Category Archive for: ‘Issue 25 – Special Issue: Colonial Africa on the Silent Screen: Recovering The Rose of Rhodesia (1918)’

I greatly enjoyed seeing The Rose of Rhodesia and reading the excellent essays collected here. But my perspective is a little different from theirs. I am a historian of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and particularly of the 1896-97 uprisings and of the Matopos hills (see Ranger 1967 and 1999). So when I watched the film I read it as though it was a commentary on …

On 23 March 1918, a new South African feature film was screened in public for the first time at Cape Town’s City Hall. A seven-reel melodrama involving a stolen diamond, a native uprising, and a frontier romance, The Rose of Rhodesia had been directed by Harold M. Shaw and shot at a Sea Point studio in Cape Town and on location in …

The editors wish to thank Nederlands Filmmuseum for graciously allowing its restored print of The Rose of Rhodesia to receive a premiere screening in Sweden in 2007, and for making a digital version available with this special issue of Screening The Past. Without the unflagging enthusiasm of our guardian angel Elif Rongen-Kaynakci and the kind support of her colleagues this project would never …

Title: ROSE OF RHODESIA, THE (Die Rose von Rhodesia) Director: Harold Shaw Production Date: 1918 Length: 5 reels (81 minutes) Format: 35mm, black and white, silent, full (silent) aperture Speed: 16 frames/second Language: German intertitles Production Company: Harold Shaw Film Productions Ltd. Country: South Africa Screenplay: Harold Shaw Photography: Henry Howse, Ernest G. Palmer Actors: Edna Flugrath Rose Randall Marmaduke A. …

Abstract The Rose of Rhodesia (1918) has received short shrift in film history because it was made by a company independent from, and crushed by, the South African entertainment business monopoly controlled from Johannesburg by I. W. Schlesinger from 1913 up to his death in 1949. Schlesinger recruited Harold M. Shaw to script and direct the “super-films” De Voortrekkers (1916) and The Symbol of …

Harold Shaw parted ways with the movie magnate I. W. Schlesinger in October 1917, after an acrimonious personal dispute, and immediately set about organizing his own film production company. Shaw poached leading production staff from Schlesinger’s African Film Productions at Killarney in Johannesburg, and signed up Schlesinger’s bitter rivals, A. M. Fisher and sons of Cape Town, to distribute his …

Abstract The Rose of Rhodesia may have premiered in Africa, but its audiences were neither primitive nor parochial. When the film opened in Cape Town on 23 March 1918, cinema had already established itself as the most popular leisure activity in Cape Town, where it had a large, diverse, and enthusiastic following. These audiences had not yet been divided, as they …

Abstract This essay aims to give a more general introduction to the film-historical context surrounding The Rose of Rhodesia (1918). What was it like to make films in the late 1910s? What was it like to go to the cinema? And what might the film’s first audiences have considered The Rose of Rhodesia’s merits? In an attempt to answer these questions, this essay …

Abstract In this essay I discuss the racial discourse underlying the regulation of space, actor movement, and gesture in The Rose of Rhodesia (1918), whose animation and restraint of black characters, by communicating a message of interracial brotherhood and reconciliation, appear to address real-life tensions between colonial masters and subjects. Shaw’s film is inflected by local as well as global discourses …

Abstract This essay examines The Rose of Rhodesia as both romantic fiction and ethnographic spectacle. It discusses the film’s development of imperial heroes, Lord Cholmondeley and Jack Morel, and a colonial heroine, Rose Randall, and analyses the film’s ethnographic representations of the colonised Other. The paper shows how the film advances perspectives on the Christianising and civilising ethic of colonialism, within which …

Abstract The Rose of Rhodesia is difficult to place in relation to British imperialism and race relations, because its situation with regard to both is ambivalent. Though clearly an “imperial” film, it has a greater affinity with the “liberal” kind of contemporary imperialism than with other sorts. Its racial attitudes appear liberal, too, albeit in a patronizing kind of way. As …

Abstract The return of The Rose of Rhodesia to the public domain comes at a remarkable time for Zimbabwe. This melodramatic film about an “unusually large rose diamond” makes an uncanny prophesy about future black African leadership of the country. And yet, in an irony of history, Zimbabwe is currently undergoing possibly the worst political and humanitarian crisis in its history at the …

Abstract This paper considers the ways in which The Rose of Rhodesia participates in colonial constructions of race, specifically as the latter relate to questions of land and insurrection. Drawing on a reading of British press coverage of the 1896 Anglo-Ndebele War, it argues that the film recuperates key events in Rhodesia’s early history in order to create a pro-imperial narrative. In …

Abstract The South African feature film The Rose of Rhodesia was produced when the imperial romance, a genre associated in particular with Rider Haggard, enjoyed great popularity. Some of its typical features are to be found in The Rose of Rhodesia, but these are adapted and exceeded so as to speak to settler (rather than British) concerns in the early Union of South …

Abstract “Could this be Lord Cholmondeley?” wonders Rose Randall, The Rose of Rhodesia’s magazine-reading heroine, 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 also set in Rhodesia? As this essay shows, the fact that the film’s Rhodesian heroine is also …

Abstract 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 …

Act I. Chief Ushakapilla wants his only son, Mofti, to become leader of all Africa. When word comes that the colonial governor has denied his request for land for a third time, Ushakapilla declares to Mofti that Africa will shortly be restored to the black race. Believing such ambitions to be futile, Mofti reminds his father of the wise counsel …

Intertitles have been numbered for ease of reference. English translation by Vreni Hockenjos. Intertitle 1 Erster Akt Act One Intertitle 2 Der Kraal des Häuptlings “Ushakapilla”. The kraal of Chief Ushakapilla. Intertitle 3 Ushakapilla, dessen größter Ehrgeiz darin besteht, seinen Sohn Mofti dereinst als Häuptling von ganz Afrika zu sehen. Ushakapilla, whose greatest ambition is to see his son, Mofti, …

Matti, how did you become a silent film musician and composer? When I was studying music at Södra Latin high school in Stockholm in 1989, the school’s film club asked me to accompany Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin since I was a classically trained pianist. I took a bundle of notes with me and tried to follow the film as best I could. …

Compiled with the generous assistance of Neil Parsons and James Burns. Fig. C1. Ink sketch of Harold Shaw, The Bioscope (London), 24 February, 1916, 759. Fig. C2. Harold Shaw on the cover of Stage and Cinema (Johannesburg), 22 April 1916. Fig. C3. “Harold Shaw’s Bargain”, Stage and Cinema (Johannesburg), 13 January 1917, 3. Fig. C4. Henry Howse, “Adventures of a ‘Movie’ Man”, Stage and Cinema (Johannesburg), 24 February …

The following biographical information has been compiled and written in collaboration with Neil Parsons, who has generously shared his research into The Rose of Rhodesia with the editors. HAROLD MARVIN SHAW (Director). 1877-1926. After starting out as an actor in a San Francisco theatre in 1893, Shaw turned to the motion-picture business in 1909. As a member of the Edison Company’s stock …

The following list of films directed by Harold Shaw has been compiled from various books and online databases, including Alan Goble’s Complete Index to World Film (http://www.citwf.com), the British Film Institute’s film and television database (http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/ftvdb/), the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com), and Kenneth M. Cameron’s Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White (1994). It is necessarily preliminary and incomplete. Since the …

Map 1. South Africa, circa 1900. Source unidentified. Map 2. Central and Southern Africa, 1896. George Gill, The British Colonies, Dependencies, and Protectorates (London, 1896). Map 3. Africa, 1922. The Comparative Atlas of Physical and Political Geography (London, Bartholomew 1922). Source: http://img.lib.msu.edu/branches/map/AfJPEGs/af1922l.htm. Created on: Tuesday, 18 August 2009 | Last Updated: Monday, 31 August 2009

Fig. G1. The Pioneer Column of the British South Africa Company. The Graphic, 25 October 1890. Fig. G2. Tensions between the BSAC and Portugal. Punch, 5 June 1891, 266. Fig. G3. The Anglo-Ndebele War of 1893. The Penny Illustrated Paper, 7 October 1893, 240. Fig. G4. Cecil Rhodes as the Pied Piper of Rhodesia. Punch, 10 May 1899, 223. Fig. G5. Postcard, undated. Fig. …

JAMES M. BURNS teaches African history at Clemson University. He is the author of Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (2002) and co-author of A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2007). He has published several articles on the role played by cinema in colonial Africa, and is currently working on a comparative history of cinema spectatorship in the Black Atlantic. MATTI BYE is a silent …