Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

The Pitt Rivers Museum has a small but valuable collection of early ethnographic film material, much of which has been digitised. Most of the collection consists not of fully edited films as such, but rather of assemblies of footage shot by anthropologists, travellers, colonial officers and like, and these are of variable levels of technical quality and competence.

However, the collection includes a number of works of great ethnographic and/or historical interest, such as the footage shot by Auguste François, French Consul in Kunming, 1901-1904, generally regarded as the first moving images shot in China. It also includes the footage of Beatrice Blackwood and Ursula Graham Bower, which although only very brief, represent two of the earliest examples of ethnographic film footage both shot and directed by women.

The current listing of digitised films in the collection is available here.

© 2018 Paul Henley