"This book was a lot of fun to write, and if readers get one-tenth of that fun reading it, we'll have succeeded," Cull said.
Projecting Empire maps the history of empire cinema in both Hollywood and Britain through a series of case studies of popular films including biopics, adventures, literary adaptations, melodramas, comedies and documentaries, from the 1930s and The Four Feathers to the present, with Indiana Jones and Three Kings. Cull and co-author James Chapman of the University of Leicester consider industry-wide trends and place the films in their wider cultural and historical contexts.
Using primary sources that include private papers, they look at the presence of particular influencers in the cinema of imperialism, as well as the actors who brought the stories to life, such as Elizabeth Taylor and George Clooney. At a time when imperialism has a new significance in the world, this book will fulfill the needs of students and interested filmgoers alike.
Cull said he undertook the book in part as a break from his usual preoccupations with public diplomacy and propaganda, but found those themes occurred throughout this new study.
"I found that a lot of the most famous post-war films on imperial themes were only possible because countries around the world wished to attract film makers as part of their own public diplomacy strategies," Cull said. "Hence, Jordan hosted David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, South Africa was glad to help the African Empire movies of the early 1960s and India worked to bring filmmakers like John Huston and George Cukor to Indian locations. I was also struck by evidence of official U.S. intervention in shaping Hollywood films of the 1950s. The chapter on the Liz Taylor colonial melodrama Elephant Walk includes details of how a CIA agent doctored the script to make it less offensive to international audiences."
Commenting on his partnership with Chapman, Cull noted: "It was an ideal pairing — he had access to the British archives and I live on top of the American sources. Each of us found that getting a chapter from the other was a great spur to our own research and writing, with each prompting the other to raise our game."
The result has been hailed by British film historian Jeffrey Richards as: "a major examination of the cinema's reaction to and involvement with a global phenomenon that dominated the twentieth century and continues on into the twenty first."
Chapman and Cull have begun work on a follow up volume treating Anglo-American Science Fiction cinema, and already have a cache of research for a sequel to Projecting Empire.
Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema
Master of Public Diplomacy
More on Cull
