| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

David Henry Slavin. Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. Pp. xv, 300. $42.50.

This book by David Henry Slavin examines the history of French colonial cinema in the interwar period and the shifting role it played in the making of French national identity. These films were usually shot in North Africa, initially in Morocco until the Rif War, and then from 1925 mostly in Algeria. The shift signifies a change not merely of location but of genre, from exotic travelogue to gendered and racialized melodrama. Slavin shows how the Morocco of Hubert Lyautey's indirect rule and the pronounced assertion of settler interest in Algeria provided different contexts in which French colonial films were produced. A constant underlying these changes, however, was that colonial politics shaped film themes, and the films in turn were used to legitimize colonial rule. French colonial cinema thus played an important role in making and remaking an assumed difference between the superior French civilization and the exotic, colonized other. It was in the 1920s and 1930s, partly in the arena of colonial film, that Frenchness became distinctly a white identity.

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