“Women, Cinema, and Public Leisure in the Colonial City”
James Burns, Professor, Department of History, Clemson University
My presentation will examine the emergence of cinemas as sites of female leisure and
sociability in the urban areas of the British empire during the early film era. Movie-houses
were novel public spaces whose rules of use were subject to constant and frequently
contested re-negotiation. Colonial elites effectively controlled the images projected to the
masses on the screen through a combination of rigid censorship and state-sponsored
propaganda. But they had less influence over the composition and comportment of the new
communities which emerged at the movies from Barbados to Bombay. And women were
among the earliest and most enthusiastic consumers of the new medium. This presentation
looks at the opportunities that cinemas provided for colonial women, both as new venues of
public leisure, and as sites of sociability removed from patriarchal control. The movies were
deprecated as an instrument of colonial propaganda by a range of intellectuals, including
Mohandas Gandhi, Marcus Garvey, and more recently the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa
Thiong'o. But this presentation demonstrates that colonial women’s experiences of the
movies varied greatly over time and space. This diversity reflects the complexity of the
imperial experience in one important, if neglected area of public leisure. Recognizing the
various responses of women to moving pictures, the quintessential agent of ‘modernization’,
can encourage scholars to adopt a more nuanced view of their engagement with colonial
culture.
The dawn of the movie era brought cinema to the remote regions of the empire in lock step
with its introduction into the metropole. Indeed, the economics of the cinema industry
allowed movies to travel to corners of the world that other forms of entertainment neglected.
Thus many colonial subjects and imperial elites came to rely on the cinema as their main
source of news and entertainment from the West. In this context cinema became popular in
cities and towns throughout Britain’s empire by 1920
In the early years movies were screened in established public venues, such as shops, theatres,
and opera houses, or in travelling, open-air shows. By the 1920s urban areas in Malaya,
India, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, all had purpose-built cinemas, whose construction
and maintenance absorbed substantial capital. Many of the new movie houses in cities such
as Calcutta, Johannesburg, and Kingston were elaborate art deco structures which boasted
state of the art amenities such as air conditioning. These new businesses operated under
intense pressure to attract any and all potential customers. Thus financial exigencies made
cinemas one of the least segregated public spaces in many colonial cities. .
In this context colonial women took advantage of the opportunities provided by cinemas
when and where they could. In South Africa, cinemas became important areas for poor
‘European’ mothers to socialize. They also provided a refuge for young ‘Coloured’ women,
who could congregate in movie houses without threatening their respectability. In the
Caribbean colonies, early cinemas were patronized largely by elite European women. But by
the 1920s they had become multi-racial sites of entertainment in which men and women,
children and adults all gathered. In Burma women were the main patrons of movies, while in
neighbouring India they were discouraged from attending cinemas during the silent era.
However with the advent of sound films, and the emergence of a dynamic local film industry,
Indian women during the 1930s became enthusiastic patrons of the new cinemas. In
predominantly Islamic regions of British West and East Africa local authorities tried to arrest
the spread of cinema, in part because it encouraged the sexes to congregate in new and
potentially uncontrollable spaces.
This brief overview demonstrates the diversity of the women’s experiences with colonial
movie shows. In doing so it argues against what Fred Cooper calls the ‘flattening’ effect of
much of colonial scholarship. The movies were arguably the most important mass
communications technology of the colonial era. Yet women’s experiences with cinema are
too diverse and varied to fit neatly into a model of colonial culture that posits a simple
dichotomy of hegemonic and resistant experiences.