundamentally infused its surrounds—a typical Malay village in the 1920s—with the stirring atmosphere of colonial modernity.

What was it about open-air cine-projection that lent itself so readily to colonial education and ideological formation? What was the connection between screen and mind, and how was this connection rooted in a so-called “environ-mental” understanding of cinema? This presentation examines how colonial filmmakers fundamentally understood cinema as an ambient medium that opens up relationalities between surrounds, mental feeling, and political society. Early mobile cinemas—with their network of regular screenings across many regions—helped to shape how colonial governments would think about “media infrastructure” as more than just technological systems but as affective environments that could energetically shift space, modulate sites, and engineer the psyche.

Nadine Chan is Assistant Professor at the Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto. She has published in Cinema Journal, Journal of Environmental Media, Periscope for Social Text, Studies in Documentary Film and the anthologies Theorizing Colonial Cinema and Screening Race in Nontheatrical Film. Her book manuscript-in-progress is titled ‘A Cinema Under the Palms: Colonial Worldmaking in an Unruly Medium'. Chan's second research project investigates humid media in Southeast Asia.

This is a free online event.

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Meeting ID: 327 677 909 431
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Image © Lat, Kampong Boy: Yesterday and Today, Kuala Lumpur: Berita Publishing Sdn. Bhd., 1993