The monthly roundup of film and television publications compiled by Simon Baker, Institute of Historical Research, and published here at the BUFVC by Linda Kaye.

In this month’s Roundup there is a focus on politics and empire. Negrine and Bull investigate the television coverage of the British MPs’ expenses scandal. The gender bias coverage in news broadcasts of female MPs in Belgium is explored by Hooge and others. While Soroka and others look at the impact of television cameras in the House of Commons. And Jayson Harsin discusses TF1’s coverage of the 2005 French riots in Cultural Racist Frames in TF1’s French Banlieue Riots.

The cinema of the Italian empire is covered by Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s in-depth study of both feature and documentary films produced under the backing of Mussolini’s government, looking at Italy’s African and Balkan colonies. Glenn Reynolds in Colonial Cinema in Africa: Origins, Images, Audiences traces the development of the media using early actualities, expeditionary footage, ethnographic documentaries and missionary films. He also explores the development of audiences, cinema circuits, and the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment in Kenya.

Decolonization features in Jon Cowans’ Empire Films and the Crisis of Colonialism, 1946-1959 which uses popular cinema from the United States, Britain, and France to examine post-war Western attitudes toward colonialism and race relations. The theme of decolonization is taken up in Marc Matera’s Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, and the chapter, Pan-Africa in London, empire films, and the imperial imagination.

Media Screen Roundup (Oct 2015) IHR-BUFVC (PDF)