{"id":140,"date":"2025-11-08T10:21:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T15:21:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/?p=140"},"modified":"2025-11-08T10:21:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T15:21:19","slug":"stark-and-benjamin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/stark-and-benjamin\/","title":{"rendered":"Stark and Benjamin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Freya Stark\u2019s 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\u2019s deep involvement in the production and distribution of propaganda films. In \u201c<\/span>The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility<\/span>,\u201d Benjamin argues that the film medium, though it carries some latent revolutionary\/democratic potential, is especially suited to fascism; it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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: \u201cthese people are powerful, I should ally myself with them.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t as different from the fascistic one as it seems imperialists of Freya\u2019s era would like to think. This hypothetical opinion of Benjamin’s <\/span>reflects how I feel, for the most part, about Stark\u2019s life. She was interesting, but seems to have tried to do the work of interpreting her own life for us already, as Benjamin\u2019s 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\u2019s mission and, while she appreciated the aesthetics of revolution and the East, she never broke from the Empire\u2019s mission.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201creproduced\u201d under Benjamin\u2019s model\u2014brought 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\u2014she was reproducing the model she knew.<\/span><\/p>\n

Example of the type of film she might have carried (produced by the Ministry of Information, which she worked for): <\/span>\u201cWARTIME FACTORY\u201d 1940 WWII BRITISH INDUSTRIAL INCENTIVE PROPAGANDA FILM XD82705<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Freya Stark\u2019s 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\u2019s deep involvement in the production and distribution of propaganda films. In \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,\u201d Benjamin argues … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Stark and Benjamin”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6926,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,13,14,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colonial-fantasies","category-deception","category-empire","category-imperialism","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6926"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":141,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions\/141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}