Contested Territory American Film Spectatorship, Colonial Mimicry, and British Empire By Beth Corzo-Duchardt Author's Accepted Manuscript. Final version published in Screen (2015) 54 (4): 401-414. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjv051 In the 1910s, a white Christian missionary working in Africa bought a film projector and some old films from a traveling American exhibitor. This was his last-ditch effort to get through to the ‘heathens’ he had thus far been unable to impress. The missionary set up a tent on the outskirts of a village and invited all to come and attend the moving picture show. 1 According to the story, relayed by turn-of-the-century educational film advocate Ernest A. Dench, the natives were ‘so astonished at first that they all stood up and then went down on their hands and knees as if to show reverence’. 2 A week later, the missionary encountered ‘a band of natives acting [out] what they had seen with great vigor’. 3 It was a scene from a trick film that, in Dench’s words, ‘depicted a man beating a tattoo with his club on another man's head, only to find his victim suddenly disappear in thin air’. 4 The natives were ‘amazed’ when their ‘victim remained where he was’ rather than disappearing as in the trick film. 5 Nonetheless, they continued until, ‘Just as they were going to deal the victim another vicious blow, the missionary intervened.’ 6 The aim of this story, which was published in Motion Picture Classic, was to point toward the potential positive effect that more suitable films would have. Dench asks his readers to imagine the ‘effect such a classic as From the Manger to the Cross [Sidney Olcott, 1912] would have on heathens out in Africa or the South Seas’. 7 He concludes his essay with a corroborating claim from a French exhibitor in an unnamed South Sea island who reported a decline in ‘law-breaking since the advent of the Motion Picture’. 8