Nadi Tofighian

Nadi Tofighian is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at the Department of Film and Literature. He has previously been a lecturer at Stockholm University and at De La Salle University Manila, and a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale University in 2015-2016. He is a special issues editor for Early Popular Visual Culture and a member of the board of the Swedish Film Institute.

My research interests include colonial history, early cinema, film distribution, documentary and ethnographic film, postcolonial theory, and Southeast Asia. My current project ‘Let the American Show You’: Early Cinema in U.S. Colonial Territories examines how U.S. government institutions and private film companies employed cinema as a colonial tool during the first decades of annexing its five occupied territories: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and Hawaii.

Teaching

These are the courses I have taught at LNU:

Film Analysis and Film Didactics (8 times)

Documentary Film (4 times)

Sweden on film and in television: representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality since 1960 (4 times, summer course, online)

World Cinema (4 times)

Contemporary Film Production and Distribution (3 times)

Film Form and Narration, introductory course (2 times)

Film History (2 times)

Research Perspectives in Cinema Studies (2 times)

Film, Archives, and Digital Culture (online, Master level)

Literature and Film

Film Criticism: Theory and Practice

Bachelor and Master thesis advisor

Research

I am currently working on a project titled ‘Let the American Show You’: Early Cinema in U.S. Colonial Territories. The project examines how U.S. government institutions and private film companies employed cinema as a colonial tool during the first decades of annexing its five occupied territories following the Spanish-American War: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and Hawaii. The project begins with the premise that film exhibition, production, and distribution practices made a significant contribution to the early spread of American influence among the local populations in these colonies.

This is an interdisciplinary project located at the intersection of cinema studies, socio-cultural history, and postcolonial studies. My research integrates early moving images, newspapers and magazines, photographs, government records, censuses, city directories, trade data, maps, and travel writing into an interdisciplinary investigation of the U.S. practices of the exhibition, production, and distribution of films in the five territories. My project taps into the imperial apparatus of information gathering, with many sources demonstrating in action the working of the colonial gaze.

The project consists of three parts that are all informed by archival materials. The first part covers the history of film exhibition in the different regions. I examine what films were exhibited and by whom, and how the exhibition format developed. Film was introduced to audiences in a variety of ways through magic shows, circuses, and technical presentations in town halls. In Manila, permanent movie houses were quickly established in business districts, residential areas, near markets, and in city outskirts – the city had more than twenty movie houses in 1910. Early film exhibitions were often presented as a sign of the progress of western science and an educational tool. I argue that there was a distinct Eurocentric worldview in these early exhibited moving images, which cemented the worldview of the coloniser and portrayed non-western people and places as exotic or uncivilised.

The second part focuses on films made in the five territories, especially by filmmakers from the United States, with a focus on the image they created in depicting the countries and their peoples. The imperial expansion of the United States had an immediate positive impact on the U.S. film industry as it gave production companies and cameramen the possibility to re-enact war scenes, show battleships and military troops, and film scenes from the new territories. In this part, I offer a comparative analysis between the films made in the different colonial territories. In my archival research for Manila, for instance, I have found advertisements for the exhibition of many filmed local events. I claim that these films reproduced racial hierarchies, and negotiated the role of religion, national heroes, and colonial relationships.

The third part covers how films were distributed in the different regions: going from itinerant film exhibitors travelling with film reels from Europe and North America, to local corporations and commercial stores selling film reels, to international film companies opening local branches. It examines the distribution strategy of U.S. film companies in the five territories and how films spread U.S. culture. Initially it took more than a year for films to reach the region, but that time gradually dwindled down to around a month. Early twentieth-century newspapers in the Philippines evidence the dominance of Western film and the idolisation of its stars. This part also follows the distribution of two films that project two very different images of the United States, Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) and The Immigrant (Charlie Chaplin, 1917). I study how the two films were distributed, exhibited, marketed, and received by the local populations. I argue that each of these aspects reflects the processes of cultural hegemony and nation-building.

This project contributes to the historiography of cinema in the non-Western world, colonial history, as well as the history of pre- and early Hollywood distribution networks and practices. In recent years a number of studies have re-evaluated and broadened the scope of early cinema scholarship. Despite these interventions, there remains a gap in scholarship, particularly with regard to the early history of cinema outside of Europe and North America. This research project fills part of this historiographical gap and also puts the history of American cinema in a broader perspective by assessing U.S. colonial history, and investigating how ideas of race and American exceptionalism were interconnected with the distribution and exhibition of film. Lastly, the project contributes to the history of the film industry in the United States, and the distribution practices in pre- and early Hollywood, which provided some of the basis upon which Hollywood ultimately established its world-wide domination. In this respect, the project also resonates today as Hollywood continues to dominate the world’s screens, as well as enjoying increasing aesthetic and intellectual dominance. In this light, the publication of a study that focuses on a historical phase where the United States became involved in world politics in new ways can help us view current events from new historical perspectives.