With the Royal Air Force in India sits halfway between a home movie and a professional film. It employs devices familiar from the cinema such as intertitles, dissolves, and irises. There is effective use of the intertitles (different borders are used to indicate distinct types of scene), but the framing devices do not accord with their conventional application in professional film. For example, without any explanation, a scene on a boating lake is shot entirely through an iris.

There is an attempt to construct a narrative within the film. The action commences with a troopship arriving and the film then shows the squadron’s first experiences of India. Scenes of repairs taking place in the airbase’s workshop prefigure the later mending of a damaged plane. Elsewhere, however, scenes are randomly assembled. This is most apparent in relation to the sporting activities of the RAF, which return to the screen when least expected.

The cameraman is limited in the subject matter to which he has access. The main action takes place in and around the compound, and the filmmakers appear a little weary of this fact. After the scenes in the workshop a title card announces ‘Life is not always dull’, adding that ‘A message may arrive asking for a turbulent tribal village to be bombed’. In this sequence we do not see any of the tribesmen or any of the bombing; instead the film laboriously details the departure and return of the planes. Drama is instead provided by the fact that one of the planes ‘malfunctions’, and we then witness staged sequences of its call for help and of its repair.

The film provides no background information regarding the tribal campaign and says nothing of the political changes taking place in India. What it does disclose is some of the colonial attitudes of the British. These are in evidence in filmmakers’ priorities and biases. They depict the methods and machinery of the RAF as up to date, and in contrast portray India as an antiquated society. The film’s ‘Indian Scenes’ are solely focused on traditional life, capturing hookah smoking, haggling, folk music and dance. The filmmakers are also generally more interested in Indian buildings than they are in the people of the sub-continent. There is only one scene in which the cameraman deliberately focuses on a group of locals. At an RAF football match Indian men among the crowd are filmed in medium close-up; it comes as a surprise when a panned movement of the camera reveals a smartly dressed British woman in their midst.

Colonial attitudes are also evidenced by the action that takes place within the film. Indians are regularly depicted performing subservient duties for RAF personnel. An extended example is provided in the scenes of a buck hunting expedition. As they head out on the hunt RAF officers get to occupy a horse and cart while their Indian servants have to walk behind. During the hunt one of the servants guides the officers towards the prey and carries their picnic. He is not allowed to share it with them, however. While the officers have their food and drink he has to sit apart.

In this film the hunts for tribesmen and for animals are portrayed in a similar manner; both come across as being good sport for the RAF. These events appear to be as much about the excursion as they are about the kill, not least because neither the tribesmen nor game can be witnessed. The hunts in fact appear to be more relaxing than the RAF’s sporting activities. It is only in the boxing and football matches that sinews are strained and conflict is apparent.

Richard Osborne (September 2009)