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 the marriage of the hero and heroine ensures the reproduction of the desired colonial future.
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The rediscovery of The Rose of Rhodesia allows a deeper investigation of colonial cinema and its imperatives than previously possible. The film incorporates the early cinematic stylistic features both of fictional narratives featuring white protagonists in Africa and of ethnographic documentaries about Africa. Contemporary criticism highlights the film’s ethnographic and geographic elements. The Kinematograph Weekly identifies the “good acting of the natives in their Zulu kraal” and “grand scenery (crags, precipices and waterfalls)” as “one of the most notable points” (6 November 1919, 115). It mentions “the fine scenes of native life and customs” and comments upon the story’s “pleasing touch of romance, pathos and humour” (6 November 1919, 116). The Bioscope describes the film’s “outstanding feature” as the “realistic and delightful study it offers of the life, personal characteristics and surroundings of a Native African tribe” (6 November 1919, 99). While the first reviewer acknowledges the significance of the narrative fiction embedded within the film, the second is less interested in the “story”, describing it as “thin, conventional and rather clumsily constructed” (6 November 1919, 99).
The film was released in Britain, as these reviews testify, but it was also screened in South Africa, where it was the only film that the Fisher family produced. In correspondence with Thelma Gutsche, the renowned South African writer and film historian Harry Fisher wrote that his father had “formed a small company to finance a Big Picture which was to be ‘The Rose of Rhodesia’”:
The film … was the biggest flop in the Cinema world…. We advertised it big and ran it at the City Hall for ONE NIGHT and One night only …. We thought there was going to be a riot as the Public wanted their money back. However that was the end of Harold Shaw and he cleared out of Africa after that … Fishers just cut the loss and forgot about Film Production after that one bad attempt. (Harry Fisher to Thelma Gutsche, 24 February 1940, University of Cape Town, Manuscripts and Archives Department)
The reasons for the “flop” are not elaborated, however.
Reading against the grain of the (British) reviews that valorise the film primarily as ethnography, in this paper I show how The Rose of Rhodesia combines a fictional narrative dominated by Rose Randall, with elements of ethnography and a topographical mise-en-scène. This “maps” Africa in ways that reinforce colonial perspectives of the land as “empty”, waiting to be discovered. Through close textual analysis of the film’s narrative choices and stylistic features, the paper examines some of the film’s meanings in the context of colonial cinema with an imperial address.
Imperial heroes: Lord Cholmondeley and Jack Morel
Rose Randall is positioned as the film’s central character through the fictional narrative as a whole and particularly with regard to the fictional romance. Her pivotal role is tied to the novel that she reads obsessively at every opportunity. While the title is never made explicit, elements of the story are graphically recreated in the form of a page (or part of a page) in full frame, showing the details of what she is reading. This reinforces her perspective in the film and underscores viewers’ identification with her character. The story of Lord Cholmondeley, the central character in Rose’s novel, offers a parallel narrative thread to Rose’s own development. Each time she reads an extract, the film implants her decisions following her reading into the narrative. As we shall see, these two stories are so entwined that Lord Cholmondeley’s fiction shapes Rose’s fantasies as well as her life choices, informing even her choice of spouse. In this sense, the film can be seen as an interpretation of the kind of text that Rose is reading.
Lord Cholmondeley represents white, British aristocracy, and all its attendant features of wealth, official connections, property ownership and servants. His story begins in the film when he leaves Britain and travels to South Africa in a “specially prepared state cabin” (Intertitle 46) on a luxury liner. On arrival, we are told, he immediately takes a train to Rhodesia. This is the film’s first reference to Rhodesia, apart from the title itself. Even when cheated in love, Cholmondeley is presented as a gentleman. This can be interpreted from his reason for leaving Britain: “for the love of this woman, for he would never allow words of disrespect for any woman to pass his lips” (Intertitle 45). Implicitly, “this woman” has been unfaithful to him. On arrival in Rhodesia he changes his name to Carl Standington, so that he cannot be found by his “old friends”, suggesting that he wishes to escape a painful past. Apparently an excellent rider, he covers two hundred miles on a mule on his first day, a feat which prompts Rose’s tongue-in-cheek remark: “What a hard-working mule!” (Intertitle 46). In any event, riding a mule diminishes his otherwise aristocratic status. These ironic layers in relation to questions of masculinity need further research, especially with regard to the valorisation of certain characteristics of the colonial man.
The film’s iconographic interest in land and landscape is a key aspect of the colonial thrust of its narrative. In this context, it is pertinent to consider Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s view that “Eurocentric cinema narrates penetration into the Third World” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 145). They propose that in these films “[t]he unveiling of the mysteries of an unknown space becomes a rite of passage allegorizing the Westerner’s achievement of virile heroic stature” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 146). Although Cholmondeley’s stamina clearly underscores his virility, he himself does not perform the unveiling function described by Shohat, especially since the viewers only learn of his journey at one remove. Rather, it is Jack Morel, his real-life stand-in, who completes the quest begun by Cholmondeley in the novel. Ultimately the sexual metaphor turns out to be a reproductive one, however, especially since it is contained by the film’s, and Jack’s, Christian ethics. It is interesting here that Marmaduke Wetherell (who plays Jack) later wrote, produced, directed, and played the lead in Livingstone (1925), a film for which he sought funding from clergymen and missionaries (Rapp and Weber 1989). His ties with both The Rose of Rhodesia and Livingstone suggest that further research into Wetherell’s engagement with film as a means of extending Christian perspectives on developing empire would be useful.
Jack’s positioning to master the space is especially evident when he goes hunting with Mofti, the Chief’s son, representing what Shohat and Stam call the “colonial desire to dominate a new land” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 146). The first hunting escapade departs from the house of the missionary, James Morel, after the two fathers agree to it. The father/son pairs are contrasted on the basis of their racial identities, iconically reinforced by their costume. Like his father Ushakapilla, Mofti is tribalised in skins and feathers around his waist, with beaded armbands around the top portions of his arms. He wears a tall white ostrich feather tied to the back of his head, as does Ushakapilla, presumably signifying their royal status. He is barefoot and carries a spear and shield made from skins. Jack, on the other hand, is dressed in safari shirt and shorts, wears long socks, boots, a hat and carries a rifle. Having left the homestead, a single shot establishes them out in the wilderness. The camera has a static wide frame, with Mofti standing on a large boulder that fills the centre of the image. The shot is taken from a low angle that cuts off the sky at the top of the frame, thereby emphasising the dominance of the landscape. Jack enters from the bottom right, holding his hand up to Mofti who pulls him up, a gesture that iterates Mofti’s subservience to Jack. Rather than continuing the hunting sequence here, the next shot cuts back to the two fathers. An ensuing sequence secures James Morel’s dominance over Ushakapilla and also asserts the civilising ethic of the missionary project. This acts as a reinforcing parallel in relation to what we have just witnessed between Jack and Mofti. Furthermore, it invokes well-used tropes of colonial dominance that ascribe a primitivist perspective to the colonised.
In Imperial Leather (1995), Anne McClintock argues that the colonial journey in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) is “figured as a journey forward in space but backward in time” (McClintock 1995, 242). In this “anachronistic space”, she remarks, “colonized people … do not inhabit history proper but exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency—the living embodiment of the archaic ‘primitive’” (McClintock 1995, 30). With its evidently primitivist intentions, The Rose of Rhodesia would seem to illustrate McClintock’s thesis. Deploying a familiar colonial trope, James Morel shows Ushakapilla what appears to be a mirror. The camera frames them together in a high angle shot with the missionary sitting above Ushakapilla squatting next to him on the floor, thereby establishing the men’s status in relation to each other. Upon looking into the mirror and seeing the Chief without apparently realising that it is himself, Ushakapilla lifts his arm three times in customary salute (Fig. 7.1). He points to the mirror, then to his own leopard-skin loincloth, looking between the two as if to compare them. Apparently realising that he is looking at himself, he throws his head back laughing (Fig. 7.2). Abruptly, Morel withdraws the mirror as if punishing a child, upon which Ushakapilla plays the part and scowls. Morel then produces a Bible in its place (Fig. 7.3). An alternative reading might suggest that Morel in fact shows Ushakapilla an image of the binary opposite to his apparently primitive position (for example, the Queen of England), prompting his comparison between what the person in the picture is wearing and his loincloth. The fact that he subsequently says: “‘If the white Chief knew the state in which I and my people find ourselves, he would have helped us!’” (Intertitle 15), reinforces this idea. In any event, Morel’s message is that only Christianity will provide the means to civilization. At this point in the narrative the bigger punishment for Ushakapilla’s refusal to embrace Christianity is still awaiting him. Construed as divine punishment, it is Mofti’s death that leads Ushakapilla to repent, and at that point he is rewarded. The reward is the land granted by the “great white Chief”, which ascribes an ahistorical twist to the narrative. It acts, however, to underscore Ushakapilla’s loss of power and subordination to white authority. The final resolution retains his primitive positioning established in this sequence and thereby contains the threat he might otherwise have posed.
The camera returns to the hunting excursion in the following sequence with just three shots of Jack and Mofti hunting in the wilderness. Like the earlier single shot, the framing of these shots, especially their width and length, combines with the overall propensity for the film to act as a travelogue, thereby further privileging the landscape. Each of these three shots repeats the static, wide frame, which is filled with the landscape each time in the form of crags and peaks as well as local flora. Like the earlier single shot, these shots are all from a low angle, cutting off the sky at the top of the frame, thus elevating and exaggerating these features for the viewer. They also establish the landscape before the characters enter the frame, and hold still as the characters leave the frame. This reinforces the landscape as a space both to-be-discovered and having-been-discovered. In the first of these three shots, Jack and Mofti creep stealthily into the right of the frame behind a large boulder. The camera holds still throughout as they move towards the foreground, dwarfed by the majestic sweep of the mountains (Fig. 7.4). The next shot exploits the landscape in a similar way. This time Mofti and Jack appear in the far distance two-thirds towards the top of the frame (Fig. 7.5). They are again dwarfed by the dominance of the mountains behind them and the boulders in the middle of the frame, with the foreground filled by indigenous flora. The camera holds still as they stand on top of the boulder. Jack lifts one foot onto the rock in front of him, gesturing his position of power both over the land and in relation to Mofti. The next shot moves to a closer view of the immediate foreground (Fig. 7.6). Once again, the frame is held static and the shot is from a very low angle, elevating them as they enter the frame, retaining the emphasis on their placement within the scene of the landscape. The framing of this sequence by James Morel’s missionary primitivising ethic is mirrored in Jack’s superiority over Mofti, thereby exposing the space in the context of a carefully constructed and embedded sense of Mofti’s subordination to Jack. This is re-confirmed later when they meet Rose, and Jack instructs Mofti to kneel, allowing Rose to clamber over his back in order to climb the rocks. This diminishes any threat that Mofti might pose to equal Jack and excludes him from the frame of romance. Jack’s superior status clearly allows him to complete what Lord Cholmondeley begins.
The framing of the shots in this sequence, coupled with the act of entering and leaving the frame, also presents the space as mythically “empty”. This perspective is first presented with Cholmondeley’s “feat” in the saddle and continues with Jack’s excursions in the wild. In the hunting sequence there is no indication of any demarcations or boundaries, nor, indeed, of any other life. The wild animals sought by Mofti and Jack (and, later, Rose) are never seen. Not only does the camera record what Shohat and Stam call “ephemeral glimpses” of the “margins” of empire (Shohat and Stam 1994, 104), it presents these ostensibly empty spaces for vicarious discovery by the imperial spectator. In The Rose of Rhodesia, what McClintock calls “primordial landscape” (McClintock 1995, 242) is thus not only “unveiled” (in Shohat and Stam’s terminology) by the colonising missionary, adventurer, or settler, it is simultaneously confirmed as available for colonisation. In this sense, and precisely for this purpose, the land is not what Michel de Certeau has called a “practised place” (de Certeau 1984, 117), at least not until Cholmondeley/Jack’s arrival.
The crucial conjunction of the virile imperial hero with the “unveiling” of the colonised space explains the significance of Cholmondeley’s description in the very first excerpt of Rose’s novel: “his dark eyes were glowing beneath their dark lashes as he raised his gaze” (Intertitle 45). This description would have appealed particularly to white heterosexual women, the primary readership for this kind of fiction. The fact that, immediately after raising his gaze, Cholmondeley “summoned his servant” (Intertitle 45) reflects the symbiosis between his masculinity and colonial power, reinforced by Jack’s superiority over Mofti. Later, we learn that “as with all aristocrats … [Cholmondeley] was lost the moment he saw the pretty face of a girl” (Intertitle 81), and that Betty Beetle was “only too willing to please the lord and, in so doing, she spoiled her chances of ever becoming … his wife” (Intertitles 81, 82). The moral of Betty Beetle’s story is imbricated with the film’s overall purpose of reproducing a colonial gender order at the same time as pleasing its audience. Since sustaining the reproductive function of the white nuclear family is vital for ensuring the colonial future, the point is made explicit: “If Betty had known the meaning of chastity, who knows? Perhaps everything would have turned out differently …” (Intertitle 82). In other words, the virile hero’s counterpart is the pure colonial heroine, who mirrors the “virgin” landscape itself. We shall return to how this part of the story acts as a crucial moment of recognition and reversal for Rose, making it possible for her to marry Jack; in her case, things do indeed “turn out differently”.
Ethnographic spectacle
The “grand scenery” referred to in one of the contemporary reviews (The Kinematograph Weekly, 6 November 1919, 115), extends beyond the general landscape that we see while Jack and Mofti are hunting. An ethnographic, tourist gaze is constructed in relation to the character of Ushakapilla, his kraal, and his journeys into the interior to his ancestral rock and to visit a sangoma (“witch-doctor”) for counsel. As we shall see, Mofti is also the object of this ethnographic gaze. The film creates what Fatimah Tobing Rony has called “ethnographic spectacle”, in her investigation of film and culture that seeks “to explain … the pervasive ‘racialization’ of indigenous peoples in both popular and traditional scientific cinema” (Tobing Rony 1996, 8).
The ancestral rock, actually situated near the spectacular Bawa Falls in the Eastern Cape, is both the site of Mofti’s betrayal of his father’s wishes (by showing Jack the rock) and the place from which, at the end of the film, Ushakapilla casts his amassed riches into the river in a gesture that reconfirms his primitivism. Ushakapilla’s visit to the sangoma represents the pinnacle of the film’s ethnographic spectacle. The sequence is framed as two matching opposite sides of a picture frame, a literal illustration of Andrew Higson’s useful notion of a “cinema of pictures” (Higson 2001, 53). Referring to the silent film Tansy (dir. Cecil M. Hepworth, 1921), Higson comments on how it is “as much a cinema of pictures as a narrative cinema” (Higson 2001, 53). As we have seen, The Rose of Rhodesia pays careful attention to the landscape as emblematic of the colonial mythology it expounds. Similarly Tansy engages imagery of the English countryside to drive home its ideological perspectives on Englishness. In the sequence where Ushakapilla visits the sangoma, this sense of “a cinema of pictures” is extended by using the landscape as the frame, initially on the right and then the left. Coupled with the way these shots are edited, the impression of an actual picture is formed. First the camera tilts down a rocky outcrop on the right of the frame with some of the sangoma’s entourage sitting at the bottom of it (Fig. 7.7). Without cutting, it pans left to the sangoma in heavily beaded, tribalised costume (Fig. 7.8). Next, the film cuts to a long tilt down a craggy edge on the left of the frame (as against the right in the former shot) and pans right at the bottom, also without cutting (Fig. 7.9 and Fig. 7.10). Together then, these two shots form the outline of a picture frame.
Ushakapilla is miniaturised in a top shot as he walks below the camera. The film cuts to the sangoma who is in a trance-like state, his body shuddering, as water gushes down the rocks behind. The Bioscope praises Harold Shaw’s “remarkable achievement” that includes this apparently “real witch-doctor” (25 September 1919, 21). The viewer’s ethnographic experience is intensified by the sangoma’s complimentary recitations to Ushakapilla that the intertitles render in the idiom of traditional praise poetry. After delivering his devastating prophecy to Ushakapilla, that Mofti will never “chase the white men away and rule over all of Africa” (Intertitle 71), a dejected Ushakapilla leaves the frame in another diminishing top shot. With his back to the camera, the sangoma raises his arms as the camera tilts up steeply to show two of his cohort at the top of the river in the top right of the frame (Fig. 7.11). They raise their arms, etched against the skyline, confirming and naturalising his prophecy.
The ethnographic spectacle is not limited to these topographical locations. Like later ethnographic narratives about Africa, such as Nionga (Stoll, 1925) and Stampede (dir. C. and Stella Court Treatt, 1929), to which it bears some resemblance, The Rose of Rhodesia incorporates mixed stylistic modes. Its opening shot of the kraal evokes a tourist view by showing a line of huts in the medium distance. Like an actuality, the camera pans slowly right, extending the viewer’s observational engagement. The camera never enters the huts however. Rather, the bulk of the images are shot in front of one hut, where Ushakapilla sits on a chair, his son at his feet and the elders around him in a circle. These static shots that are framed as frontal and clearly staged for the camera, resemble the tableaux of early cinema (Sandon 2000, 121-2).
The film’s ethnographic, colonial gaze is accentuated in several other scenes in front of the chief’s hut. On a few occasions, the camera departs from the static-shot format and becomes mobile, as in the side shot of a group of children lining up in front of the chief. Ushakapilla sits to the left of the frame in front of the hut. The children enter the shot from the left and snake over to the right, the camera following the action behind them, with the bare backs of the last in line immediately in front of the camera. The camera follows as the children move forward across the frame’s diagonal, revealing their nakedness with a thin loincloth draped from their waistbands. Occasionally the film cuts to Ushakapilla in mid-shot or close mid-shot, particularly when he is pondering on his plans, leaning on the baskets of gold and diamonds looking into the distance. Not all shots have this purportedly “documentary” feel, however. In particular one of the shots of Ushakapilla cuts to a “dream” of his ancestors, illustrated by images of a battle between warriors in double exposure. This technical effect imbues the images with a surreal quality as the warriors clash against each other in a phantom-like shadow play. This is the only subjectively interior shot in the film, thereby ascribing special significance to Ushakapilla, in relation to both the ethnographic and narrative aspects of the film.
Some of the elders are occasionally shown in close-up. These close-ups are linked into the narrative, for example, when one of the elders comments on the question of land (Fig. 7.12). By contrast, Mofti’s figuration in close-up, on two occasions, warrants special mention in the context of ethnographic spectacle. In these close-ups, he is filmed in a head and shoulders shot that is reminiscent of photographic portraiture. He is positioned slightly to the right of the frame with his bare shoulders just visible (Fig. 7.13). His face is turned slightly to the left of the frame, his eyes looking out left and up towards his father sitting off-frame. This close-up is held four times longer than the other close-ups, thus separating it from the narrative flow, ascribing it a fetishised objectivity and increasing the sense of spectacle. The lingering, exoticising focus on Mofti’s semi-profile matches tropes of colonial photography and cinematography that similarly linger upon the heads and faces of the colonised. These include the conjunction of specific forms of portraiture with anthropometry as well as visual anthropological documentary records (Edwards 1992). The question of subjective agency is also evoked in the close-ups of Mofti. An earlier comparative example can be found in A Day in the Life of a Rickshaw Boy(Butcher’s Empire Pictures, 1912), an “interest short” (Gutsche 1972, 330) that ends with close-up shots of the men’s heads as they turn round slowly showing off their headdresses. While these images also invoke the sense of ethnographic spectacle, they raise questions about subjective engagement and individual agency in visual ethnographic practice.
Colonial Heroine: Rose Randall
We have seen how The Rose of Rhodesia exposes the landscape to discovery by the viewer, using travelogue-style images of the Bawa Falls and the sangoma. The film embeds its imperial romance within this broader context, focused on Rose and her choice of spouse. The figure of Fred Winters plays a significant role in this regard, entering her life just at the point in her reading where Lord Cholmondeley has retired, exhausted, after his marathon mule ride. The film has already shown Winters’ failure to cross the desert on a horse, thereby setting up an opposition between the aristocrat, Cholmondeley, and the thief, Winters, and, by extension, between Jack and Winters. When Bob Randall returns from the bar with Winters, Rose’s thoughts are interpreted in an intertitle: “‘Could this be Lord Cholmondeley?’” (Intertitle 62). This highlights how her reading has encouraged the fantasies that she subsequently expresses in her behaviour towards Winters. The camera is set up in front of the dining table in the foreground, presenting a static, wide shot of Rose and Bob’s domestic space. This is the primary site of the encounter between Rose and Winters, who perform to the camera’s positioning. Thus we have a form of domestic interior exposure, unique in the film, in which the theatrical camera set-up exposes the drama of Rose’s fiction. This has the effect of further reinforcing viewer identification with Rose as colonial heroine. For example, the viewer gets a privileged view of Rose celebrating her discovery of “Lord Cholmondeley” by doing a dance around the room. When Winters comes in, she falls off her chair, he helps her up, showing strong interest in her as she flirts with him by stroking her hair and tossing it behind her shoulder.
The next morning, after Bob and Winters have gone off to the diggings, she reads the next instalment of the novel, in which Cholmondeley tucks into springbok steaks (Fig. 7.14). Now the camera moves through the space with her, cutting on action and giving the viewer a close view as she holds up a tin of Fray Bentos corned beef, her facial expression conveying hesitation. When she decides to go hunting, her pace quickens as she darts across the room, the camera following her actions, drawing in the viewer. She picks up a rifle, loading it with aplomb, and puts on a wide-brimmed straw hat. The next shot is wide, with Rose in the centre, surrounded by a wild, uninhabited landscape that fills the frame (Fig. 7.15). As in the earlier landscape shots, the sky does not feature. Unlike the earlier shots, however, Rose does not enter an already-established frame but is revealed within it, a relatively small figure, dwarfed by the cliff down which she is climbing. She strides confidently through the space and as she crouches down to aim, the film cuts to a medium close-up. Once more, the camera follows her actions, emphasising her point of view.
Rose’s engagement with this otherwise masculine territory resembles the performance of Englishness by the eponymous heroine of Tansy, who engages the “tomboy” characteristics of her character in what Andrew Higson calls “a very naturalistic and unselfconscious manner” (Higson 2001, 57). Yet, as Higson argues, Tansy is not only a “tomboy”, but also a “Perfect Lady” (Higson 2001, 57). For female audiences, Rose’s equally naturalised hybrid identity, as both hunter and prospective wife, pushes the boundaries of the conventional beguiling female. Even as she flirts with Winters and plays the dutiful, domesticated daughter to her father—thereby revealing the necessary qualities for becoming a future wife and mother—Rose displays a fearless independence that would also have appealed to female audiences, particularly those beyond the colonies. This aspect of Rose’s character is located within the more general travelogue-type features that establish the film’s African context. Applying Higson’s account of Tansy as “feminising the image of Englishness” (Higson 2001, 57), Rose can be seen as “feminising” the image of a potentially alien African territory, thereby diminishing the threat it poses and reinforcing the prospect of imperial expansion to white, western audiences.
Rose’s encounter with Jack and Mofti (Fig. 7.16) is contrasted with the hunt in an intertitle: “Rose comes across a different kind of wild animal” (Intertitle 65). When Jack approaches, she says: “‘I thought you were a springbok’” (Intertitle 66). Although Jack’s underlying search for a female partner is highlighted by Mofti’s subsequent quip about the dangers of “‘hunting wild animals like these’” (Intertitle 67), the issue is complicated by the presence of Mofti, whose nominal eligibility is precluded by the colonial fear of miscegenation. Thus the film has to work to neutralize Mofti as possible threat: before he can be killed off, this sequence serves to fix the gender and racial hierarchy between white settlers and the colonised Other. We have already seen how Mofti helps Jack up the rock, and how, after they meet Rose, Jack instructs Mofti to crouch down so Rose can use his back as a step. Had Mofti lived, in other words, he would almost certainly have had to become Jack and Rose’s servant. Since he is the son of a chief, however, and therefore expected to become Chief in turn, the only resolution available to the colonial narrative in this instance is for Mofti to die. Before this occurs, the relationships between these characters are visualised in ways that match Shohat’s broad assertion that “[a] Western woman, in [imperial] narratives, exists in a relation of subordination to Western man and in a relation of domination towards ‘non-Western’ men and women” (Shohat 1997, 40). The point is driven home all the more forcibly by the fact that, although Rose is clearly able to hunt on her own, once Jack and Mofti enter the picture, the colonial hierarchy must be reinvoked.
The sequence highlights another aspect of Jack and Rose’s coupling as “wild animals” that initially exceeds the colonial boundaries of the text. This discursive excess shifts the emphasis away from the more familiar colonial equation of indigenous people with animals and onto the heterosexual encounter between Jack and Rose. In so doing, it adds complexity to the crude characterisations of black people as animals in They Built a Nation (dir. Joseph Albrecht, 1938), for example (see Maingard 2007, 56), and in other colonial representations more broadly (Sandon 2000, 136-8). This clever twist on Shaw’s part plays into the development of the film’s romantic fiction and is reinforced by Mofti’s comments to the couple later in the film where he links their happiness to “‘monkeys with pastries’” (Intertitle 89). By the time Mofti has died and the film has reached its end, this focus on animals in the romantic relationship between Jack and Rose has been linked back to, and recontained by, the text’s colonial meaning: with their marriage, the white colonial future is ensured.
Meanwhile, Rose offers Winters the choice of preserved meat or springbok for supper. The camera once more takes up its static, frontal mode. Rose and Winters perform to the camera at the front of the table, very close to the camera itself. This places them in a medium two-shot, once more emphasising their romantic encounter. Winters leans towards Rose in a rather forward manner, taking her hand and kissing it. Although she rebuffs him, she is clearly taken by his attentions. This romantic intensity would have added to the film’s appeal for female audiences. Rose skirts around the table, fetches food, and moves forward in the frame, recreating a two-shot across the table. Winters’ choice of springbok now directly matches the Lord Cholmondeley story, which Rose acknowledges by moving to the back of the room and ostentatiously throwing down the preserved meat, all the while looking back at Winters and smiling (Fig. 7.17). Shortly afterwards, Rose reads about the (literally) chastening example of Betty Beetle, whose willingness to “please” Cholmondeley “spoiled her chances of ever becoming … his wife” (Intertitles 81, 82). In her next encounter with Winters, Rose reverses her earlier interest in his advances. Reassuming their medium two-shot in the front of the camera, she rebuffs Winters’ attempts to kiss her. Being white, young, confident, and relatively good-looking, he is clearly eligible, yet she chooses to remain chaste, paving the way for Jack to win her hand. These domesticated scenes playing to the camera provide an interiorised intimacy with Rose’s experience and point of view. The spatial interiority acts as a metaphor for the psychological interiority, conveyed by the combined textual references of the Lord Cholmondeley story with Rose’s own life.
The corollary of the Betty Beetle extract is fiercely played out in Rose’s life precisely because she has refuted Winters and is now free to choose one man or the other. Jack visits the Randall homestead with newspapers: “‘I thought you might enjoy reading some news from back home …’” (Intertitle 86). He shakes Bob’s hand and attempts to shake Winters’, who sulkily holds back. Jack, Rose and Winters are all seated in the foreground of the frame, with Rose between the two men. The camera has a wide frontal position, encompassing the scene. Winters starts reading a newspaper while Rose chats to Jack on her right. He stands up to talk to Bob in the background, leaving Rose and Winters as a couple in the foreground. She looks at Winters with evident concern, and turns round to look at Jack. As she turns back, the camera cuts on the action, and Rose enters a comparative mode in which she looks from one man to the other weighing them up against each other. The pace of the film shifts here from the static framing to a montage of medium close-ups that match Rose’s shifting gaze from one man to the other. Each time she looks at Winters, her face expresses anxiety. On the other hand, each time she looks at Jack she smiles more. Her growing interest in Jack is interpreted by a lingering, low angle mid-shot from her point of view that elevates him and widens his shoulders across the frame, at the same time as showing him talking amicably to Bob. Rose looks back at Fred, then again at Jack. As she turns her head back to the front of the frame she lets out a sigh, her shoulders drop, she smiles broadly and holds her face in her hands: her choice is made. Jack returns to sit next to her and they chat together, while on her other side Fred continues to read his newspaper. Soon afterwards, Mofti visits, at the very moment when Rose hands Jack a white rose cut from the garden. Through this gift, and in relation to Jack’s metaphorical position in the narrative, she now simultaneously becomes Jack’s white Rose and the white Rose of Rhodesia.
The camera remains static as Mofti enters the frame. The shot is held for the duration of the next scene, highlighting the extent to which the previous scene has been heavily edited to reflect Rose’s ambivalence and ultimate choice. Jack holds out the rose for Mofti to smell, which he does laughing. He touches it, kisses his fingers and touches the rose again, then asks Rose for one himself. Tellingly, with regard to the earlier discussion of fears of miscegenation, she seeks Jack’s approval before doing so. Mofti puts it in his hair in front of the feather he always wears, a symbolic act of imperial collusion. He prophesies the couple’s future marriage and invokes their happiness by means of a reference to the fabled site of Cecil Rhodes’s burial in Rhodesia in 1902: “‘May you be as happy as a monkey with pastries, and may your wife give you as many children as there are stones on the Matoppos Hills’” (Intertitle 89). Any possible romance attaching to Mofti is dispelled by his death shortly after, a doubly ironic event: first, because Mofti, as already noted, has warned Jack of the dangers of falling off a cliff; and, second, because Rose and Jack plant a cutting from the white rosebush at his graveside. Indeed, there is a third level of irony insofar as James Morel reiterates the film’s Christianizing and civilizing mission by persuading Ushakapilla to give Mofti a Christian burial.
Returning to the scene in which Rose chooses Jack, when Mofti and Jack leave together, the camera cuts to a medium close-up of Rose looking troubled on the left of the frame, with Fred in soft focus in the background still reading the newspaper (Fig. 7.18). She looks back at him with an expression that recalls her earlier ambivalence. Her choice of Jack as the “Cholmondeley” in her life is confirmed immediately afterwards when the camera lingers on her face in a medium close-up as she waves goodbye to Jack and Mofti. She remains disengaged from Fred, still in soft focus in the background.
Her choice made, Rose assumes a special significance for the colonial future by virtue of her status as heroine. To the extent that Cholmondeley is able freely to traverse two hundred miles of apparently uninhabited Rhodesian territory, and considering his nobility and wealth, coupled with his Britishness, he would seem to represent the opportunities offered by a colonial frontier that now stretched from South Africa into Rhodesia and beyond. Cholmondeley and Rhodesia are equated. Winning a Continent, the English title of Shaw’s De Voortrekkers (1916), has a particular relevance here inasmuch as it invokes the broader colonial aspirations of the time (see Maingard 2007, 16). As we have seen, by marrying her own “Lord Cholmondeley”, our heroine becomes, in effect, the white Rose of Rhodesia. Indeed, this view is articulated explicitly by Ushakapilla when he congratulates Jack on “‘possess[ing] the most beautiful rose in all Rhodesia’” (Intertitle 114). In terms of Christianity and the colonial civilizing mission, Rose’s chastity makes her the harbinger of an ideal colonial future, as is confirmed by the film’s ending in which she and Jack are surrounded by their four small children (Fig. 7.19). Jack’s dog-collar graphically confirms that he, like his father before him, now represents the Christian mission to civilise Africa. In its final focus on the nuclear family, The Rose of Rhodesia mirrors the endings of its two main predecessors in South African cinema, De Voortrekkers and The Symbol of Sacrifice(1918), in which the union of white couples is similarly foregrounded (see Maingard 2007, 29, 33). It echoes, too, the conclusion of The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915), in which not one but two married couples signify the preservation of a white future.
Conclusion
In this paper I have focused selectively on the imperial hero and colonial heroine in The Rose of Rhodesia, as well as how the film creates ethnographic spectacle. The film has a tight ideological framing, binding together narrative threads that at first sight seem disconnected. The Cholmondeley storyline provides a spine for the development of the romance as a key feature of the film played out through the character of Rose Randall. The opposition between Rose’s suitors, Jack Morel and Fred Winters, is critical to the film’s thematic exposition. The genre of romantic fiction that the film illustrates and, in part, creates, would have had special appeal for female audiences. The film’s exploitation of its geographical locations and its ethnographic objectification of indigenous people, also drive home its imperial address with particular force. While contemporary reviews in the trade journals ascribe greater value to this aspect of the film, I have shown in this paper how the film’s colonial register is produced not by this alone but by its imbrication with the romantic fiction.
This necessarily selective analysis leaves out a number of other significant aspects of the film. In the early part of the film the Rose Diamond plays its part as the “rose” of Rhodesia within an elaborate scenario involving the Karoo Diamond Mines Syndicate. Indeed, Rose Randall is only introduced after the film has been running for twenty-seven minutes. The significance of the Rose Diamond and of the film’s focus on mining warrants further discussion. The ambiguities surrounding the film’s title suggest that it relates less to the film’s actual location than to the colonial future. In this sense, the Rose Diamond is an index of Rhodesia’s potential mineral wealth, especially as the colony expands northwards. The fact that colonial expansion depends on reproduction specifically within the white, nuclear family, explains the significance of the romantic fiction at the heart of the film.
The film also shows how the landscape is not simply contested as a site of un-colonised wilderness, but is penetrated by modernity and its signifiers. The train, for example, snakes through the cinematic frame in a steeply curved spatial dominance that mirrors its actual colonial dominance in communications and transport. Similarly the newspaper that falls by accident from the train window occupies the centre of the frame as it flutters across the dry landscape and almost straight into Jack’s hands. Literal references to newspaper reports and letters play their part in the narrative and are often visualised. The urban location of the first part of the film raises the issue of conflict between large-scale mining and small-time prospecting as epitomised by Bob Randall. The ideological fit of these aspects warrants further analysis.
In addition to making a work of silent cinema available to more general scholarship, the recovery of The Rose of Rhodesia promises to facilitate future comparative research into South African cinema. When Harold Shaw directed De Voortrekkers, he was recreating history in the form of a film epic. The Symbol of Sacrifice, in whose genesis he played some part, can similarly be described as an historical epic. Both incorporate romantic couplings that are inextricable from the colonial ideologies they reinforce. Although The Rose of Rhodesia is not epic in style, Shaw does re-engage the device of romantic coupling, making it central to the narrative. All three films end with the celebration of the white nuclear family and its reproductive functions. Together, they form a rich resource for studies of colonialism, its cinematic portrayal by imperial ideologues, and the impact of the films themselves on cinema audiences.
With special thanks to Emma Sandon for her support and for generously sharing her primary research in the University of Cape Town, Manuscripts and Archives Department.
Illustrations
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Created on: Sunday, 16 August 2009