Challenging the Mythical Boer Hero Archetype in Anglo-Boer War Short Films

SHORT FILMMAKING IN SOUTH AFRICA AFTER APARTHEID Historical ContextAlthough 1994 saw the birth of democracy in South Africa the South African film industry is much older. In fact, our great documentary film tradition dates back to 1896 and the Anglo Boer War(1). Surprisingly only a few books have been published regarding the history of one of the oldest film industries in the world and one of the largest on the African continent. Between 1910 and 2008 1434 features were made in South Africa (Armes 2008). Approximately 944 features were made in the period between 1978 and 1992, as well as nearly 998 documentaries and several hundred short films and videos (Blignaut & Botha 1992). South African film history is captured in a mere twelve books. Developments in early South African cinema (1895 - 1940) have been chronicled in Thelma Gutsche's The History and Social Significance of Motion...

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Seventeen Short Films About Breasts

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e522982009-001 ◽

2008 ◽

Author(s):

Cathryn Robertson

Keyword(s):

Short Films

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Humanitarianism, Human Rights and Biopolitics in the British Empire, 1890–1902

Britain and the World ◽

10.3366/brw.2016.0216 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 96-115 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Anna Clark

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

Human Rights ◽

British Empire ◽

Concentration Camps ◽

Boer War ◽

Personal Rights

The 1890s were a key time for debates about imperial humanitarianism and human rights in India and South Africa. This article first argues that claims of humanitarianism can be understood as biopolitics when they involved the management and disciplining of populations. This article examines the historiography that analyses British efforts to contain the Bombay plague in 1897 and the Boer War concentration camps as forms of discipline extending control over colonized subjects. Secondly, human rights language could be used to oppose biopolitical management. While scholars have criticized liberal human rights language for its universalism, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberals did not believe that rights were universal; they had to be earned. It was radical activists who drew on notions of universal rights to oppose imperial intervention and criticize the camps in India and South Africa. These activists included two groups: the Personal Rights Association and the Humanitarian League; and the individuals Josephine Butler, Sol Plaatje, Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, and Bal Gandadhar Tilak. However, these critics also debated amongst themselves how far human rights should extend.

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Short Films from a Small Nation

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424134.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

C. Claire Thomson

Keyword(s):

Public Information ◽

Industrial Process ◽

Actor Network Theory ◽

Documentary Films ◽

Wide Range ◽

Short Films ◽

Post War ◽

The 1960S ◽

Art And Architecture

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.

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Perceptual-Imaginative Space and the Beautiful Ecologies of Rose Lowder's Bouquets

Paragraph ◽

10.3366/para.2020.0343 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 43 (3) ◽

pp. 314-329

Author(s):

Sarah Cooper

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Moral Philosophy ◽

Ecological Principles ◽

Short Films ◽

Ecological Concern

Experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder is an intricate explorer of perception. Many of her exquisite silent short films feature flowers that are scrutinized frame by frame in shots that appear to have layers, as well as volume, and to quiver between simultaneity and succession. Yet these perceptual palimpsests that present almost too much for the eye to take in also reveal an as yet unexplored relation to imagination. Informed by ecological principles and foregrounding floral beauty, Lowder's Bouquets create a striking bond between perceptual and imaginative space. This article draws upon twentieth-century phenomenological accounts of perception before delving into earlier historical discussions of beauty in nature and in art, and bringing out connections to moral philosophy and feminist ecophilosophy, in order to understand how the beautiful entwines with ecological concern in the perceptual-imaginative space of her films.

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