The War Face Off-Screen: Catalogue descriptions, imperial interpellations, and reading on- and off-screen faces in British Boer War films

Analysing films and film catalogue descriptions pertaining to the Anglo-Boer War (1898-1901), this chapter elucidates the importance of the face within British Boer War filmmaking. I argue that the face in early cinema represented something direct and personal – an experience beyond discursive codifications – for audiences. Film producers/exhibitors exploited the face’s evocativeness and used their catalogue descriptions to shape its imperial meaning. The catalogues thus present the face as a mediated immediacy useful for fashioning an imperially minded British citizenry.

Rather than comprehend the catalogue descriptions as reductive of the face’s evocative potential, I reveal the ingenuity of their use in magnifying imaginative, visceral, and meaningful associations between the on-screen face and the off-screen (spectatorial) face. The chapter thus connects theoretical formulations about the cinematic face, that locate the face’s radical potential in its linguistic inarticulability, with scholarship about the creative and propagandistic use of media in promoting the British Empire.