Thursday 4 March 2010

Home movies chronicling end of Empire released online

A collection of almost 300 silent films, offering a unique glimpse of life in India and other parts of South Asia during the final days of the British Empire has been released online. The films were shot between 1911 and 1956 on 8 mm and 16 mm reel and cover an astonishing range of subjects of interest to social historians, visual anthropologists and school children. The collection is owned by the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge and may be viewed for free at:
http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/films.html

For a taster of the collection, see the University of Cambridge press release, 4th March 2009, which includes a presentation on YouTube, in which the Centre's Archivist, Dr Kevin Greenbank, and Film Archivist, Dr Annamaria Motrescu, talk about this unique collection.

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