Part II
After Second World War, and particularly by the 1970s and 1980s, Western filmmakers began to portray colonial encounters in more complex and subtle ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, cinema around the world, from the perspective of both filmmakers and audiences, remained drawn to the themes of Western colonialism and, particularly, the difficult issues and problems created by the colonial encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans.
Colonialism at the movies began at the dawn of the motion picture industry in the late 1900s. A fifty-second reel about the French colony of central Vietnam in Indochina was made by Gabriel Veyre, a collaborator of the Lumière Brothers in 1897. This short, shows two French women giving money to a group of Vietnamese children who scramble and fight for every coin. Only a small fraction of French films made in the 1920s and 1930s were colonial in subject or made in exotic locations. French filmmakers, however, made their share of colonial adventure stories that shored up the idea of empire and idealized the Foreign Legion as the “thin white line” defending civilization from the Arabs.
David Henry Slavin counts fifty such films set in North Africa in the 1920s and 1930s that “legitimated the racial privileges of European workers, diverted attention from their own exploitation, and disabled impulses to solidarity with women and colonial peoples” (Henry 3). Justification of colonialism and White men’s savior complex was executed through films in early years of the 20th century. The Four Feathers was such an attempt from the western film makers.
One of the favourite colonial stories, a 1902 novel by the British author A. E. W. Mason, about the courage of a former British soldier during the Sudan campaign of 1898, The Four Feathers was first made into a film during World War I and was remade by ZoltanKorda in 1939. The 1939 film presented the Sudanese enemy, the Arab dervishes, and the African men as mindless warriors in the service of a madman. These and other British films with colonial themes of the 1930s offered little justification for empire other than, writes Jeffrey Richards quoting Nowell-Smith’s words, “the apparent moral superiority of the British, demonstrated by their adherence to the code of gentlemanly conduct and the maintenance of a disinterested system of law and justice” (Richards 364). The Four Feathers is a Technicolor spectacle which examines imperial, masculine codes of honour and chivalry. The film relates to the themes of other 1930s British films in the empire genre by suggesting that although the empire is profoundly unstable and dangerous, British military intervention and the endorsement of particular codes of masculine chivalry are necessary to keep order.
Mason’s 1902 novel has appeared on film seven times, including a 2002 version by the Indian director Shekhar Kapur. Kapur’s film The Four Feathers, unlike the previous ones, injected a dose of anti-imperialism in its double perspective of how British imperialism affected the subordinate native people and the British and native soldiers who enforce foreign rule.
American filmmakers, and apparently American audiences, were not interested in any American “Empire” other than the “Wild West” and cowboys and Indians. “The western” dominated the American cinema from the silent period through the 1950s. Not unlike French and British colonial films, American westerns contrasted white civilization and Indian “savagery,” as well as the conflicts within newly settled colonial societies. Apocalypto, a Hollywood movie which features the struggles of Mayan Empire can be chosen as an example to identify the White men’s propaganda to indigenous people.
Apocalypto is a Hollywood movie produced in the year 2006 which evidently portrays the Mayan kingdom as inherently blood-thirsty savages. The film is directed by Mel Gibson with a racist propaganda, depicts the story of a tribe under Mayan civilization. The Mayan kingdom is at the height of its wealth and power but the foundations of the empire are beginning to crumble. The leaders believe they must build more temples and sacrifice more people or their crops and citizens will die. Jaguar Paw, a peaceful hunter in a remote tribe, is captured along with his entire village in a raid. He is scheduled for a ritual sacrifice until he makes a daring escape and tries to make it back to his pregnant wife and son. This movie is a series of nightmares of the same old racist ignorance, distortions, exaggerations, stereotypes, and lies and omissions that present colonized as a violent and irrelevant savage people. Apocalypto is Gibson’s ignorant and criminal white supremacist vision of Mayan civilization. He is obsessed with downgrading Mayans as mere savage, lessening their accomplishments, showing Mayans as the worst of people committing human sacrifice; a people worthy of being destroyed by Europeans. They are portrayed as weird characters who are illiterate and uncivilized.
The movie Apocalypto masquerades as a historically accurate description of the Mayan civilization before colonization by the Catholic Spaniards. It has failed miserably in this endeavor. The city of Mayans is shown as blighted and filthy, and there are no re-creations of the stunning plazas filled with florid art. It was a culture with complex astronomy, a365-day calendar, and their own writing system, but none of these achievements is celebrated or acknowledged in the movie.
The film ends with the coming of Spanish missionaries to the Island. The Protagonist, Jaguar Paw, and his family walk away in satisfaction seeing the arrival of Spaniards. The dominant message of the climax is that the Mayans were corrupt and merciless without any redeeming values who required the arrival of the Christian Spaniards to save them. It is Mel Gibson’s own message of salvation through the European Christians.
