Simba

Watched this film the other night. Felt that there should be an automatic award of credits for anyone who has managed to sit through the film. It is absolutely awful. As a piece of entertainment it is on a par with the very worst of amateur dramatics and as a reflection of history, whatever your point of view,  it is as biased as is possible. The summation of the film provided by Dyer [visual culture: the reader; eds jessica evans and stuart hall; Sage Publications 2010; pp 461 - 466] is an interpretation that supports his particular approach by the selection of elements of the film whilst ignoring others. I have no particular quarrel with this approach but I do not think that he manages to throw any more light on the concept of 'whiteness' as was his stated intention.

Dyer states the film is "organised round a rigid binarism with white standing for modernity, reason, order, stability and black standing for backwardness, irrationality, chaos and violence."  As a binary system has only two possibilities describing the film in this way ignores the differences both large and small within the two main groups as depicted in the film. We have positions in the 'white' camp that range from working with the black group to shooting them out of hand and the 'black' camp that ranges from those who sided against the Mau Mau and those who formed the greater part of the forces defending the status quo and the heroic acts of the individuals such as the black servant who, although, fatally wounded, fired the rocket to get help when his master and mistress were being attacked.

Dyer tells us that he was taught the scientific difference between black and white at primary school. [ibid p 458]. His explanation is still largely accurate (black is the absence of colour and white is the presence of all colours in equal proportions) and he remarks on the way that 'black' in racial terms refers to 'coloured'. What he fails to do is to follow his analogy further. The colour or lack of colour we see when viewing objects is a combination of the nature of the reflective surface and its interpretation by our brain. Crudely put a surface that is seen as black reflects none of the spectrum and one that is seen as white reflects all of the spectrum in equal proportion. Our interpretation of what we 'see' is very much affected by our expectations. For example we see a white shirt as white in tungsten light whereas if an image of the same shirt in the same conditions is taken by a camera that has not been programmed to take images in tungsten light it will have an orange hue. This was a particular problem with film cameras using standard film.

In other words the colour of an object is only an indication of its surface properties and tells us very little about its internal structures and what we 'see' is subjective being the product of our biological make up and our learned experiences. To use a more prosaic example anyone who has been shopping with his/her loved one or worst of all presented with clothes and asked "what do you think of this colour" will know that sinking feeling because you see colours close to each other in a different way to your spouse.

In colour there are no boundaries. Colour does not make a step change from one colour to the next. There is gradation. To describe something as 'white' is a convenient shorthand and because we have no need, in our general lives, to distinguish variations. However if it was important we would develop language that would allow us to communicate the difference to others. Somewhere I have read the Intuit have some 400 words for 'snow' because the different nature of snow is of vital importance to their survival.

What has this journey into the nature of colour to do with 'Simba'; 'blackness' or 'whiteness'.  The way that we interpret the vast number of colours that we see is an internal act of ours that produces different results by different people. I would argue that this is equally true of seeing 'colour' in people. There is no simple option of joining one camp or another and most will find themselves torn between conflicting elements and both supporting and rejecting the main protagonists ( to continue the analogy of actual colour there is no defined boundaries between 'black' and 'white').  Based on my viewing of 'Simba' I do not believe that Dyer has taken account of this diversity and by failing to do so undermines the conclusions that he reached.

However I plan to watch the 'Night of the Living Dead' later today (in daylight!) so I may change my views.