Freya Stark’s era of power overlapped with the life and work of Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School writer and thinker. I was especially reminded of Benjamin when I read about Stark’s deep involvement in the production and distribution of propaganda films. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” Benjamin argues that the film medium, though it carries some latent revolutionary/democratic potential, is especially suited to fascism; it’s part of a broader transition in art away from the cult value of a unique item situated in a particular, hallowed viewing space and toward a mechanically-reproduced image, all meaning and authenticity of which is diluted with reproduction. Film is an especially severe example because politics steps up to replace its cult/religious value. It replicates the real world and adheres to genre convention too precisely, such that all the work of interpretation is already done for the viewer. Stark’s propaganda films did the same and took it even further. They explicitly demonstrated the military might of the British Empire, with the express purpose of telling the subject of the film to think, whether they realized it or not: “these people are powerful, I should ally myself with them.” Her films were pure politics, in the sense that they were a honed tool of imperial power, not in the sense that any real dialogue occurred between the film/propagandist and the subject.
Benjamin would have hated her films, even as he fled the Nazi Germany the British were helping to defeat. He would have found them artless and fascistic; the colonial mechanism isn’t as different from the fascistic one as it seems imperialists of Freya’s era would like to think. This hypothetical opinion of Benjamin’s reflects how I feel, for the most part, about Stark’s life. She was interesting, but seems to have tried to do the work of interpreting her own life for us already, as Benjamin’s film does to the audience, with her re-wrought books, letters, and autobiographies; still these texts tell us little about the person Stark actually was, so we must turn to biographers, and even they are overly sympathetic at times. She was uncreative in her life’s mission and, while she appreciated the aesthetics of revolution and the East, she never broke from the Empire’s mission.
She, too, was subject to the controlling influence of the British Empire. Although personal circumstances made her unique, in a core way, she was a person “reproduced” under Benjamin’s model—brought up Britishly, made to memorize poems and love the Empire, repeatedly copied until there could be no original/authentic version of her type, not even Gertrude Bell. All she knew was this method of mechanically reproducing ideology, so it makes perfect sense that she would bring those propaganda films with her to Yemen—she was reproducing the model she knew.
Example of the type of film she might have carried (produced by the Ministry of Information, which she worked for): “WARTIME FACTORY” 1940 WWII BRITISH INDUSTRIAL INCENTIVE PROPAGANDA FILM XD82705
Since you’ve brought up Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” I’m curious as to what you imagine to be the interrelation between aura and the colonial imagination. As the mechanical reproduction enabled by the camera is a different mechanism from the societal reproduction of the imperial mandate, in what ways can we still root both in the modality of colonial thought? Or is that an impossibility?
Claire, I LOVE LOVE LOVED this blogpost. I totally and completely agree with you and you gave me much to think about when ponderin gover the character of Freya Stark… The power/beauty/scary part about art is interpretation, so for some reason, I never considered progaganda as particularly scary because it does the interpreting FOR a viewer. I watched Nouvelle Vague last night (a movie about the French New Wave movement, Godard’s ‘Breathless’) and kept rolling my eyes at the pretentious film solipsisms (I think this was an intentional directorial choice). I kept thinking of the way people are interpreted by artmakers to create a specific message/aesthetic. What is the danger of itnerpreting oneself? In many ways, it screams defense: I MUST control the narrative because I need people to see MY perpective and UNDERSTAND ME! While her writing stood out to me (definitely my favorite of the three so far), she was probably the least interesting personally. While the stories (her step-dad, factory accident, etc.) were interesting, I would argue Eberhardt was much more entertaining and engaging, perhaps exactly because of her mystery, her constant shifting of what it meant to be Miss Eberdhardt. Freya Stark, conversely, feels flat and one-dimensional: an easy actor in the mission of Empire.
As I understand your take, Claire, is that if we interpret Stark through the lens of Benjaminian critique–then we can read her as aura-less, abjected into a state of mechanical reproduction by the ideological workings of Empire; here we might well connect a critique of Empire to that of Capitalism which was Benjamin’s bete noire. The problem–the blindspot of thinkers like Benjamin was that they were Eurocentric and hence had an “anticolonial deficit” and couldnt really connect capitalist ideology to that of colonialism.
Im intrigued by the films she might have carried to show to audiences in Yemen etc during WW2–later in her career when she was working for the British Ministry of Information. I dont know much about these; but I do think the line between fascism and colonialism is a thin one for sure! This is precisely what Aime Cesaire pointed out when he accosted White Europe in his famous Discours Sur Le Colonialisme in 1950.