w/ Dr. Nadine Chan (University of Toronto)
//September 26th, 2024
//5:30-7:30 PM
//GEM Lab, FB 630.15
//1250 rue Guy
Abstract: In the 1930s, the Rural Lecture Caravan—a mobile cinema operated by the Malayan government—travelled widely across the Malay peninsula screening educational films on financial and agricultural improvement. Uncontained by physical walls, their outdoor film shows emitted a vibrant energy that not only mesmerized its immediate viewers but fundamentally infused its surrounds—a typical Malay village in the 1920s—with the stirring atmosphere of colonial modernity. What was it about open-air cine-projection that lent itself so readily to colonial education and ideological formation? What was the connection between screen and mind, and how was this connection rooted in a so-called “environ-mental” understanding of cinema? This chapter examines how colonial filmmakers fundamentally understood cinema as an ambient medium that opens up relationalities between milieu, mental feeling, and political society. Early mobile cinemas helped to shape how colonial governments would think about “media infrastructure” as more than just technological systems but as affective environments that could energetically shift space, modulate sites, and engineer the psyche.
Nadine Chan is Assistant Professor at the Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto. Her research investigates environmental film and media in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Her book manuscript-in-progress is titled A Cinema Under the Palms: Colonial Tropicality in an Unruly Medium. Chan’s second research project is titled Humid Media: Thermodynamic Architectures of Calibration and Control. She has published in Cinema Journal, Journal of Environmental Media, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Periscope for Social Text, Studies in Documentary Film and the anthologies Theorizing Colonial Cinema and Screening Race in Nontheatrical Film.
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