Storm Over Asia (1928)

TRAC 2 (1) pp. 93–111 Intellect Limited 2011 Transnational Cinemas Volume 2 Number 1 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/trac.2.1.93_1 MARTIN STOLLERY Open University From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa: Transnationalism and imperialism in British intellectual film culture of the late 1920s and 1930s ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article explores a revealing instance of the historical intersection of transnationalism and imperialism: the initial British reception of the Soviet film Storm Over Asia (1928). It brings together for the first time previously separate strands of research on transnationalism within British film culture, and British cinema and empire. It uses a range of primary, secondary and theoretical sources to explore a pivotal moment of transition in British film history, while also contributing to what Tim Bergfelder envisions as a future ‘transnational history of European cinema [that] might focus precisely on the strategies and practices by which filmic texts “travel” and become transformed according to the specific requirements of different cultural contexts and audiences’ (2005: 326). More generally, this case study also stands as a prime example of the importance of attending, in both historical and imperialism transnationalism Soviet montage cinema Storm Over Asia film reception British documentary movement film censorship 93 Martin Stollery contemporary contexts, to what Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim describe as ‘difficult questions about transnationality, such as those pertaining to (post) coloniality’ (2010: 16). Recent work on transnationalism in British/European film history, pioneered by scholars such as Andrew Higson, has remained quite separate from the literature on imperialism and British film history that has emerged during roughly the same period. In different ways, my earlier work (2000), along with Prem Chowdhry’s (2000) and Priya Jaikumar’s (2006), as well as the Colonial Film project led by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (Colonial Film), all reconsider aspects of the cultural, political and economic dimensions of British film history within wider imperial networks. There are, of course, differences between the transnational approach to British film history developed by Higson and the work of scholars who have explored its imperial ramifications. There is, however, also potential for bringing these separate bodies of work, which both focus on cultural phenomena that exceed national boundaries, into productive dialogue. The exploration of continuities and connections between imperialism, transnationalism and internationalism has been pursued in other areas of historical enquiry, leading Grant et al. to advocate ‘a more historically sensitive and open approach’ to their ‘symbiotic relationship’ (2007: 12). It is an approach that can usefully be extended to film history. My initial focus in the case study discussed here is on what Deborah Shaw has categorized as ‘transnational viewing practices’, which she defines as encompassing ‘the viewing of any film made and/or set in a different national context from that of the audience’ (forthcoming). I explore the initial British reception, by writers involved in the influential journal Close Up, of the Soviet film Potomok Chingis-Khan/Storm Over Asia (Vsevelod Pudovkin 1928). These writers expressed a commitment to transnational film culture alongside a conviction, not untypical for its period, that the British empire should aspire to what Lewis Samuel Feuer later contentiously defined as ‘progressive imperialism’, which ‘elevates living standards and cultural life; it brings education and the arts to its more backward areas’ (1986: 4). The Close Up writers’ combination of transnationalism and progressive imperialist sentiment in their responses to Storm Over Asia set a precedent for slightly later, related developments that were central to the emergence of the British documentary film movement. In her discussion of the ethics of transnationalism, Mette Hjort points out that ‘the assumption, much of the time, seems to be that “transnationalism” is the new virtue term of film studies, a term that picks out processes and features that necessarily warrant affirmation as signs, among other things, of a welcome demise of ideologically suspect nation-states and the cinematic arrangements to which they gave rise’. (2010: 14) If issues of imperialism are included in the equation, however, it becomes more difficult to fall into a dualistic transnational: good, national: bad opposition. In the specific discussion that follows, the national does not become ‘displaced or negated’ in my analysis, which is a danger Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim (2010) as well as Shaw (forthcoming) warn against in transnational film studies, a danger that arises partly out of the ‘ideological suspicion’ to 94 From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa which Hjort refers. Instead, I use British primary sources to explore a pivotal moment in British film history, while also contributing to what Tim Bergfelder envisions as a future ‘transnational history of European cinema [that] might focus precisely on the strategies and practices by which filmic texts “travel” and become transformed according to the specific requirements of different cultural contexts and audiences’ (2005: 326). This transformation of ‘travelling’ films simultaneously feeds into what Bergfelder describes as ‘the continuing evolution of national cultures’ that are neither ‘pure’ nor ‘stable’ (2005: 321). Andrew Higson’s work has focused on the relationship between British national cinema and transnational European cinema initiatives in the 1920s and early 1930s. These involved various co-production arrangements and the movement of film-makers across European borders, typically without the direct involvement or support of nation states. Indeed, Higson argues in his most recent essay that these transnational initiatives were confronted, ironically, by ‘trade barriers – quotas, tariffs and the like – designed to protect the national production business, motivated in part by straightforwardly economic concerns but also often in part by concerns about the erosion of what were perceived as specifically national cultures’ (2010: 72). The economic motivation for introducing such measures was to mitigate against Hollywood’s market dominance, but they also tended to restrict film imports from other European nations as well. The primary legislation in this area in the British context was the Cinematograph Films Act 1927. Yet as Jaikumar has highlighted in her research on this legislation and the debates surrounding it, the Act enabled any film produced within the dominions and colonies of the British empire to count towards the required quota of ‘British’ films (2006). This encompassed films wholly or partly shot by British production companies in imperial territories, as well as films produced, for example, by Indian or Australian companies. The expectation, as far as the latter were concerned, was that colonial governments within the empire would implement reciprocal quota requirements within their legislation.1 In Britain’s case, then, the trade barriers established in the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 were simultaneously nationalist and imperialist. The legislation prioritized cinematic exchange and cooperation within the British empire over transnational European ventures. The transnational European cinema initiatives of the 1920s and the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 constituted different, potentially divergent strategies designed to achieve common goals. These included challenging Hollywood dominance, stimulating British production and increasing its market share. Considering these issues from the perspective of film culture, in terms of what audiences were watching and what some minority audiences wanted to watch, gives a different picture. As Higson points out, British popular film audiences enamoured of Hollywood and minority groups pursuing early forms of intellectual cinephilia were ‘equally transnational’ in their viewing practices, although the objects of their enthusiasm differed, and did not necessarily conform to the type of films that resulted from the transnational Western European production initiatives or which were envisaged by the 1927 film legislation (2010: 70). Close Up (1927–1933), the highbrow intellectual film journal most concerned with British film culture around the time the Cinematograph Act 1927 was passed, was based in Switzerland, with British and American core personnel, and a network of European correspondents. Close Up was therefore a forum where, as Higson puts it, ‘transnationalism reigned supreme’ (2010: 70). Operating in a period after the First World War, when the effects of Hollywood’s dominance of British and other European 1. The Cinematograph Films Act 1938 restricted the definition of British film productions (Jaikumar 2006: 62). 95 Martin Stollery markets were keenly felt, yet before the advent of film festivals where a diverse range of films travelled to metropolitan audiences (Venice in 1932 is conventionally seen as this tradition’s inaugural event), and long before Internet film downloading, the Close Up writers were crucial early arbiters of transnational intellectual film culture. Close Up eschewed cinematic nationalism, and its core personnel held out little hope for an ‘English film revival’. Kenneth Macpherson, the journal’s editor, stated bluntly in its first issue that the Cinematograph Films Act was unlikely to encourage any cultural change because ‘the average attitude of England and the English to art is so wholly nonchalant and clownish that it is quite useless to expect any art to indigenously flower there’ ([1927]1998: 37). Rather than boosting British film production, one of Close Up’s objectives was to intervene at the point of exhibition by introducing readers to a wider, transnational culture of critical debate and reflection surrounding what the journal considered to be the greatest achievements of cinematic art. Bryher, the assistant editor, financial administrator and sponsor of Close Up, was also the contributor most involved in the practical details of how films they admired might be seen in Britain. She counseled readers in a March 1928 article on how to effectively lobby local cinema exhibitors to screen the ‘fifty or more good foreign films in Wardour Street that will probably never be shown generally’ ([1928] 1998: 287). Close Up’s aesthetic value judgements and its campaigning for more diverse exhibition practices fostered an emergent European film canon, within which Soviet montage cinema took pride of place. This posed a problem. The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) refused to certify many Soviet montage films, including emergent classics such as Bronenosets Potemkin/Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein 1926). The underlying rationale was that films defined as containing political or moral propaganda were distinct from ordinary entertainment features and therefore beyond the BBFC’s sphere of competence, which extended only to the latter category. By the mid-1920s, court rulings had set a precedent for local authorities to follow the BBFC’s lead, and the Home Office was also advising local councils to accept the judgement of this self-regulating body established by the film industry. This left little space for the exhibition of Soviet montage cinema. However, final legal authority, under the provisions of the Cinematograph Act 1909, lay with local government. The (London) Film Society, founded in 1925 was granted special permission by the London County Council (LCC) to exhibit Soviet montage films, along with many other less politically contentious works, as part of their special Sunday screenings held at the New Gallery Kinema in Regent Street, and later at the Tivoli on the Strand. Although this established a protected London enclave for the type of transnational film culture favoured by the Close Up writers, it did not satisfy them. They launched their own campaign to liberalize British film censorship, which coincided with other initiatives in this area, such as the arguments put forward in Ivor Montagu’s pamphlet The Political Censorship of Films (1929). It was within this context that pressure began to build for both the exhibition and suppression of Potomok Chingis-Khana/The Heir to Genghiz Khan/Storm Over Asia (1928), a Soviet montage film that, in its Western European travels, provoked explicit engagement with the issue of British imperialism. Vsevelod Pudovkin directed Potomok Chingis-Khana, a film shot around Lake Baikal in Buriat-Mongolia, in 1928. The action is set in 1920. Imperialist military forces attempt to fabricate an illustrious ancestry for the film’s 96 From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa Mongolian protagonist Bair (Valéry Inkijinoff), as a prelude to establishing him as a puppet ruler. Bair ultimately leads a Soviet-inspired Mongolian uprising against the occupying forces. To a certain extent, the film can be classified as one of the many transnational European initiatives of the 1920s. It was produced for the part German-owned studio Mezhrabpom-Rus, whose distribution links provided an opening through which Soviet films passed into Western Europe. Higson has pointed out how transnational European films of the 1920s were often ‘further “localised” or “nationalised” at the point of distribution’, through strategies that included retitling and alternative intertitles (2010: 77). Both strategies were applied to Potomok Chingis-Khana when it was screened in Berlin, although these ‘localising’ tendencies were balanced by the need for its communist distributors to maintain the film’s propagandist potential. In Germany, the film was given the title Sturm über Asien. This placed greater emphasis upon aesthetics; specifically the virtuoso montage sequence at the film’s conclusion in which Bair leads the uprising of a Mongolian horde that seemingly emerges from the earth as storm gathers. For some German speakers, the title would also have potentially aligned the film with the recent book of the same name by the famous German explorer and secret agent Wilhelm Filchner. His Sturm über Asien dealt with pre-Revolutionary Russian imperial designs on Tibet at the turn of the century, where Britain was the rival great power (Filchner 1924). Filchner’s book also included considerable ethnographic detail about a country with some similarities to Mongolia. As Amy Sargeant has demonstrated, montage aesthetics and ethnographic interest were two key themes in the extensive press coverage when the film was first exhibited in Berlin (2007: 58–62). Whereas in the Soviet release of Potomok Chingis-Khana the imperialists were British, and were clearly identified as such in at least one Soviet audience survey, the German release incorporated some alternative intertitles that provided a degree of deniability in response to inevitable British objections to the film (Sargeant 2007: 56–58). These alternative intertitles referred to the occupying forces in Sturm über Asien as anti-Bolshevik troops under the command of the renegade former White military leader, the Russian Baron Ungern Sternberg. Some German reviewers accepted this at face value. However, the British correspondents who covered the Berlin screenings of Sturm über Asien as a major cultural event in the main news sections of several British broadsheet newspapers rejected this attempt to redefine the nationality of the film’s villains. The Observer’s correspondent stated: ‘The plot […] is an indictment of British mandates, colonies and protectorates over Asiatic peoples’ (Anon 1929d: 10). The Times’ Berlin correspondent systematically listed every visual indication that the occupation forces were British: The ‘White Russians’ wear uniforms resembling British. General UngernSternberg and his staff look as like British officers as a Russian producer can make them […] [when Bair] is about to sign a treaty making his kingdom a minor protectorate under the artful Imperialist Power […] there is something like a Union Jack in the background. (Anon 1929e: 10) The Times review lodged in the British newspaper of record a negative judgement of the film and its possible effects on certain audiences. The reviewer insisted that the film could only be classified as a Hetzfilm, roughly translatable as one likely to incite hatred and cause disturbances. This view was carefully 97 Martin Stollery Figure 1: ‘Something like a Union Jack in the background’ in Storm Over Asia. noted by a range of interested parties, from the core Close Up personnel to Special Branch and the Home Office. The core Close Up personnel, who had also seen the film in Berlin, chose to take a stand on Storm Over Asia in their February 1929 issue, which was devoted to the topic of censorship. It included a form requesting signatures for a petition as part of the journal’s ongoing campaign against the current British regulations. Macpherson published an extensive rebuttal of The Times review, which he said seemed to be talking about a completely different Storm Over Asia to the one he had seen. In her Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929), the first book-length study of Soviet cinema to be published in English, Bryher referred again to The Times review, and discussed Storm Over Asia at greater length than any other film mentioned in her book. Storm Over Asia became the focus of a wide ranging debate, triggered by The Times review, which engaged a number of the issues central to Close Up’s transnational project. The Times’ Berlin correspondent was prepared to accept that cinema could be an art, and was prepared to entertain the possibility that Storm Over Asia might fall into this category. His conclusion, however, was that it fell very far short of this: The praise accorded to Storm Over Asia was so remarkable that one was prepared resolutely to close one’s eyes to the propaganda and see something really notable..[but]..the idea that the picture makes any real contribution to the science of the film is far fetched..[it] is evidently intended for the Indian bazaars and the native quarter of Shanghai. (Anon 1929e: 10) The Times review conforms to Clyde Taylor’s bold claim that: ‘The aesthetic played a major role in the narration of transcendent Whiteness and 98 From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa an indispensable role in the development of modern, pseudo-scientific racism’ (1998: 26). The Times’ Berlin correspondent asserted his affiliation to a transcendent, transnational whiteness by attempting to approach Storm Over Asia in a Kantian spirit of disinterestedness. Despite this, the film’s perceived shortcomings and crudities convinced him that its ideal audience was the socially most inferior, non-white population groups in areas where Britain maintained colonial interests. Consequently, The Times’ reviewer excluded Storm Over Asia from the aesthetic sphere. The Close Up writers responded with a battery of arguments and examples justifying Pudovkin as an artist and Storm Over Asia as art. The Times review did not once mention the director of Storm Over Asia: for the Close Up critics the name ‘Pudovkin’ justified and explained a great deal. It justified and explained, for example, a montage sequence comparing the British general and his wife getting dressed, and a ceremony conducted by a group of Mongolian lamas, which might otherwise be construed as crudely propagandistic and offensive to British military honour. Macpherson argued that: The analogy made between the preparation of the commander’s wife and the devil dancers, both donning absurd trinkets, absurd headdress, absurd clothes and absurd masks, is obvious, and because it is Pudovkin, not obvious. It is, apart from anything else, a consummate piece of pure cinema. (1929b: 42) Macpherson, like The Times reviewer, saw art as something that transcended the obvious. The identification of Pudovkin as an artist supported Macpherson’s assertion that Storm Over Asia achieved this transcendence. Bryher’s book devoted its first three chapters to Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. The big names were celebrated, their oeuvres delineated, their achievements taken as undeniable proof of the fact that these directors should occupy pride of place within an emergent transnational cinematic pantheon. The Close Up writers’ cinephiliac enthusiasms were so intense that the Leavisite critic William Hunter felt obliged, in his pamphlet The Scrutiny of Cinema, to caution against, ‘the customary tone of the more pretentious criticism of today [which] is to speak of Storm Over Asia as if it were on the level of King Lear, of Eisenstein as a second Leonardo da Vinci […] and so on’ (1932: 13). Unlike The Times reviewer, the Close Up writers’ aesthetic of pure cinema did not have as its corollary the base sensibilities of colonial subjects whose inherent volatility could be inflamed by crude propaganda films such as Storm Over Asia. The Close Up writers’ progressive transnational intellectual orientations drew them towards an engagement with black Atlanticism, particularly as manifested in the Harlem Renaissance. In August 1929, they ran a special issue on ‘the negro’ and cinema. Contributors criticized patronizing and demeaning stereotypes of African Americans in Hollywood films although, as was the case with several variants of white modernism during this period, they tended, as James Donald puts it, to link blackness to ‘a certain physicality, a certain naturalness, and ultimately that primitiveness necessary for […] challenge to the suffocating reality of bourgeois life and the banal conventions of middlebrow art’ (Donald et al. 1998: 33). Given this context, the provocative comments in The Times about Storm Over Asia being intended ‘for the Indian bazaars and the native quarters of Shanghai’ could not go unchallenged. Macpherson commented of the correspondent that ‘apparently he does not mean [that] as 99 Martin Stollery a compliment!’ (1929c: 36). Similarly, Macpherson rejected the implication that Storm Over Asia could in itself cause disturbances among such viewers: ‘you can’t foment unrest and discontent unless it is already there, and is anybody going to do anything about it?’ (1929a: 11). He argued that films such as Storm Over Asia would, if widely exhibited, have the opposite effect to that which their more conservative critics feared. They would, in his view, educate working-class and colonial audiences that less enlightened critics feared they would incite. The Close Up writers trod a politically cautious line. They resisted their opponents’ attempts to seize upon their advocacy of Soviet montage cinema as evidence of communist sympathies. Bryher and Macpherson carefully dissociated themselves from the kind of accusation published in the 15 January 1929 edition of The Daily Express and reprinted in Close Up’s February 1929 anti-censorship issue: ‘[There is] a pro-Russian propagandist organisation [i.e Close Up] operating from Territet, Switzerland to remove the ban imposed by the government and the BBFC on about forty Russian propagandist films now in cold storage in this country’ (Anon 1929a). As Anne Friedberg has noted, and as some leftist commentators observed at the time, the Close Up writers sought to achieve a tone in their writing that would ‘mute the threat of the Russian film’. References to Soviet revolutionary phraseology, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, or opposition to imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, ‘were strikingly absent from Bryher’s book and from Close Up itself’ (Friedberg 1983: 274). Instead, rather than supporting revolution or decolonization as the remedy for any discontent experienced by the colonial subjects represented in Storm Over Asia, Bryher sought an alternative way forward. She humanized the British military forces in Storm Over Asia and posited the ‘natives’ as children requiring nurture and educational and cultural development. She argued that the general, his officers and his wife, were not ‘exaggerated types’ (Bryher 1929: 64). Such people, according to Bryher, did indeed exist amongst the British upper middle class, but Figure 2: The sacred child in Storm Over Asia. 100 From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa she added that other kinds of people, such as administrators, teachers and missionaries, were also doing more useful and progressive work within the British empire. To show that Pudovkin was an even-handed observer, some humane qualities were even attributed to the British general and his wife. Bryher described the encounter in Storm Over Asia between them and a sacred child in a Mongolian temple in the following manner: ‘both the general and his wife, having a sentimental love of children, pity. Pity the child because it is there, denied play and denied air, and pity because it is said that these children die young’ (1929: 64). Children and education about the empire featured prominently in Bryher’s concluding reflections on the debate about Storm Over Asia. Bryher, who had a particular interest in educational reform and the use of film in schools, elaborated upon Macpherson’s comment about Storm Over Asia’s educational value by declaring, because of its outstanding location shooting, that it was worth seeing ‘over and over again from merely the ethnographical point of view[…].If an Englishman had brought this record back, all the school children possible would be taken to see it by empire and educational leagues and societies’ (Bryher 1929: 62, 63). The Times review was based upon a duality between white aesthetic appreciation and undisciplined, potentially disruptive ‘native’ sensibilities, with Storm Over Asia firmly relegated to the latter domain. The Close Up writers’ extended riposte arrived at a position where Storm Over Asia was understood in simultaneously transnational and imperial terms. Bryher’s and Macpherson’s reception of Storm Over Asia combined an appreciation of ‘consummate […] pure cinema’, which stood at the heart of Bryher’s and Macpherson’s ideal of transnational film culture, with a progressive imperialist outlook into which British school children and less developed, child-like ‘natives’ should be inducted. Bryher invoked the authority of another publication from The Times group of newspapers in her final reflection on the Storm Over Asia debate: ‘where we have failed in England, and lamentably failed, is in our lack of provision of educational facilities for the natives. Now this is not a “red” statement. I read it almost weekly in the pages of The Times Educational Supplement’ (1929: 68).2 The Close Up writers’ efforts did not result in Storm Over Asia being screened as widely within Britain and its empire as they hoped. While the Close Up cinephiles were developing their arguments, representatives from Special Branch, the Home Office and the BBFC debated how best to deal with the prospect of Storm Over Asia being screened in Britain (Willcox 1990). Captain H. Miller of Special Branch first applied for a warrant in December 1928 for customs to seize the film as it entered Britain. The Home Office initially decided that no action was necessary, pending further information about the film. After The Times’ Berlin correspondent’s article was published on 12 January 1929, Miller made another, successful application for a warrant. Despite this, a print of the film managed to get through customs without being intercepted. Miller also wrote to alert BBFC Director Joseph Brooke Wilkinson to the film on 17 January 1929, quoting the reference in The Times review to ‘Indian bazaars and the native quarter of Shanghai’. Reports about Storm Over Asia continued to appear in the British press over the following days. For example, on 23 January 1929 the Morning Post, in an article titled ‘Anti-British film’, referred to how Storm Over Asia’s British characters ‘appeared incapable of any dealings with the natives which are not characterized by ruthless barbarity and inhuman lust for gain and domination’ (Anon 1929b). The debate building around Storm Over Asia and Soviet films more generally prompted Brooke Wilkinson to write to Miller on 1 February 1929 asking 2. The Storm Over Asia debate can be used to further illuminate Tatiana Heise’s and Andrew Tudor’s comparative study in which they test the general applicability of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory of cultural production. They do so by exploring related examples far removed from those Bourdieu initially used to formulate his theory. Heise and Tudor analyse British and Brazilian approaches to the legitimization of film art in the 1920s and 1930s. They raise a question about ‘the degree to which Bourdieu’s field theory applies only within distinct social and political boundaries, or whether fields could (or should) also be conceptualized at a trans-national level’ (Heise and Tudor 2007: 182). They tentatively conclude that, although the relative strength of the social agents differed, there was a common ‘pattern to the positions available for agents’ occupation’, in the basic constitution of the field of film art in Brazil and Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. To adopt Bourdieu’s terminology, intellectual audiences in Britain associated with Close Up and the Film Society began to assert a degree of autonomy in their consecration of specific films and film-makers, independent of the heteronomous value judgements that social agents wielding economic or political power, such as the BBFC, tried to impose. The Storm Over Asia debate, however, is an instance where the question Heise and Tudor raise, about whether Bourdieu’s field theory can be conceptualized in 101 Martin Stollery transnational terms, has to be considered alongside the issue of the subordinate position assigned to colonial subjects within this field. Heise and Tudor propose as a general principle that, where there are diverse and conflicting groups within a field, a straightforward high/low axis may be insufficient to capture how the field attributes value, and ‘a more multi-dimensional conceptualization of consecration’ of art and artists may be necessary (Heise and Tudor 2007: 185). This was certainly the case with the Close Up writers on Storm Over Asia. They consecrated the film in ‘pure cinema’ terms but also incorporated more heteronomous criteria, derived from contemporary debates about imperial progress and development, into their evaluation of its educational use value for colonial subjects. for his comments on a draft letter that could be published in the press to clarify the BBFC’s position on this issue. The draft letter stated that the BBFC assessed films on their own merits, regardless of country of origin, and that the free flow of films from different countries was important in order to encourage ‘the wholesome competition of independent schools of thought and methods of treatment’, thereby exposing British producers to the best work from across the globe. The BBFC’s transnational rather than narrowly nationalist credentials were emphasized: ‘The public and the trade may rest assured that no Russian film has been, or will be, denied a certificate except for reasons which will be applicable to those of any other country, including our own’. The letter went on to explain, however, that some Soviet films caused problems, not because they were Soviet, but because they were permeated with Soviet ideology dedicated, among other things, to the overthrow of the government of other countries, and ‘especially of the British empire’ (Brooke Wilkinson 1929). The draft letter was never published because on 16 February 1929 the Home Office counselled ‘dignified silence’ rather than public participation in the debate (Scott 1929). Nevertheless, as an internal statement of BBFC policy it acknowledged the ideal of transnational film culture advocated by Close Up, although as a trade organization the BBFC harnessed this closely to the boosting of British film production. Significantly, the Close Up writers and the BBFC did not adopt diametrically opposed positions across every aspect of their different responses to Storm Over Asia. Rather, each tried to occupy some of their adversary’s ground in order to more convincingly win the argument. This supports Martin Barker’s contention that, at least in adversarial contexts, ‘reading positions’ are […] taken up partly in response to other people’s assessments’ (2006: 130). The time for a decision came when Storm Over Asia was presented to the BBFC for certification later in 1929. Representatives from the India Office and the War Office contributed to the discussion about how to deal with the film. The argument that eventually won the day was the one initially articulated in The Times review, which prioritized the maintenance of order within the empire over other considerations. The BBFC concluded on 23 August 1929 that Storm Over Asia could not be certified because the final montage sequence, featuring Asian colonial subjects in revolt, could provoke an ‘ugly riot’ if shown in India (Anon 1929c). Censor boards in India typically followed the BBFC’s lead, as well as taking more local considerations into account. Further to India Office advice, the Government of India imposed a customs ban on Storm Over Asia, and there is no evidence of it ever having been presented for certification during the Raj (Bhowmik 1995: 57). The post-independence exhibition of Storm Over Asia in India deserves further detailed analysis. It coincided with Pudovkin’s speaking tour there in 1950, part of the Soviet Union’s strategy of building alliances during the Cold War with newly independent, non-aligned countries. Britain only enjoyed foreign concession status and more limited powers in Shanghai, the other location mentioned in The Times review, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. As in India two decades later, Yaxiya fengbao/Storm Over Asia was screened there shortly after the strengthening of diplomatic ties between the Soviet Union and China in December 1932 (Zhang 2005: 249). In Britain, concerns about possible disturbances were mocked when Storm Over Asia was shown publicly in London for the first time by the Film Society in February 1930. Ralph Bond recorded the event in Close Up: The Film Society announces that it will show Storm Over Asia at the Tivoli on 23 February. Great sensation. The Lord’s Day Observance 102 From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa Council is very upset and calls on the LCC [London County Council] to prohibit the exhibition. The audience at the Tivoli is assembled. A copy of the letter received by the Tivoli management is flashed on the screen. Fearing the worst, and straining our eyes we read: Clause 8 (a) of the Rules of Management, etc., etc. No cinematograph film shall be exhibited which is likely to be injurious to morality or to encourage or to incite to crime, or to lead to disorder, or to be in any way offensive in the circumstances to public feeling or which contains any offensive representation of living persons. I am to add (proceeds the letter) that should any disorder occur at the premises during the exhibition of Storm Over Asia the Council will hold the licensee of the premises responsible. I am Sir, Your obedient servant. The Film Society laughed. So would a cat. But can you beat it? ([1930] 1998: 301–02) The Film Society laughed at the notion that its civilized patrons might act like unruly natives. This privileged screening of Storm Over Asia needs to be located, however, not only within the burgeoning transnational European film art network, which included institutions such as the Club des Amis du Septième Art in Paris, but also within a wider imperial context where Indians, for example, were denied the opportunity to see the film for nearly two decades. Subsequent British screenings of Storm Over Asia to predominantly white working-class audiences during the 1930s constituted an intermediate category, between the Film Society elite at one end of the spectrum, and colonial subjects at the other. The Workers’ Film Society and associated organizations began to arrange screenings of Soviet films in Britain for specifically proletarian audiences. The intention was to provide a service similar to the Film Society’s, albeit with a more exclusive focus on Soviet cinema rather than on a wider range of films from around the world. The Workers’ Film Society emphasized these films’ political rather than aesthetic aspects, and aimed to make screenings accessible to anyone by keeping membership fees low. Throughout the 1930s, the Workers’ Film Society and related organizations were subjected to persistent official and semi-official harassment: police raids, screenings cancelled at the last moment due to local council or police pressure on exhibitors, and so on. The establishment of Kino, to distribute 16mm films, nonflammable and therefore technically not subject to the fire safety provisions of the Cinematograph Act 1909, provided a firmer basis for this kind of activity. Storm Over Asia became part of its repertory. Kino’s annual report for 1936, for example, recorded 120 screenings of the film that year (Ryan 1980: 65). The screening of Storm Over Asia by a workers’ film organization led to exchanges in the Houses of Parliament. On 3 March 1931, Waldron Smithers, a backbench Conservative MP, raised the matter with the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and again two days later with the Labour Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes (Commons Hansard: 184–85, 571). Smithers demanded to know which agency had brought the film into the country, and whether West Ham Council, a Labour stronghold in an area of London with a predominantly working-class and ethnically diverse population, would be reprimanded for allowing it to be shown. He condemned the exhibition of the film as 103 Martin Stollery 3. One illustration of the closeness of the links between the BBFC and the Home Office is the fact that Edward Shortt, the BBFC’s president at this time, was a former Home Secretary. unpatriotic, and called for a state censorship bill. These outbursts were deftly evaded by government ministers. Much as any individual MP might object to a particular film, there was little likelihood of a British government introducing a state censorship bill. It had taken a number of years to arrive at an understanding between the Home Office, local councils and the BBFC. A system of official state censorship would potentially expose central government to criticism from either pro- or anti-censorship factions on each decision it made, and create a large administrative workload. Under the arrangement prevailing in the early 1930s, the government could disclaim responsibility, as Clynes did when challenged by Smithers, even though the Home Office and other departments of state exercised influence behind the scenes, as was the case with Storm Over Asia.3 The Close Up writers and the BBFC differed fundamentally on the exhibition of Storm Over Asia, but both articulated commitments, albeit differently defined in each case, to transnational film culture. For the Close Up writers, Storm Over Asia was compatible with progressive imperialism, whereas for the BBFC the film’s perceived threat to the stability of the British empire overrode any contribution to the development of film as art, or benefit to British film producers, that might be derived from allowing it wider distribution. For all parties involved in the debate, descriptions and representations of empire were in transition. When Miller of the Special Branch wrote to Brooke Wilkinson of the BBFC on 7 February 1929, for example, with his comments on the draft letter about the censorship of Soviet films, he suggested that if it was published, the blunt reference to ‘the British empire’ should be softened to ‘the British Commonwealth of Nations, India and British colonies’ (1929). This exchange between Scotland Yard, the Home Office and the BBFC mirrors the terminological vacillation in John Grierson’s short essay, first published in 1933, about the work of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) and its film unit. Grierson wavered between the terms ‘empire’ and ‘Commonwealth’, the latter attaining greater currency after the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster in 1931. Grierson famously argued that the achievement of the EMB had been: to change the connotation of the word ‘Empire’. Our original command of peoples was slowly becoming a co-operative effort in the tilling of soil, the reaping of harvests and the organisation of a world economy. For the old flags of exploitation it substitutes the new flags of common labour. (Grierson and Hardy [1933] 1979: 48–49) This is broadly consonant with what the historian Frank Trentmann has described as a newly emergent intellectual emphasis, within the 1914–1930 period, on global coordination and a ‘new internationalism’ that framed ‘international government as a continuation of imperial history, not a break or challenge’ (2007: 48). The documentary film movement came to dominate British intellectual film culture during the 1930s. Grierson and his EMB patron, the senior civil servant Stephen Tallents, staked out a particular relationship to the Storm Over Asia debates during the movement’s emergence and the first stage of its consolidation during the early 1930s. This relationship is worth exploring in more depth, because it highlights the movement’s relationship to transnationalism and imperialism more vividly than the standard, received wisdom about the links between British documentary and Soviet montage 104 From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa cinema. The anecdote that distils this received wisdom is the Film Society’s famous double bill of Battleship Potemkin and Drifters (John Grierson 1929), on 10 November 1929. This event is repeatedly cited on widely used as well as authoritative web pages, including the Wikipedia entry on Grierson, the BFI Screenonline entry on Drifters and the page on his career at the Grierson Trust’s website (Wikipedia; BFI Screenonline; The Grierson Trust). The standard analysis arising from this is that British documentary films such as Drifters were influenced by Soviet montage techniques, but the movement adapted them to serve reformist rather than revolutionary purposes (Higson 1986). Undoubtedly, the famous double bill at the Film Society was a public relations coup for Grierson, but for present purposes replacing Battleship Potemkin with Storm Over Asia as the pivotal film opens up a more multidimensional perspective on the nascent documentary film movement’s history. In 1930, shortly after its Film Society debut, Grierson travelled to Cambridge to lecture on and project Storm Over Asia, as well as Turksib (Viktor Turin 1929) at the Easter conference of the National Union of Students (NUS). Prior to the screening, Grierson is reported to have commented, somewhat hyperbolically, to the conference organizers: I’ve brought a couple of films with me and I’d like to run them after my talk. I don’t think we should announce the titles because I’ve just smuggled them into the country from France in my suitcase. They’ve never been shown in Britain and the less said about them the better. (Hardy 1979: 62) By this time there were several frameworks within which Storm Over Asia, described by Grierson as a ‘world shaker’, could be viewed: as pure cinema; as essential viewing for those wanting to keep up to date with the latest developments in transnational intellectual film culture; as propaganda that threatened imperial stability; as a film prompting reflection on how to progressively develop the empire or Commonwealth (Grierson [1932] 1981: 64). Turksib, a Soviet documentary film about building the Turkestano-Siberia railroad, was a useful counterweight in this context because it was less controversial than Storm Over Asia. As Matthew Payne has argued, Turksib’s success with critics and audiences, not only in the Soviet Union but also across Western Europe, can in part be attributed to its pervasive employment of the familiar trope of western technology transforming eastern backwardness (2001). Grierson was a guest speaker to whom any NUS delegate with an interest in cinema and possible ambitions to work in film production would have listened very carefully, given that during this period he was recruiting (male) university graduates to work for him at the EMB film unit. More generally, Grierson’s talk and the screenings of Storm Over Asia and Turksib would have resonated at the conference of an organization that, through initiatives such as student exchange programmes, sought to expand its members’ horizons beyond national boundaries. According to Robert Cecil, its honorary president at that time, the NUS deserved support because: imperially, it binds the students of the Dominions in a common understanding and loyalty with those of the Mother Country. Internationally, it seeks to promote a better understanding between the students of the Empire and those of other countries. (1930: 10) 105 Martin Stollery Similarly, the Union’s Secretary Ralph Nunn May, a member of the Imperial Debating Team that toured Canada and Australia in 1926, and later a film producer and general manager of the Crown Film Unit, gave a speech at the conference about how ‘young people had to determine whether they were going to sing ‘Britannia rules the waves’ or insist that the England of the future shall face up resolutely to international cooperation on the basis of equality’ (Anon 1930: 10). As Ian Christie has suggested, Grierson’s relationship to Soviet cinema was ‘complex and often ambivalent’ (1988: 8). This is true not only in terms of what Grierson wrote about Soviet films but also in terms of what he did with them. Around the same time as the NUS event, Grierson also screened Storm Over Asia, Turksib, and other Soviet montage films at private screenings at the Imperial Institute’s cinema for EMB officials and members of the government. As Priya Jaikumar has pointed out, the Cinematograph Act 1927 and the EMB, both mid-1920s creations of the British state, were in some respects comparable in their orientation towards imperial cooperation, in part through the promotion of protectionism (2006: 49). Grierson’s screenings of Soviet cinema at the Imperial Institute were organized to demonstrate how vital it was for the government to support a state-sponsored film unit, by way of providing a graphic illustration of one of the political challenges that had to be met, as well as the artistic standards that had to be equalled. Tallents, the EMB Secretary, gave four examples in his 1932 pamphlet, The Projection of England, of Soviet films that Britain needed to match. These were Battleship Potemkin, Storm Over Asia, Turksib and Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko 1930). Figure 3: Stephen Tallents. 106 From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa Of the second he wrote: ‘No story in itself could be more antipathetic to an English eye; yet I have heard an Englishman of wide cinematic experience describe it as the greatest film that he has seen’ (Tallents 1932: 32–33). Tallents astutely integrated two apparently divergent cultural trends: the Home Office and BBFC stances which saw films such as Storm Over Asia as antipathetic to the imperial project the EMB attempted to modernise and reinvigorate; the Close Up embrace of Soviet montage cinema as an integral part of transnational film culture. This integration was aided by the fact that there were already points of contact between these trends. The British documentary film movement of the 1930s can therefore be seen in terms of a convergence between the Close Up version of transnational intellectual film culture that preceded it, and state-sponsored protectionist imperialism. In some respects, the British documentary film movement, considered in its widest definition, fulfilled the type of film-making envisaged by Bryher in her discussion of Storm Over Asia: films of ethnographic value exploring progressive developments that would be of educational value to school children and ‘native’ subjects of the British empire. The movement also paralleled wider transnational trends during the 1930s in its importation of North American and European film personnel to work within the British film industry: Robert Flaherty and Alberto Cavalcanti are the leading examples, but other figures such as the French composer Maurice Jaubert also worked on British documentaries during the 1930s. These film-makers were, as Bergfelder puts it, ‘cultural outsiders in more ways than one’ who nevertheless decisively contributed to some of the documentary movement’s, and therefore British national cinema’s, most highly regarded films (2005: 320). British members of the movement looked far beyond national boundaries: two of its alumni, Paul Rotha (1930) and Basil Wright (1974), wrote histories of world cinema. Like Close Up, the documentary movement supported the burgeoning British film society movement in the 1930s that promoted a transnational film culture orientated towards the perceived classics of European cinema (MacDonald 2010). Although he conflates workers and more generalist film societies, Tallents neatly summarized, from his perspective as EMB Secretary, how the documentary film movement represented an imperialist intervention into minority transnational film culture: There are growing up today in England scores of small Film Societies at whose performances week after week throughout the winter are gathered those whose interest is in cinema as an art and especially as an art of propaganda. These Russian films are the mainstay of their performances. They can scarcely find a single English film of interest to their purpose. (1932: 32) For Tallents, the solution to this undesirable situation was self-evident. There had to be official support for the production of films that could rise to the aesthetic level of, and effectively supplant Soviet productions: ‘We have ready to our hand all the material to outmatch Storm Over Asia by a film that should be entitled Dawn Over Africa’ (1932: 31). The Storm Over Asia episode in late 1920s and early 1930s British film culture needs to be seen within the larger pattern of relationships between transnationalism, imperialism and internationalism that is integral to the history of British intellectual film culture and the documentary film movement from the late 1920s to the era of decolonization. The output of the Crown Film Unit during the 107 Martin Stollery 4. The Czech/Welsh working-class solidarity articulated in The Silent Village would more likely have been described at the time of its release as internationalist, given the established uses of this term within socialist and Marxist traditions. Yet, according to Hannerz’s definition, this solidarity would be a transnational connection. This film is an example, then, of the need to be aware that transnationalism is sometimes used as a contemporary academic description for some relationships and connections that would previously have been described as internationalist. 5. This aspect of film history needs to be understood within the larger context of continuities between pre-war imperial and postwar internationalist networks (Mazower 2009). 108 Second World War, for example, has justly been celebrated by film historians as one of the outstanding achievements of British national cinema. Yet some of Crown’s projects emerged within the larger context of formal alliances between the British and Allied governments, or governments-in-exile. The Czech refugee film-maker Jiri Weiss published an essay in the journal Documentary News Letter in December 1941 in which he urged British documentary film-makers to fully represent the European as well as British and imperial dimensions of the conflict, to tell ‘the true stories of the multitude of nations which […] now stand side by side’. Weiss suggested this could best be achieved through an Allied film unit (Chapman 1998: 216–17). Although this suggestion was never taken up, demonstrating the continuing importance of national boundaries, even among wartime allies, Weiss went on to re-edit for British distribution documentary films supplied to the British Ministry of Information by the Soviet Film Agency. He was also employed by Crown to direct Before the Raid (1943), which used Scottish villagers to re-enact resistance to the Nazi occupation of a Norwegian fishing village. The most renowned Crown film-maker, Humphrey Jennings, also directed a similar project, The Silent Village (1943), which used Welsh miners and their families to re-enact the Nazi massacre of the inhabitants of the Czech village of Lidice. Both of these films were made possible by formal international alliances between the British government and the Norwegian and Czech governments-in-exile. Yet they also explore what we would now understand as transnational connections, if we accept sociologist Ulf Hannerz’s distinction, which holds that internationalism is more closely linked to the actions and involvement of the governments of particular nation states, whereas transnationalism is driven mainly by non-state actors (1996: 6). Before the Raid is partly premised on North Sea regional cultural connections between Norway and Scotland, whereas The Silent Village posits a transnational, working-class solidarity between Welsh and Czech miners that exceeds relationships between states.4 The True Story of Lili Marlene (Humphrey Jennings 1944), which traced the migration during wartime of a German song into British popular culture, can be described as an exploration of how, even during wartime, transnational cultural flows undermine reductive definitions of national cultures. At the same time, Crown continued the precedent set by Tallents and the EMB, by devoting considerable time and resources during 1942 and 1943 to a major unfinished film, Morning, Noon and Night, about the British empire war effort. Jennings was one of a number of documentary film-makers involved in this film, which sought to re-imagine the empire in internationalist terms (Stollery 2011). Immediately after the war, some key players in the British documentary movement became involved in UNESCO, and other United Nations projects, resulting in films such as World Without End (Paul Rotha and Basil Wright, 1953). This film can be understood in Hannerz’s terms as more of an international than a transnational initiative, insofar as it was sponsored by an organization constituted on the basis of formal collaboration between representatives of different member states.5 Like the reception history of Storm Over Asia, these later historical configurations, which obviously deserve closer attention than they can be given here, tend to be sidelined in accounts of the British documentary movement that consider it primarily in terms of a narrowly conceived understanding of British national cinema. These later examples are worth mentioning, however briefly, simply to demonstrate that further scholarly explorations of the shifting, complex relationships between transnationalism, imperialism, internationalism and neocolonialism, and their intersections within particular national contexts, would prove fruitful across the entire span of film history. From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful to Sudha Rajagopalan and Jon Hoare for their helpful responses to questions relating to this article. Scott Anthony (without being aware of it), Deborah Shaw and the anonymous reviewers for this journal al so contributed useful suggestions and references. REFERENCES Anon (1929a), ‘40 Red Films in Cold Storage’, Daily Express, 15 January. —— (1929b), ‘Anti-British Film’, Morning Post, 23 January. —— (1929c), ‘Note of private showing of Storm Over Asia at BBFC offices. [manuscript]. Home Office Correspondence 1839–1959. HO 45/24871’, The National Archives, London. —— (1929d), Storm Over Asia, The Observer, 25 January, p. 10. —— (1929e), Storm Over Asia, The Times, 12 January, p. 10. —— (1930), ‘New Views on New Problems’, The Manchester Guardian, 29 March: p. 10. Barker, Martin (2006), ‘I Have Seen the Future and It Is Not Here Yet […]; or, On Being Ambitious for Audience Research’, The Communication Review, 9: 2, pp. 123–141. Bergfelder, Tim (2005), ‘National, transnational or supranational cinema?: Rethinking European film studies’, Media, Culture and Society, 27: 3, pp. 315-331. BFI Screenonline, Drifters, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/439877/. Accessed 13 September 2010. Bhowmik, Someswar (1995), Indian Cinema, Colonial Contours, Calcutta: Papyrus. Bond, Ralph ([1930] 1998), ‘Acts under the Acts’, in James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds), Close Up, 1927–33: Cinema and Modernism, London: Cassell, pp. 301–303. Brooke Wilkinson, J. (1929), ‘Letter to H Miller. [manuscript]. Home Office Correspondence 1839–1959. HO 45/24871’, The National Archives, London. Bryher ([1928] 1998), ‘What Can I Do?’, in James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds), Close Up, 1927–33: Cinema and Modernism, London: Cassell, pp. 286–287. —— (1929), Film Problems of Soviet Russia, Territet: Pool. Cecil, Robert (1930), ‘At Home and Abroad’, The Times, 12 March. p. 10. Chapman, James (1998), The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945, London: I. B. Tauris. Chowdhry, Prem (2000), Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— ‘Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire’, http://beta.bfi.org. uk/colonialfilm/home. Accessed 10 September 2010. Commons Hansard (1931), Parliamentary Debates, 5th series, vol. 249, pp. 184–85, 571. Christie, Ian (1988), ‘Introduction: Soviet Cinema: A Heritage and its History’, in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, London: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Donald, James, Friedberg, Anne and Marcus, Laura (1998), Close Up, 1927–33: Cinema and Modernism, London: Cassell. Dovzhenko, Alexander (1930), Earth, VUFKU, USSR. Eisenstein, Sergei (1926), Bronenosets Potemkin/Battleship Potemkin, USSR: Sovkino. 109 Martin Stollery Feuer, Lewis Samuel (1986), Imperialism and the Anti-Imperialist Mind, New York: Prometheus. Filchner, Wilhelm (1924), Sturm über Asien/Storm Over Asia, Berlin: Neufeld and Henius. Friedberg, Anne (1983), ‘Writing About Cinema: Close-Up 1927–33’, Ph.D. thesis, New York: New York University. Grant, Kevin, Levine, Philippa and Trentmann, Frank (2007), Beyond Sovereignty, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Grierson, John (1929), Drifters, UK: EMB. Grierson, John and Hardy, Forsyth (1979), Grierson on Documentary, London: Faber. —— (1981), Grierson on the Movies, London: Faber. The Grierson Trust, ‘John Grierson’, http://www.griersontrust.org/john-grierson.html. Accessed 13 September 2010. Hannerz, Ulf (1996), Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, London: Routledge. Hardy, Forsyth (1979), John Grierson: A Documentary Biography, London: Faber. Heise, Tatiana and Tudor, Andrew (2007), ‘Constructing (Film) Art: Bourdieu’s Field Model in a Comparative Context’, Cultural Sociology, 1: 2, pp. 165–187. Higbee, Will and Lim, Song Hwee (2010), ‘Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies’, Transnational Cinemas, 1: 1, pp. 7–21. Higson, Andrew (1986), ‘“Britain’s Outstanding Contribution to the Film”: The Documentary-Realist Traditon’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays, London: BFI, pp. 72–97. —— (2010), ‘Transnational developments in European cinema in the 1920s’, Transnational Cinemas, 1: 1, pp. 69–82. Hjort, Mette (2010), ‘On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism’, in Natasa Durovi ová and Kathleen Newman (eds), World Cinema: Transnational Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 12–33. Hunter, William (1932), Scrutiny of Cinema, London: Wishart. Jaikumar, Priya (2006), Cinema at the End of Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jennings, Humphrey (1943), The Silent Village, UK: Crown Film Unit. Jennings, Humphrey (1944), The True Story of Lili Marlene, UK: Crown Film Unit. MacDonald, Richard (2010), ‘Film Appreciation and the Postwar Film Society Movement’, Ph.D. thesis, London: Goldsmiths College (University of London). Macpherson, Kenneth ([1927] 1998), ‘As Is’, in James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds), Close Up, 1927–33: Cinema and Modernism, London: Cassell, pp. 36–40. —— (1929a), ‘As Is’, Close Up, 4: 2, pp. 5–15. —— (1929b), ‘Storm Over Asia – And Berlin!’, Close Up, 4: 1, pp. 37–46. —— (1929c), ‘Times is Not What they Was!’, Close Up, 4: 2, pp. 33–36. Mazower, Mark (2009), No Enchanted Palace, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, H. (1929), ‘Letter to Harold Scott. [manuscript]. Home Office Correspondence 1839–1959. HO 45/24871’, The National Archives, London. Montagu, Ivor (1929), The Political Censorship of Films, London: Gollancz. Payne, Mattew (2001), ‘Viktor Turin’s Turksib (1929) and Soviet Orientalism’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 21: 1, pp. 37–62. Pudovkin, Vsevelod (1928), Potomok Chingis-Khan/Storm Over Asia, USSR: Mezhrabpom-Rus. 110 From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa Rotha, Paul (1930), The Film Till Now, a Survey of the Cinema, London: J. Cape. Rotha, Paul and Wright, Basil (1953), World Without End, UNESCO. Ryan, Trevor (1980), ‘Film and Political Organisations in Britain, 1929–39’, in Don Macpherson (ed.), Traditions of Independence, London: BFI, pp. 51–69. Sargeant, Amy (2007), Storm Over Asia, London: I. B. Tauris. Scott, Harold (1929), ‘Letter to H. Miller. [manuscript]. Home Office Correspondence 1839–1959. HO 45/24871’, The National Archives, London. Shaw, Deborah (forthcoming), ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing “Transnational Cinema”’, in Stephanie Dennison (ed.), Transnational Film Financing in the Hispanic World, Woodbridge: Tamesis. Stollery, Martin (2000), Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. —— (2011), ‘The Last Roll of the Dice: Morning, Noon and Night, Empire, and the Historiography of the Crown Film Unit’, in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire, London: BFI, pp. 35–53. Tallents, Stephen (1932), The Projection of England, London: Faber. Taylor, Clyde (1998), The Mask of Art, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Trentmann, Frank (2007), ‘After the Nation-State: Citizenship, Empire, and Global Coordination in the New Internationalism, 1914–1930’, in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 34–53. Turin, Viktor (1929), Turksib, USSR: Vostokkino. Weiss, Jiri (1943), Before the Raid, UK: Crown Film Unit. Wikipedia, ‘John Grierson’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Grierson. Accessed 13 September 2010. Willcox, Temple (1990), ‘Soviet Films, Censorship and the British Government: A Matter of the Public Interest’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 10: 3, pp. 275–292. Wright, Basil (1974), The Long View, New York: A. Knopf. Zhang, Zhen (2005), An Amorous History of the Silver Screen : Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. SUGGESTED CITATION Stollery, M. (2011), ‘From Storm Over Asia to Dawn Over Africa: Transnationalism and imperialism in British intellectual film culture of the late 1920s and 1930s’, Transnational Cinemas 2: 1, pp. 93–111, doi: 10.1386/trac.2.1.93_1 CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Martin Stollery, who works part time for the Open University, is the author, among other publications, of Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism (2000), and is currently researching the career of the British film-maker Ian Dalrymple. Contact: E-mail: [email protected] 111