VISUALIZING AFRICA Interdisciplinary Perspectives on The Rose of Rhodesia (1917) A Premiere Screening and Symposium Slottsbiografen, Uppsala, 2 June 2007 Sponsored by the Department of English, Uppsala University

THE ROSE OF RHODESIA (75 mins) Made in or around 1917, The Rose of Rhodesia is the earliest cinematic representation of Zimbabwe and one of the first films with Africans in lead roles. It may well be the second-oldest surviving feature film made in Africa. Like so many films of the silent era, it was long thought to have been lost. A single footnote in the standard history of South African cinema recorded: “The Rose of Rhodesia . . . [was] of very poor and of amateurish quality and survived only a few showings at various Town Halls”. In the late 1990s, an intact print of The Rose of Rhodesia was acquired by the Netherlands Film Archive. It revealed a film that was both technically and aesthetically ambitious by contemporary standards. A colonial melodrama with romantic, comic, and political elements, it boasted an array of locations, techniques such as cross cutting and double exposure, and, above all, spectacular outdoor locations. In 2006, the Netherlands Film Archive undertook a full restoration of the print, which receives its world premiere screening today at Uppsala’s Slottsbiografen. This is the first time The Rose of Rhodesia has been shown in public for over eighty years. Details of the production and distribution of The Rose of Rhodesia are sketchy. In 1917, its American director, American Harold M. Shaw, had recently left African Film Productions after making De Voortrekkers (1916), a historical propaganda film styled on D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) that was to become a cornerstone of white Afrikaaner mythology. Interior scenes for Rose of Rhodesia were probably filmed near Cape Town by cinematographer Henry Howse, while the outdoor sequences were shot in the Bawa Falls region of the Eastern Cape Province (formerly the Transkei). According to The Bioscope, Shaw spent six weeks on location with his wife Edna Flugrath, Howse, and two South Africa actors. The film’s African stars, who did not speak English, were coached by Shaw personally, and extras from the Fingo people were paid in “tobacco, fancy wire, beads and money”. The Rose of Rhodesia was advertised heavily upon its British release in 1919, with full-page announcements in the major trade papers. It received trade screenings at the following venues at Super Cinema, London (28 Oct); Unity Picture Palace, Sheffield (16 Nov); Cinema Exchange, Leeds (17 Nov); Imperial Theatre, Newcastle (19 & 20 Nov ); Cinema Exchange, Manchester (25 Nov); and Imperial Theatre at the Palais de Luxe, Liverpool (27 & 28 Nov). It was usually screened with another Shaw film (now lost) titled Thoroughbreds All, a horse-racing drama about a Rabbi, a Catholic priest, and an Anglican minister. Intriguingly, the intertitles of the surviving print of The Rose of Rhodesia indicate that it was also exhibited in Germany-speaking countries.

PLOT SYNOPSIS Chief Ushakapilla has grown impatient with the Rhodesian authorities’ refusal to give him land. He decides that his son Mofti should lead an uprising against the white intruders. Not far from Ushakapilla’s kraal live the missionary James Morel and his son Jack, a good friend of Mofti’s. Despite the missionary’s efforts to resolve the situation, Ushakapilla instructs his men to take a mining job in order to steal gold and diamonds that will finance the revolt. Meanwhile, a white overseer named Fred Winters has stolen a huge pink diamond, known as the Rose Diamond, from a South African mining syndicate. While making his escape, he loses the diamond, which is recovered by one of Ushakapilla’s men. Winters meets the failed prospector Bob Randall, whose daughter Rose is the object of Jack Morel’s affections, and decides to work with him. While Jack and Mofti are hunting, they meet Rose, which prompts Mofti to wish his friend all happiness and a wife who will give him “as many children as there are stones on the Matoppos [Hills]”. After Mofti is killed in an accident while hunting with Jack, the Morels given him a Christian burial. Ushakapilla is so affected by the loss of his son that he abandons his plans for an insurrection and gives the stolen diamond to Rose. Shortly after, he receives the land for which he has been waiting, Winters is arrested by a detective, and Rose receives a huge reward for returning the diamond, allowing her and Jack to marry. In the penultimate scene, Ushakapilla throws the gold that was to have financed his revolution into the waters where the spirits of his ancestors dwell. The film closes with a tableau of Jack (now a clergyman) and Rose surrounded by their four children, followed by the intertitle: “Mofti’s good wishes have begun to be fulfilled.”

“Here ends the rule of the black chiefs...”

Bawa Falls, South Africa

EARLY REVIEWS

“Combined with a carefully constructed story and skilful and interesting characterisation, ‘The Rose of Rhodesia’ has the qualities of an ‘educational’ and of a ‘scenic’. One of the most notable points is the good acting of the natives in their Zulu kraal, and much of the grand scenery (crags, precipices, and waterfalls) is of a kind which could only be taken in Rhodesia. At the same time, in the following story, there is a pleasing touch of romance, pathos and humour, with a slight suggestion of irony, all of a moderate kind and artistically presented. . . . At the start an impression is given that there is to be strong drama founded on a conflict between the interests of the natives and those of imperialism. But, in reality, the ‘native question’ does not develop. The producers have carefully avoided the danger of giving offence to partisans of either side. In doing so they have left the story rather devoid of ‘punch,’ but that does not matter to those who prefer artistic merit to thrills. The story is entirely pleasing, both as a whole and in detail. The native character is shown in a pleasing light. Even the black thief saves his victim’s life by giving him water. The acting both of Chief Kentani and Prince Yumi as the Chief and his son is extraordinarily good. In fact it seem that they simply live their parts. The chief characteristics of the son are his almost childlike delight in hunting, his affection for his white companion, and his unexpected bursts of humour. As he has never faced the camera before, it must be assumed that acting comes natural to him. Kentani is perhaps best in the scene of the chief’s mourning for his son. The scene of the burial of the young native and the planting of a rose slip in front of his tomb is one of true and artistic pathos. Edna Flugrath gives an interested study of a girl naturally sensible, but imbued with the nonsense of a novelette, her father’s drunkenness and his failure. She is particularly good in her youthful coquetry towards the thief when she takes him to be a novelette hero. The first theft of the diamond is an original and ingenious piece of work, and altogether the three threads of the plot are woven together with exceptional skill. In spite of the lack of thrills or suspense in the working out of the story, it is pretty sure to please the crowd, as it certainly will the select, because of the fine scenes of native life and customs, which are a credit to the producer—Harold Shaw.” — Kinematograph Weekly (London), 6 November 1919 “The outstanding feature of this rather unequal production is the realistic and delightful study it offers of the life, personal characteristics and surroundings of a Native African tribe. The principal native parts are played by genuine blacks of ‘royal’ blood—Chief Kentani and his son, Prince Yumi—and, although the episodes in which they figure have no very important bearing upon the story, the quaint but effective naïveté of their acting is a histrionic curiosity which should not be missed. The story of the film is thin, conventional and rather clumsily constructed, but the gorgeous African landscape against which, for the most part, it is set, invest the plot with an interest it would not otherwise possess, whilst the native element is as novel as it is charming. . . . One rather wishes, in fact, that Harold Shaw, who produced the film, had chosen a plot which would have made the natives the central features of the play. For the rest, there is not a great deal that is necessary to say concerning the picture. The white players scarcely compare with the blacks in interest or even effectiveness, while the incident of the diamond robbery is too stagey to be very thrilling. The photography of the exteriors is admirable, but the interiors suffer from inadequate lighting. At present rather ragged and jumpy, the film could be greatly improved by careful editing. ‘The Rose of Rhodesia’ is a decided novelty.” — The Bioscope (London), 6 November 1919

THE PRINCIPALS HAROLD M. SHAW (Director). American. 1877-1926. After acting in several Edwin Porter shorts, Shaw made his directorial debut in 1911, working for Edison among others. Moving to England, he directed numerous quality productions, including The House of Temperley (1913), Trilby (1914), and A Christmas Carol (1914). Shaw spent 1916-1919 in South Africa, making the historical epic De Voortrekkers and The Rose of Rhodesia. Returning to Hollywood in 1922, he directed three more films before his untimely death in a car accident. In 2000, the US National Film Preservation Board added Shaw’s The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912) to its National Registry of landmark films. EDNA FLUGRATH (Rose Randall). British. 1893-1966. Former ballet dancer with the Anna Pavlova Company and the Chicago Opera. After starting with Edison, she starred in over sixty films before 1924, many directed by her husband, Harold Shaw, including Trilby (1914), De Voortrekkers (1916), and Kipps (1921). Upon their return to England from South Africa, they enjoyed popularity as the stars of the London Film Co. CHIEF KENTANI (Ushakapilla). Biographical information lacking. According to The Bioscope, “ruler of the Fingo Tribe” and “brother of the man who started the last Kaffir War”—possibly a reference to the Ninth Cape Frontier War (1877-8) in which amaXhosa returning from the diamond fields had fought to regain their lands from white colonists. “Kentani” may be a corruption of the name !Centani.

PRINCE YUMI (Mofti). Biographical information lacking. According to The Bioscope, son of Kentani.

MARMADUKE. WETHERELL (Jack Morel). South African. c.1884-1939. Taught film scenario-writing at Johannesburg Business College in 1920. Starring roles in Darkness (George Cooper, 1923), Women and Diamonds (F. Martin Thornton, 1924), and others. Other writing and directorial credits include Livingstone (1925), The Somme (1927), Robinson Crusoe (1927), Victory (1928), and A Moorland Tragedy (1933).

PIANO ACCOMPANIMENT MATTI BYE is Sweden’s foremost silent film performer and composer. Active internationally since the mid-1980s, he has performed with the classical piano as well as Farfisa organs and even sheets of metal. Bye’s numerous compositions for Swedish film classics include Victor Sjöström’s Körkarlen (Phantom Carriage) and Mauritz Stiller’s Herr Arnes Pengar (Sir Arne’s Treasure), and he has composed theatrical music for Ingmar Bergman and Robert Lepage at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm as well as for film directors Jonas Åkerlund, Stig Björkman, and Peter Cohen. “Bye has given new life and a new dimension to an almost forgotten tradition.” — Swedish Film Academy Stipendium, 1994

SLOTTSBIOGRAFEN SLOTTSBIOGRAFEN is one of Sweden’s oldest surviving cinemas. Built in 1913-1914, it was intended to function as both a cinema and a venue for the social activities of Uppsala’s Manufacturers and Artisans Association. Exquisite decorations in the national romantic style then in vogue evoked medieval architecture and church murals, and painted vignettes by Gusten Widerbäck depicted various artisanal guilds. The manager of Sweden’s showpiece cinema was local film magnate Hugo Plengiér. Since films were silent at that time, screenings were always accompanied by live music, and after the breakthrough of sound Slottsbiografen’s talented orchestral director, Erik Bauman, was to become Europafilm’s musical director. The first film to be shown at Slottsbiografen’s premiere, on 26 October 1914, was Mauritz Stiller’s Stormfågeln (The Stormy Petrel). In 1929, the crowd which squeezed in to watch its screening of the first sound film in Uppsala included an eleven-yearold boy named Ingmar Bergman. With the coming of sound, Slottsbiografen’s murals were painted over, remaining hidden until the cinema ceased commercial operation in 1991. After five years of restoration, Slottsbiografen reopened in all its former glory in 1996. It is now a national landmark building.

PROGRAMME 08:00-09:00

Registration (Slottsbiografen foyer)

09:00

Welcome Professor Danuta Fjellestad, Dept of English, Uppsala University

09:15-10:15

Keynote address In Africa, Diamonds Are Forever: From “The Rose of Rhodesia” to “Blood Diamond” Peter Davis (Villon Films, Vancouver)

10:15-10:45

Coffee

10:45-11:00

The Print of “The Rose of Rhodesia” Elif Rongen-Kaynakci (Netherlands Film Archive)

11:00-12:15

Premiere screening of The Rose of Rhodesia Piano accompaniment by Matti Bye

12:15-13:15

Lunch

13:15-15:15

Session I. Chair: Åsa Jernudd (Örebro University) “A Histrionic Curiosity”: The “Rose of Rhodesia” and Silent Cinema Vreni Hockenjos (Stockholm University) “Poor Man’s Entertainment”: Cape Town Bioscope Culture and “The Rose of Rhodesia” James M. Burns (Clemson University, USA) Imperial Supremacy Visualised as a Lesson in Love Ylva Habel (Stockholm University)

15:15-15:45

Coffee

15:45-17:30

Session II. Chair: Stefan Jonsson (Dagens Nyheter) “The Rose of Rhodesia”, Race, and Empire Bernard Porter (Newcastle University, UK) “The Rose of Rhodesia” and the Colonial Image Stefan Helgesson (Uppsala University) Guns and Roses: Rhodesia and the Woman Reader Stephen Donovan (Uppsala University)

17.45

Symposium ends

SPEAKERS JAMES M. BURNS is an Associate Professor in African History at Clemson University. His monograph Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (2002), a history of cinema and spectatorship in Southern Africa, was chosen as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles for 2002 by the journal Choice. He is the author of several articles on African film history, and a co-author with Robert O. Collins of A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2007). PETER DAVIS is a documentary film-maker with some 60 titles to his credit. His work has been mostly social and political commentary, ranging from Castro’s Cuba to biographies of CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and Francis Gary Powers to the Vietnam War, the Middle East, Britain in the 1960s. Several of his early films were made in Sweden and broadcast on Swedish television. Much of his work dealt with apartheid in South Africa, which led him to study cinema’s role in perpetuating or challenging that institution, as expressed in his documentaries and book with the same title, In Darkest Hollywood. His current focus is on the personalities involved in the making of the 1928 film Siliva The Zulu. STEPHEN DONOVAN is a Lecturer at the Department of English, Uppsala University. His publications include Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (2005) and articles on Modernist literature, empire, and travel writing. In 2005, he co-organized a screening of Knocknagow (1918), the first film made by an Irish company, at New York University. He is currently writing a cultural history of the British South Africa Company, which administered Rhodesia until 1924. YLVA HABEL is a Research Fellow at the Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University. She completed her dissertation, “Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s Swedish Welfare State”, in 2002. Currently she is working on a study of the Swedish reception of Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, focussing on issues of race, gender, diasporic travel and exile. Her publications include essays on advertising propaganda, the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897, and the cultural politics of television. STEFAN HELGESSON is a Research Fellow at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University. His main fields of interest are Southern African literatures in English and Portuguese, postcolonial theory, and theories of world literature. He is the author of Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee (2004) and the editor of Literary Interactions in the Modern World (2006). VRENI HOCKENJOS is a doctoral student in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University, where she is completing a thesis titled “Picturing Dissolving Views: August Strindberg and the Visual Media of his Age”. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago and Cornell University. Together with Stephan Michael Schröder, she has co-edited a book on Scandinavian literature and intermediality, Historisierung und Funktionalisierung. Intermedialität in den skandinavischen Literaturen um 1900 (2005).

BERNARD PORTER is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Newcastle (UK). He has previously taught at Cambridge and Hull, and been a Visiting Professor at Yale and Sydney Universities. He has published a number of books on British imperial history, including Critics of Empire (1968; reissued 2007), The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism (4th edn., 2004), The AbsentMinded Imperialists (2004), and Empire and Superempire (2006), the last comparing British and American “imperialisms”. He lives in the Stockholm area, and is currently teaching a postgraduate course on “Imperialism” at Stockholm University. ELIF RONGEN-KAYNAKCI is an Archival Researcher at the Netherlands Film Museum, Haarlem. Other restoration projects on which she has worked include Beyond the Rocks, a long-lost silent film of 1922, starring Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson, which received a premiere screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles on 29 November 2005.

PAPER ABSTRACTS In Africa, Diamonds Are Forever: From “The Rose of Rhodesia” to “Blood Diamond” Peter Davis From earliest times, diamonds have fascinated the purveyors of mass entertainment. Through the impact of literature and, later, cinema, and with the decisive intervention of manipulative advertising, diamonds came to signify romance, wealth, and social success in the popular mind. From the nineteenth century, diamonds were mostly found in Africa, a location wrapped in the exotic and quick with adventure. In this fabulous landscape, diamonds were there for the taking – which included stealing. Diamond theft was the subject of the first feature film made in South Africa, Star of the South (1911), and the motif continues in our own time with films such as the blockbuster Blood Diamond (2006). Although none can be called masterpieces of cinema, the films which will be examined in this keynote address are all important as social and historical documents whose significance lies as much in what they conceal as in what they reveal. They resonate with assumptions about Africa and Africans, with concepts of white superiority, and with racism, reflecting an ethos of control which was born in the nineteenth century and persists to this day: that of pirate capitalism.

“A Histrionic Curiosity”: “The Rose of Rhodesia” and Silent Cinema Vreni Hockenjos The aim of this paper is to chart the broader film-historical context of Harold M. Shaw’s The Rose of Rhodesia (1919). What was the cinema like as a cultural

phenomenon when Rose of Rhodesia was screened for the very first time? What were the conditions for producing and watching films in the late 1910s? In what ways is Shaw’s work typical for its time – in what ways is it unique? The paper discusses historical specificities of the 1910s such as, the rise of a movie star-culture or the trend towards feature films and the so-called ‘classical Hollywood style.’ Next to casting light on the British film industry, a particular focus is directed towards the promotion and reception of The Rose of Rhodesia in Britain.

“Poor Man’s Entertainment”: Cape Town Bioscope Culture and “The Rose of Rhodesia” James M. Burns This presentation examines the movie-house (or ‘bioscope’) culture of Cape Town at the time of the premier of The Rose of Rhodesia. In 1918 film was still a novel and somewhat disreputable medium in South Africa, and was known in the popular press as ‘Poor man’s entertainment’. Though The Rose of Rhodesia was slated for an international release, it was very much a product of the film world of the Cape. The film’s images, its method of marketing, and the ways in which audiences reacted to its screenings all reflect the complexity and diversity of Cape Town’s movie-house culture. Through an examination of these Cape Town audiences—their linguistic, ethnic, racial, gender, and class affiliations, their previous experiences of cinema, and their understanding of the version of Southern African history constituted by this film—I hope to shed some light on the readings colonial spectators might have brought to the film. A reconstruction of this cinema world reveals the ways in which audiences invested films with unique and diverse meanings in the early cinema era.

Imperial Supremacy Visualised as a Lesson in Love Ylva Habel This paper will focus upon the pedagogically rendered relationships between imperial masters and male subjects, exemplifying how depictions of interracial brotherhood and care may kill impulses to strife with kindness. Ashis Nandy has conceptualized relationships on colonial territory as dynamized by antagonistic intimacy, constituting the behaviours and mindsets of colonizer and colonized alike. Taking his point of departure in an Indian setting, he argues that cultural interaction is built on the premise that the colonized must fight colonial rule within the ”psychological borders” set up by their masters. In this context he visualises a process in which conceptions of gender are redefined, pitting English and Indian masculinities against each other. As claimed by several postcolonial thinkers, imperial practice needed a constant reinscription of its civilizing and moral mission to legitimate its rule—often over populations vastly outnumbering the white settlers on colonial territory. As shown by J.M. Burns’s study of Zimbabwean film history, Flickering Shadows, film became one of the privileged “Tools of Empire”, used to engrain acceptance and respect for English rule. The Rose of Rhodesia can be seen as a case in point, evidencing a specifically local cinematic rhetoric, embedded in ambivalent censorship strategies.

“The Rose of Rhodesia”, Race, and Empire Bernard Porter The Rose of Rhodesia is remarkable partly for its apparently sympathetic view of Africans. This view is problematical, of course, but does not appear to be “racist”. It was a fairly common one at the time; one of a number of varying and conflicting racial discourses to be found in the early 1900s, which were generally rooted, it will be argued, less in “culture”, and certainly not in domestic European culture, than in the material relationships between Europeans and “natives” in the colonies themselves. The paper will also speculate as to why Harold Shaw selected this particular racial discourse for this film, among the many others he might have preferred, and does seem to have preferred, for example, for his earlier De Voortrekkers.

“The Rose of Rhodesia” and the Colonial Romance Stefan Helgesson The Rose of Rhodesia, this paper will argue, is generically ambiguous. On the most obvious level, it reproduces key elements of the colonial romance as discussed by Laura Chrisman. The story of the noble Ushakapilla’s futile attempt at resisting the white rulers as well as the reification of the spectacular diamond both cater to the colonists’ need for historical redemption. There must, so to speak, be a higher reason behind “our” – the implied white audience’s – presence in Africa. Ushakapilla’s acknowledgement of defeat, which is represented in terms of a conversion to Christianity, and the diamond’s aura of adventure and excess offer a symbolic resolution to the colonial anxiety of being “out of place”. On the other hand, there is also a realist strain in the film that undercuts the logic of the romance to certain extent. The drunkenness and poverty of the prospectors is the clearest example, but the extensive use of outdoor footage and markers of “modernity” such as the railway and the newspaper is equally important in countering the colonial romance. In these “realist” elements we see the beginnings of an emergent, secular discourse on colonial modernity. The paper will ask, finally, what role the new and still generically unstable film medium played in enabling The Rose of Rhodesia’s eclecticism.

Guns and Roses: Rhodesia and the Woman Reader Stephen Donovan “Could this be Lord Cholmondeley?” wonders Rose Randall, the magazine-reading heroine of The Rose of Rhodesia, when a scruffy stranger arrives at her door. Rose’s weakness for romantic fiction is an obvious vehicle for comedy. But is it just coincidence that her magazine story is itself set in Rhodesia? As this paper will show, the fact that Rose is reading a romance about Rhodesia in Rhodesia tells us much about the special status of this colony in British popular culture. Despite having very few white women, Rhodesia was the subject of a literary vogue in the 1910s and 1920s in which novels with female protagonists sold in the millions and were adapted for theatre and film. In this “virtual” Rhodesia, it will be seen, women readers found a space of individual responsibility and freedom – literally, of guns and roses – that echoed many of the demands and aspirations of the women’s movement.