Dear BAFTSS members

Christian Missions in Global History Seminar

Wednesday, 21st May, 2014, 5.30.p.m – 7.30.p.m. Room 102 (Athlone Room),

Senate House, 1st floor

Films with a Mission: missionary films in comparative film history

A number of British missionary societies, both Protestant and Anglo-Catholic, adopted film in the first half of the twentieth century. Missionary film collections include those of the Church Missionary Society, the Church of Scotland missions, the London Missionary Society, the Methodist Missionary Society, the Salvation Army, and St. Joseph’s Missionary Society. The paper will outline some of the key issues and questions in historically assessing these important collections, and will screen a number of extracts. The paper will encompass comparative approaches to interpreting missionary film shot in Africa and India. It will examine how, on the one hand, individual British churches invested in film to compete with other denominations, including foreign churches, in recruiting, converting and raising funds, whilst, on the other hand, being involved in interdenominational collaborations in film production and cinema exhibition to promote missionary work and Christianity, through the International Missionary Council (IMC) and the Missionary Film Committee (MFC). The paper will thus assess the significance of the take up of the new mass media technology of film in evangelical strategies by British Christian missions in the modern period.

Dr. Emma Sandon is a lecturer in film and television at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published on British colonial film in Africa and South African film in the Union of South Africa.. She was a project management team member of the Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk, and is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/ and Senior Research Associate for the Chair of Social Change, Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg. Films with a Mission: a comparative study of British missionary film collections in Africa and India in the first half of the twentieth century is funded by the British Academy.

Dr.Emma Sandon
Lecturer in Film and Media
Department of Media and Cultural Studies
School of Arts
Birkbeck
University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H OPD
0044207 631 6130
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