“Pathé Baby Films of North Africa”

This essay argues the Pathé Baby home projector and its documentaries of North Africa reveal the apex of the nineteenth-century domestic dream and a twentieth-century nostalgic grasp of crumbling Empires. Moving images that were controlled by the projectionist, and which were flattened on the shell walls, emblematized the racialized time that trapped North Africans in a vague past on the screen. However, if the projection suggests that the colonized farm, weave, dance, within the colonizers’ home, the small but present ways, we find the North Africans rejecting the camera and/or performing exoticism for a financial exchange complicate the previously read passivity in their objectification, and thwart their inclusion in a colonial home collection.