Biopics And Politics: The Making And Unmaking Of The Rhodes Movies
In 1997 the British Broadcasting Corporation screened a six hour dramati zation of the life of the South African imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Titled sim ply Rhodes, the film was one of the most expensive and ambitious produc tions ever undertaken by the BBC, costing over £15 million and relying on support from American, Canadian, and South African public television. The final script was reportedly reviewed and approved by the Prime Ministers of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The program was eventually broadcast to countries throughout the world, including the United States, Australia, and Zimbabwe, the nation that had once been the colony of Rhodesia. The series was the first Rhodes biography to be filmed in over sixty years, and only the second in the history of the cinema. And yet, though only two Rhodes films have ever been produced, since 1916 at least seven similar projects have been attempted. Why has there been so much interest in producing a Rhodes movie, and why have so few of them actually been made? An analysis of the history of the Rhodes biopics reveals that all attempts to film his life have been affected by the enormous shadow he continues to cast over Southern African politics. Since his death in 1902 Rhodes has become the most potent icon of the peculiar form of imperial ism that took root in Southern Africa in the late nineteenth century, and eventually developed into the modern Apartheid state. Not surprisingly, politicians and administrators with a stake in the Rhodes legacy have influ enced every attempt to film his life. Most of the proposed Rhodes biopics foundered on the ambivalence or hostility of Southern African regimes that feared the political ramifications of bringing his life to the screen. The two Rhodes films actually made only came off because they enjoyed the support
Michael Balcon's Close Encounter with the American Market, 1934–1936
Michael Balcon is generally recognised for his stewardship of the Ealing Studios from 1939 and the portfolio of highly esteemed films which emerged over the decade 1942-52. Perhaps as a consequence of the critical preoccupation with those films, less attention has been given to his activities as Director of Production of what was Britain's largest film organisation during the 1930s: Gaumont British (G-B). Based upon archive material held by the British Film Institute, The Michael Balcon Special Collection (MBSC) and the US box-office information contained in Variety, this article sets out to redress partly this state of affairs by concentrating on the organisation's efforts, 1934-36, to become a major player in the world film industry; a rival in scale and output of the principal Hollywood studios.
Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate