Calm and Conceited - The White Male Traveler in Film, from Classic to Propaganda Michaela Protenic College

The portrayal of the white male traveler in classic film is best described as serenely calm, yet also seemingly superior to any person of another gender, class, and or ethnicity. Through the classic Hollywood film Black Narcissus (1947), the infamous Nazi-Germany propaganda film The Eternal Jew (1940), and the white male traveler is created into an amicable, ignorant being with an extreme superiority complex issue. These traits of the white male traveler suggest similarities of European colonial expansion and the racial conquest both outside and within Europe. He, the white male traveler, mimics these same behaviors which author Ann Kaplan juxtaposes through the combination of male and imperial gaze in her analytical piece “Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze”.

In Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), there is only one character that fits the description of the white male traveler; Mr. Dean (David Farrar), who accurately portrays the stereotype of a confident, cool-minded figure who also shows his superiority through the Hollywood filmmakers’ cinematic use of the male gaze. Accompanying the Anglican nuns, who are establishing the school and hospital in the middle of a village in the...