| Sumario: | This article explores the work of British documentary film-maker and film expert, Alexander Shaw, undertaken in the colonies and dependent territories of empire. It draws on films Shaw made in Malaya, East Africa and India between 1938 and 1942, analysing elements of film technique, narration and production context. It suggests that the official film of empire could vary on the basis of the political context and film industrial setting it encountered. In the Indian case this issue is explored in the different types of films made by a local documentarist, A. Bhaskar Rao, for Shaw and a key Indian film-maker and producer, V. Shantaram. The main concern of the article is to understand how official documentary in the period of empire and decolonisation frames modernising imperatives of social, cultural and technological change in relation to the politics of race and ethnicity.
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