Naming the Native: Typification from Intertitle to Voice-over in A Ramble Through Ceylon (1912) and Charming Ceylon (1931)
Keywords:
travelogue; early nonfiction film; intertitle; voice-over; stereotype; Ceylon; multimodal analysis; social actor representationAbstract
Early travelogues may have functioned not merely as records of colonised places, but as instruments for classifying the people represented. This article compares two travelogues of Ceylon made twenty years apart by commercial producers in two different film industries: A Ramble Through Ceylon (1912), a silent film bearing the trade mark of the French company Eclipse, and Charming Ceylon (1931), a sound short in James A. FitzPatrick’s Traveltalks series. Using shot-by-shot multimodal transcription and van Leeuwen’s categories for the representation of social actors, it traces how each film turns the people it shows into types. In 1912 the instrument of typification is the intertitle, a discontinuous written label that classifies a group before the image appears and then falls silent, so that the image can exceed it, most clearly when the women under the title “CINGHALESE NATIVES” look back at the camera. In 1931 the instrument is a narrator who speaks continuously over the image. Rather than merely replacing the label, the voice adds deixis, evaluation, ranking and statistics, pointing to a waiter’s comb as the mark of his “station in life” while it calls a winnowing scene “primitive”. The article suggests that the coming of sound may have intensified the typifying grammar of the travelogue rather than loosening it, and that this grammar appears to have been a commercial genre convention shared across national industries, not only the product of colonial commission.
References
1. Abdullah, F., & Lulita, L. (2018). Social actors in an intercultural communication classroom: A discursive lens of intercultural education. Indonesian JELT: Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching, 13(1), 31–51. https://doi.org/10.25170/ijelt.v13i1.1449
2. Ait Oukhzame, E. M., & Stasiowski, M. (2021). ‘Globalizing the local, localizing the global’: Writing space in the Arab Gulf region. Architecture_MPS, 19(1).
https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v19i1.005
3. Altman, R. (2004). Silent film sound. Columbia University Press.
4. Altman, R. (2006). From lecturer’s prop to industrial product: The early history of travel films. In J. Ruoff (Ed.), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel (pp. 61–76). Duke University Press.
5. Arnold, J. (2016, October 28). Traveltalks: Grand Canyon, pride of creation. Turner Classic Movies. https://www.tcm.com/articles/1271485/traveltalks-grand-canyon-pride-of-creation
6. Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text (S. Heath, Trans.). Fontana Press.
7. Benelli, D. (2006). Hollywood and the attractions of the travelogue. In J. Ruoff (Ed.), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel (pp. 177–194). Duke University Press.
8. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
9. Bhabha, H. K. (1997). The other question: The stereotype and colonial discourse. In K. M. Newton (Ed.), Twentieth-century literary theory: A reader (pp. 293–301). Macmillan Education UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25934-2_54
10. Boyle, R. (2010, June 1). Preserving the ‘little bastards’. Himal Southasian.
https://www.himalmag.com/preserving-the-little-bastards/
11. Bright, B. J. (1998). Ethnographic film and the popular imagination. American Quarterly, 50(1), 183–191. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.1998.0052
12. Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: Sound on screen (C. Gorbman, Ed. & Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1990)
13. Crafton, D. (1997). The talkies: American cinema’s transition to sound, 1926–1931. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
14. Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. Columbia University Press.
15. FitzPatrick, J. A. (Director). (1931). Charming Ceylon [Film]. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptn8Jt5u4g8
16. Good, J., & Lowe, P. (2020). Understanding photojournalism. Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003104049
17. Grieveson, L., & MacCabe, C. (Eds.). (2011). Empire and film. Palgrave Macmillan; British Film Institute. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-92498-1
18. Griffiths, A. (2002). Wondrous difference: Cinema, anthropology, and turn-of-the-century visual culture. Columbia University Press.
19. Gunning, T. (2006). “The whole world within reach”: Travel images without borders. In J. Ruoff (Ed.), Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel (pp. 25–41). Duke University Press.
20. Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Sage; The Open University.
21. Hauksson-Tresch, N. (2021). Visual rhetoric of the truth in the Dreyfus affair: A semiotic approach. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique, 34(1), 127–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09617-4
22. Horrall, A. (2017). Inventing the cave man: From Darwin to the Flintstones. Manchester University Press.
23. Jaikumar, P. (2006). Cinema at the end of empire: A politics of transition in Britain and India. Duke University Press.
24. Jaikumar, P. (2019). Where histories reside: India as filmed space. Duke University Press.
25. Kaczmar, D. (2021). Disability and race in British literature, 1580–1833 [Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan]. Deep Blue. https://doi.org/10.7302/1540
26. Kornhaber, D. (2020). Silent film: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190852528.001.0001
27. Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2021). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (3rd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003099857
28. Labarthe, G. (2019). De l’autre côté du miroir : L’écriture extime dans les œuvres de fiction de Peter Handke, 2002–2011 [On the other side of the mirror: Extimate writing in the fiction of Peter Handke, 2002–2011] [Doctoral dissertation, Université Toulouse–Jean Jaurès]. theses.fr.
http://www.theses.fr/2019TOU20104/document
29. Liu, W., Du, C., & Liu, F. (2024). Communicating change: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of China’s poverty reduction posters. Frontiers in Communication, 9, Article 1444032.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1444032
30. MacDougall, D. (1998). Transcultural cinema (L. Taylor, Ed.). Princeton University Press.
31. Martens, E. (2024). The runaway production of A Daughter of the Gods. In S. Reijnders, E. Martens, D. Castro, D. Póvoa, A. Nanjangud, & R. Schiavone, Media, place and tourism: Worlds of imagination (pp. 21–41). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003320586-3
32. McKernan, L. (2004). Charles Urban. In S. Herbert & L. McKernan (Eds.), Who’s who of Victorian cinema. https://www.victorian-cinema.net/urban
33. McKernan, L. (2013). Charles Urban: Pioneering the non-fiction film in Britain and America, 1897–1925. University of Exeter Press.
34. Mitchell, T. (1989). The world as exhibition. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31(2), 217–236. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500015802
35. Nichols, B. (1983). The voice of documentary. Film Quarterly, 36(3), 17–30.
36. Nichols, B. (2017). Introduction to documentary (3rd ed.). Indiana University Press.
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2005t6j
37. Opratko, B. (2019). Im Namen der Emanzipation: Antimuslimischer Rassismus in Österreich [In the name of emancipation: Anti-Muslim racism in Austria]. transcript Verlag.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839449820
38. Peterson, J. L. (1998). [Review of the books The third eye: Race, cinema, and ethnographic spectacle, by F. T. Rony, and Parallel tracks: The railroad and silent cinema, by L. Kirby]. Modernism/Modernity, 5(2), 177–181. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.1998.0037
39. Peterson, J. L. (2013). Education in the school of dreams: Travelogues and early nonfiction film. Duke University Press.
40. Pinney, C. (1997). Camera Indica: The social life of Indian photographs. Reaktion Books.
41. Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. Routledge.
42. A ramble through Ceylon [Film]. (1912). Eclipse.
43. Rauhansalo, J. (2025). Decadence in Paris: A British dread. Examining the stereotyping of the French in Marie Corelli’s Wormwood (1890) [Master’s thesis, University of Eastern Finland]. UEF eRepo. http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:uef-20250948
44. Rony, F. T. (1996). The third eye: Race, cinema, and ethnographic spectacle. Duke University Press.
45. Rose, E. (2020). Civic voyeurism: Józef Robakowski’s aerial views of the commons. Carolina Digital Repository, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://doi.org/10.17615/dd0f-at63
46. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology. University of Chicago Press.
47. Scott, J. B. (2019). Translated liberties: Karsandas Mulji’s Travels in England and the anthropology of the Victorian self. Modern Intellectual History, 16(3), 803–833.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000579
48. Shohat, E., & Stam, R. (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media. Routledge.
49. Skopeteas, I. (2020). Documentary genres: Criteria and dominant theories. International Conference on Cultural Informatics, Communication & Media Studies, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.12681/cicms.2763
50. van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195323306.001.0001
51. Wang, Z. (2026). Subordinated privilege: Towards an intra-categorical analytic of ambivalent power. Anthropological Theory, 26(4), 463–493. https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996261458582
52. Wijewardhane, P. D. P. N. (2026). Ethnographic films about Ceylon: An analysis of representation in the late colonial era [Doctoral thesis, University of Colombo].
53. Wijewardhane, P. D. P. N., & Laksiri, W. M. R. (2026). The voices of commerce and the hands of labour: The tea plantation worker from Song of Ceylon (1934) to YouTube [Manuscript submitted for publication].
54. Winston, B. (1995). Claiming the real: The Griersonian documentary and its legitimations. BFI.
55. Wright, B. (Director). (1934). Song of Ceylon [Film]. GPO Film Unit; Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board.
56. Yeh, E. Y. (Ed.). (2018). Early film culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic histories. University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9731616
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles published in the Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Studies (JAMS) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), unless otherwise stated. Authors retain copyright of their work and grant JAMS the right of first publication.
