James Burns has previously explored the subject of colonial cinema in his well-reviewed study, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (2002). So it is not surprising that he would expand his reach into other areas of the British Empire in his attempt to track the complex relationships among cinema, society, modernism, imperialism, and colonialism. For decades, the subject of the British Empire and cinema has attracted numerous scholars, with the topic falling in and then out of academic fashion, depending on the current political and cultural ideologies. But most of these studies, even the very sophisticated ones, share a common perspective when looking at cinema in, and about, the British Empire. And that perspective, no matter how complex, always involves a fundamental question about what these films reveal about the reality, or the myths, of British imperial rule, to either contemporaries or subsequent generations of white Europeans. This of course is a very common way of researching, and doing, film and history, by no means restricted to the cinema of the British Empire. Burns intends to avoid this convenient trap. In addition, he is not a film studies devotee either, so the reader will not find elaborate theories such as the “male gaze” or the ideas of Lacanian psychology. Instead he wants to understand how the experience of cinema in its many forms shaped the imperial and world outlook of both the colonizer and the colonized, a goal easily stated but difficult to achieve.

For this social history of the cinema in selected parts of the British Empire down to 1940, Burns provides a very straightforward framework. His first chapter reveals how cinema became a fixture in the urbanized areas of the empire such as Kingston, Cape Town, and Bombay. Limited to white elites at first, the movies then moved into the masses. Chapter 2 deals with the silent era and growing concern about the impact of film on “white prestige,” decline of “morals,” and an increase in crime. Attempts at censorship were common. This was not all that different from similar concerns about the movies expressed by purity groups in the United States at the same time. And already one encounters the dreaded cultural threat of the “Americanization” of the empire due to the dominance of Hollywood films, a repetitive theme in the story. Chapter 3 examines the official attempts to produce educational and informational movies for the colonized, designed to uplift the “heathen.” Burns knows this “white man's burden” material well from his previous work. Movies were perceived by rulers as a “tool of empire,” designed to assimilate colonial subjects into the imperial order, with varying degrees of success.

Chapter 4 breaks new ground in the examination of the impact of talkies on the production of native language films, the increasing segregation of movie houses, and further concerns about the impact of American words, accents, clothes, and other aspects of popular culture. Burns argues that “during the 1930s the cinema became ‘normalized’ as a form of leisure in the colonial world” (6). Of course this would be expected since cinema had by then become the global media choice of the twentieth century. Most of his examples are drawn from Jamaica, India, Malaya, and South Africa, along with some from other parts of tropical Africa. India, Hong Kong, and particularly South Africa had very strong local film industries by 1940, and these are covered extensively. Burns concludes, “One thing that can be said with certainty is that cinema integrated the peoples of the empire into new communities.” (179). And these new communities were both global and local. Here the influence of America emerges strongly with images of the gangster and cowboy. This American influence would become even more pronounced after 1945.

There is a certain truism about cinema studies that bears repeating here. It is almost impossible to determine the varied impacts that movie going, or a particular film, can have on an individual or a group. And the sorry attempts by colonial elites to manage, manipulate, or analyze the film-going habits of their subjects were generally failures. Scholars and reviewers may think they know what people think before they think about it, or think they know what movies mean for certain groups of people. They do not know of course, and frequently the intentions of film manipulation can have the exact opposite impact. It is difficult to decipher precisely what movies the colonized were viewing. But certainly that experience was diverse and more intense than previously thought. Movies do transform the lives of viewers. And Burns modestly concludes, “This book seeks to begin a dialogue about what these transformations entailed, and their lingering influence in the former empire today” (181).

Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1896–1940 raises different and important questions. We know what Gene Autry's Round Up Time In Texas (1936) reveals about Hollywood's take on South Africa and how ridiculous and racist it is, but what did a black South African come away with after viewing the film in the 1930s? Of course much of the history of the cinema in the British Empire reflects the general history of the growth of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century. In the early years of that century, the South African Solomon Plaatje believed fervently in the transformative power of the cinema—the bioscope—as a tool of liberation for his fellow black rural South Africans, but that hope was dashed by the creation of the Union of South Africa, with the exclusion from political power of the African majority. But as this study reveals, the emancipatory power of mass culture among the peoples of the British Empire shows the continuing link between cinema and modernity, and even liberation.