British Empire’s hidden workings in India and Iran revealed in remarkable new film footage
▻https://theconversation.com/british-empires-hidden-workings-in-india-and-iran-revealed-in-remar
The collection ranges from professional expedition documentaries to home movies and amateur documentary footage. Some films, such as The Conquest of Everest (1953) are well known. Others are only now emerging from the obscurity of the archives, such as the recently restored colour footage filmed by Sir Charles Evans on the first ascent of the third-highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga 1955.
Beyond these professional documentaries intended for public release are a whole range of amateur films. And they are shedding new light on aspects of imperial science, administration and colonial travel, providing us with major new sources through which we can examine the hidden histories of exploration and empire.
Skrine’s films provide us with unprecedented footage of Iran under the Allied-Soviet occupation, and demonstrate a strong surveillance sensibility.
A treasure trove of footage.
Increasingly after 1942, the Soviets confiscated and destroyed Skrine’s ciné-camera footage if they felt it strayed too long on military subjects. So it is all the more remarkable that, later in 1942, Skrine managed to avoid detection and travelled north to the border of Soviet Turkmenistan and covertly filmed the oil trains trundling from Tashkent to Krasnovodsk along the Trans-Caspian railway, footage that also appears in his Quetta-Damghan film.
He also made a brief, unauthorised crossing of the unguarded border into the Soviet Union. Covert surveillance, deliberate infringement; to the Soviet occupying forces this would have constituted espionage. Old home movies, it seems, are not always innocent. In some cases, they enable us to see with the eyes of Britain’s imperial security state.
Royal Geographical Society
▻https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/collection/royal-geographical-society
