Cinematic Settlers

The Settler Colonial World in Film

Janne Lahti, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367503833
• eBook ISBN: 9781000094459
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

This anthology adds to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies by examining settler colonial narratives in the under analyzed medium of film.

Cinematic Settlers discusses different cinematic genres, national traditions, and specific movies in order to expose related threads, shared circulations of knowledge, and paralleled representations. Organized into thematic groupings—conquest, settlers, natives, and space—the contributors explore the question of how film compares to written genres and other visual media in representing and effecting settler colonialism on a global scale. Striving for inclusiveness, the volume covers different eras and settler colonial situations in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hawaii, the American West, Canada, Latin America, Russia, France, Algeria, German Africa, South Africa, and even the next frontier: outer space. By showing how films offer layered, contested, and dynamic settler colonial narratives that advance and challenge settler hegemonic readings, the essays enable students to better analyze and understand the complex history of diversity and colonialism in film.

This book is important reading for undergraduate classes on the history of empire, colonialism, and film.

PART I

Conquest

1

The South Pacific as the Final Frontier: Hollywood’s South Seas Fantasies, the Beachcomber, and Militarization

Delia Malia Konzett

The West and the Push into the Pacific

The American West has figured prominently in Hollywood’s imagination as a reflection of the United States’ nation building, continental expansionism, and Manifest Destiny. It led to the formation of the timeless Western film genre and the cinematic myth of the American frontier in the silent era of the 1910s and 1920s, a timeline paralleled by Hollywood’s South Seas genre dramatizing the conquest of the Pacific. Thus, two distinctly different moments of American settler colonialism emerged on Hollywood’s screens simultaneously, contributing to the national narrative of the US empire. With the illegal military coup and annexation of Hawaiʻi in 1893 and 1898 respectively, sponsored by New England colonizers (descendants of missionaries), the United States began to assert itself as a global power, viewing Hawaiʻi as a crucial gateway to Asia. Whereas the settler colonization of Hawaiʻi in the nineteenth century led to the dominance of a white New England ruling class represented by its industrial agricultural barons, Hollywood’s representational colonization of this new territory of Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific proceeded with more caution so as not to unsettle the symbolic order of race on the mainland built around Jim Crow segregation. Nevertheless, Hollywood’s institutional complicity with settler colonialism is undeniable in its release of numerous films representing the agenda of US colonialism in Hawaiʻi from the very beginning of the islands’ annexation, which roughly coincides with the birth of cinema in the mid-1890s.

US cinema begins to explore Hawaiʻi as early as 1898 in the form of the widely disseminated documentary Edison shorts, focusing on the island’s resources such as its maritime ports and harbors and its fertile lands, especially agrarian crops such as sugar cane.¹ These shorts also stress that the New England settlers are rightfully in charge of the islands based on their superior technology and ability to cultivate and develop the land in modern industrial style, following the Protestant ethic of capitalism and “its providential interpretation of profit-making.”² Historian Emily Rosenberg refers to the colonizing triad of “Capitalists, Christians, [and] Cowboys” as instrumental in implementing American Manifest Destiny in the conquest of overseas lands.³ “Traders, investors, missionaries, philanthropists, and entertainers,” Rosenberg notes, “contributed both to expansion and the liberal developmental paradigm that accompanied it.”⁴ Significant feature films depicting a romanticized South Pacific emerge around 1915, leading to the creation of the South Seas fantasy genre rife with contradictions concerning settlement and colonization. As mass cultural products of repetitive formula, these films, not unlike the Buffalo Bill shows discussed by Rosenberg, “build [their] appeal on a mixture of nostalgia and promotional hype.”⁵ And, in spite of their fantasy driven plots, they envision and already anticipate a more systematic conquest of the South Pacific with permanently stationed military as the ultimate settler group, producing what philosopher Paul Virilio calls the paradigmatic “vision machine” of cinema in which war, technology, and representation are intertwined.⁶ For the purpose of this essay, I will focus specifically on the military adaptation of the South Seas genre, thereby creating a historical continuity of imperial territorial claims that often began with settler colonialism in the guise of benign missionary work.⁷

I will explore here the South Seas genre and its corpus of films as an expression of US expansionism and its subsequent militarization in the South Pacific combat genre during World War II. Unlike the Western genre, where narratives of mythical gunslingers and unstoppable white settler conquest prevail, the Hollywood narrative of westward expansion into the Pacific enters the treacherous ground of non-western cultural contexts reframing its white hegemony. Its white settler protagonists find themselves in a racial limbo from which they either emerge in a return to mainstream norms, signaled by a return to the US mainland, or succumb to a dissolution of their white identity via interracial marriage. Even after the significant industrialization and modernization of Hawaiʻi at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood South Seas film narratives routinely depict Hawaiʻi and the South Pacific in first contact scenarios, showing its populations stuck in inferior pre-modern and “primitive” lifestyles. In fact, the South Seas genre, informed by prohibitive Jim Crow segregationist racial laws, produces inherently contradictory narratives of simultaneous compromised settlement or necessary departure from the conquered lands. Not until the military fully enters the picture in the leadup to World War II, is permanent settlement in the Pacific seriously entertained in Hollywood narratives. Contrary to these fictionalized narratives, permanent settlement had already started in the early nineteenth century with white elites consolidating land possessions with the active help of the military, eventually ruling majority-non-white populations in Pacific territories such as Hawaiʻi and deriving large scale economic benefit from their colonized lands with their industrialized agriculture. In addition, the military actively joined in the colonization, establishing a naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1899 that was to be expanded over the coming decades to become the home of the Pacific Fleet.

Hollywood’s Beachcomber

The initial uncertainty about the extent and limits of settler colonial conquest of the South Pacific is expressed in Hollywood’s trope of the white male beachcomber. As viewed by various anthropological studies, the historical figure of the beachcomber functions initially as a vanguard of Pacific explorers.⁸ Often drawn from ex-whalers or ex-convicts, beachcombers managed to settle on various Pacific islands in the early years of large-scale Pacific discoveries and conquests (e.g. in Hawaiʻi from 1790s–1820s) and were useful to local chiefs as intermediaries with white traders, securing tools and weapons. In return, they secured some form of social integration into the tribal cultures of the Pacific. With the spread of illnesses such as smallpox, however, the newly arriving missionaries eventually gained the upper hand and marginalized the beachcomber, as they were able to provide vaccines in return for religious conversion.⁹ Additionally, naval officers increasingly usurped the mediating position of beachcombers concerning military affairs. The late stages of the beachcomber are characterized by moral dissolution, alcoholism, and their obsolescence. Sociologists Martin Zelinietz and David Kravitz note that this period “correlates with the rapid increase of the beachcombing population, and the bad character manifested by some of the beachcombers.”¹⁰ Hollywood’s fascination with the beachcomber mostly focuses on this later phase as his immoral lifestyle offers a more adequate representation of transgressive cultural fantasies popular during the roaring 1920s and the pre-Code Hollywood era (1930–1934).¹¹

This pre-Code era is frequently associated with a non-regulated Hollywood cinema permitting a wider range of freedom concerning sexuality and controversial topics. However, as film scholar Ellen C. Scott has argued in Cinema Civil Rights (2014), unofficial racial codes were already in place during the late 1920s with its soft regulation by the Studio Relationship Committee (SRC, 1926–1934). As Scott points out, SRC regulator Jason Joy, known for his permissiveness on sexuality sought “to establish a firm color line and called for the elimination of racial integration.”¹² Indeed, as political scientist and cultural scholar Cedric Robinson comments on the origins of early cinema, it appears that an unwritten racial code is operative from the very beginning of cinema, reflecting the agenda of US imperialism and white nationalism: “The commercial exploitation of motion pictures, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, coincided exactly with the onset of Jim Crow … there is also compelling evidence that cohesion and control of American motion pictures was spurred by the powerful interests implicated in the formulation of a new racial regime.”¹³ Its voluntary implementation can be found in the early shorts of American cinema’s founder, Thomas Edison. For example, shorts such as “Kanakas Diving for Money” (1898) and “Harvesting Sugar Cane” (1902) document the colonization of Hawaiʻi as a legitimate enterprise of US territorial expansion led by a superior culture and race much like his short “Watermelon Contest” (1896) denigrates African Americans from within its scopic perspective of whiteness.

In contrast to the Western genre known for its open panoramic landscapes, South Seas fantasy films could not immediately use the Pacific setting as the backdrop for their promotional narratives due to distance and technical challenges. Instead, backlot recreations on the mainland were augmented with various black and brownface performances similar to early B Westerns that relied on stereotypical screen Indians and Mexicans. McVeagh of the South Seas (1914, dir. Harry Carey) offers an early example of Pacific settler colonialism not yet refined in its promotional filmic and narrative rhetoric. McVeagh (Harry Carey), described as a New England Harvard graduate and “self-exiled to the South Seas,” transforms in the film into a brutal colonizer known for torturing his native subjects. He acquires Liana (Fern Foster), the daughter of the native chief, through trade with liquor but is double-crossed by his shipmate Gates (Herbert Russell) who equally succumbs to her spell and instigates a local rebellion against his rule. The film ends with McVeagh eventually escaping to San Francisco “toward civilization – and happiness,” dismissing his and Gates’ behavior as episodes caused by the corrupting climate or tropical fever of the Pacific, a common assumption in the rhetoric of Euro-American colonialism.¹⁴ Aloha Oe (1915, dir. Richard Stanton), a film that is no longer extant, offers instead a more romantic fascination of the beachcomber David Harmon (Willard Mack) marooned on a tropical island. He saves the chief’s daughter, Kalaniweo (Enid Markey), from impending sacrifice to appease the spirit of an erupting volcano, fathers a child with her, and after a short stay on the US continent returns to her upon hearing the alluring song “Aloha ‘Oe.”¹⁵ Both films agree about the civilizational superiority of the white American settler but disagree on whether the new territories should be abandoned or cultivated and assimilated.

D.W. Griffith’s South Seas fantasy The Idol Dancer (1920), unfettered by any studio regulation, deepened the discourse of racism via extensive use of blackface performances and non-disguised racist content conflating stereotypical exotic and savage depictions of Asians and Africans to capture the fluid racial spectrum of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia that anticipates the cultural setting of Skull Island in King Kong (1933). Like Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), The Idol Dancer embraces Manifest Destiny and aligns it with US overseas expansionism and the nation’s newly emerging global role. As French philosopher and film scholar Gilles Deleuze observes, “The American cinema constantly shoots and reshoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation–civilization, whose first version was provided by Griffith.”¹⁶

The film initially contrasts the bland and ethical behavior of white New England missionaries with the more exciting loose morals and vibrant lives of Dan (Richard Barthelmess), the white gin-drinking beachcomber, and the native islanders marked by their aversion to western clothes and their passion for dancing. In a significant shot showing the beachcomber across from his rival in love for the native Mary, we can see the film anticipating the coming role reversal of the beachcomber (See Figure 1.1). Due to the tragic sacrificial death of the young white missionary and rival suitor Walter Kincaid (Creighton Hale), Dan is eventually reformed and his Polynesian girlfriend Mary (Clarine Seymour) converts to Christianity, abandoning her Tiki idols. Of mixed Javanese, Samoan, and white descent, Mary dresses in Polynesian costume but appears clearly as white on screen, and hence does not endanger the racial code. In promotional posters, Mary was in fact falsely described as “a beautiful white girl cast away,” living “among the cannibals, head-hunters and black birders of the South Sea Isles.”¹⁷

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Prologue
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Reel Settler Colonialism: Gazing, Reception, and Production of Global Settler Cinemas
• PART I: Conquest
• PART II: Settlers
• PART III: Natives
• PART IV: Space
• Index