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.
Background : This is one of the very few major films of ethnographic interest to emerge from the British colonial period in South Asia. It was released in 1934 by the General Post Office film unit, then headed by John Grierson. He was also the producer and on the opening credits, his name comes first and is larger than that of the director, Basil Wright, who at that time was a relative newcomer to film-maker. Originally commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board as a four-part travelogue intended to promote the Ceylon Tea Marketing Board, in the course of post-production, it became instead a poetic meditation on the religious qualities that permeate traditional life on what is now the island of Sri Lanka.
Content: The film is subdivided into four parts, presented as if they were four movements in a symphonic composition: the first part follows Sinhalese pilgrims to the sacred mountain of Sri Pada (known to Europeans as Adam’s Peak), the second presents everyday subsistence activity on the island – fishing, pottery, house-building, rice cultivation – and a children’s dance class, contrasting the calm and measured nature of this traditional mode of life with that of the ‘voices of commerce’, shown in the third part. This consists of scenes of colonial economic activity, including the harvesting of tea, the laborious processing of copra and the dispatch of goods on international freighters, overlain with clipped telephone voices referring to stock prices and logistics. The final part returns to religious themes, juxtaposing some magnificently costumed dancers with images of the giant statues of Buddha carved in granite at Gal Vihara and a peasant farmer leaving an offering of flowers to them.
A peasant farmer approaches the statues of the Buddha at Gal Vihara.
The film was mostly shot by Wright himself and in a manner that he would later explain had been very much influenced by the advice that he received from Robert Flaherty when the latter was briefly attached to the film unit of the Empire Marketing Board for a few months in 1931. However, notwithstanding the excellence of the cinematography and the often-daring visual transitions, arguably the most distinctive and impressive aspect of the film is the highly elaborate soundtrack entirely developed at post-production in London. In developing this soundtrack, Wright benefitted greatly from the influence of Alberto Calvacanti, the Franco-Brazilan film-maker then working with the GPO Unit, and also the avant-garde composer Walter Leigh.
Inspired by the contrapuntal theories of Sergei Eisenstein, this soundtrack combined a broad panoply of sounds, including Sinhalese music performed by musicians brought to London specifically for the purpose, Leigh’s own avant-garde compositions, a range of special effects as well as disembodied voices speaking both English and Sinhalese. In addition, it featured a series of texts offering ethnographic observations about Sinhalese life originally published by the sea captain Robert Knox in 1681 and based on his knowledge of the island having spent twenty-three years in captivity there. This text was read in a most entrancing manner by Lionel Wendt, who was a Burgher, that is, a person of mixed European and Sinhalese descent and by profession a photographer. Wendt had collaborated with Basil Wright and his assistant, John Taylor, throughout their lengthy shoot of several months, advising them on all aspects of traditional Sinhalese life.
Dancers in ‘Apparel of a God’ – the final part of the film.
Although The Song of Ceylon is widely acclaimed as one of the finest works of documentary cinema of the interwar years, the film has also been criticized, among other things, for presenting an idealised Orientalist vision of Sinhalese life in the 1930s (there is very little in the film about urban life) and for glossing over the exploitation of Sinhalese workers on the tea plantations and elsewhere. It has also been questioned on more specifically ethnographic grounds, including for implying that the dancers juxtaposed in the final section with the statue of the Buddha are engaged in a religious performance of some kind when in reality, they are secular performers who hire themselves out to provide entertainment at weddings and similar festivities.
But whatever the validity or otherwise of these criticisms – and there are certainly counterarguments that might be made against them – The Song of Ceylon remains a work of uncontestable ethnographicness in that it was based on extensive prior research and a relatively lengthy shoot, as well as being informed by the insights gleaned from Wendt and Knox. Above all, in this film, the poetic power of cinema is used in a virtuoso manner to communicate the experience of everyday customary Sinhalese life in a direct manner. It was surely for this reason that it would later be a source of inspiration to two of the leading ethnographic film-makers of the second half of the twentieth century, Robert Gardner and David MacDougall.
A longer version entitled With the Headhunters in Papua was released in 1923. National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra. Clips from the original 1921 version reconstructed in 1979 are available at http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/pearls-and-savages/
10 min., b&w, no synch sound, but voice-over commentary in English by Margaret Mead
Source: ?
This is the only one of the seven films that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead made in Bali and New Guinea in 1936-39 that does not form part of the Character Formation in Different Cultures series. Though shot at the same time, it was released some 25 years later, and had a different editor. Whereas the other films were intensively focused on parent-child relationships, this film is mostly concerned with instruction given by professional dancers, notably by the then-celebrated dancer, Mario.
Opening sequence of ‘Dances of the Kwakiutl’ (Framegrab from black and white print).
9 min., shot in 16mm colour stock. Extra-diegetic sound of Native chanting and a brief passage of voice-over commentary in English.
Production: Produced by Orbit Films, Seattle, for distribution through Dimensions Inc.
Source : Now distributed through Documentary Educational Resources (DER), details here. A black-and-white print is viewable on YouTube here.
Background: For general background to the making of a series of films about the Kwakwaka’wakw by Orbit films and the involvement of Robert Gardner, see the entry for Blunden Harbour.
This film was also shot in Blunden Harbour, a small village on the coast of the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. Although Gardner was the producer and also performed the voice-over, he did not know how to operate a moving image camera at this stage of his career and was not present during the shooting.
As with Blunden Harbour, the cinematography is credited to William Heick. The sound-recording is credited to Morris Dowd but he was not present for the shoot either. The Native chanting on the soundtrack appears to have been recorded for Fort Rupert, an earlier film produced by Orbit Films at the eponymous village on Vancouver Island, on the other side of Queen Charlotte Strait from Blunden Harbour.
It is not credited, but there is also a brief passage of voice-over performed by Gardner.
This film was shot on the same occasion as the closing sequence of Blunden Harbour. This shows a number of winter ceremony (‘potlatch’) dances performed in the village’s Big House at the filmmakers’ request and paid for by them. In Dances of the Kwakiutl, both the performers and the dances are mostly the same, though they are presented in a different order and at different lengths. The singers and even certain audience members are common to both.
The quality of the image is very different in the two films: the Blunden Harbour sequence was shot in black-and-white, probably 35mm, and the quality is superb while this film was shot on 16mm colour stock and the quality is less than perfect, probably on account of the lack of illumination.
Although shots of some dancers are unique to Dances of the Kwakiutl, most shots in the film seem to have been taken simultaneously with shots of the same dancers in the Blunden Harbour sequence, albeit from a different angle. But the cinematographic style of these duplicate shots is very different: it is more remote and much less confident.
This suggests that much of Dances of the Kwakiutl was shot by a second cameraman. If so, this would probably have been Heick’s assistant, Pierre Jacquemin. Though he is not named in this film’s credits, Jacquemin is named in the credits of Blunden Harbour, so he clearly knew how to shoot.
Content: The film opens with a sequence showing a woman dancer wearing a hamatsa or “cannibal bird” mask. The voice-over explains that these are winter ceremony dances, but they are now performed for personal rather than ceremonial reasons.
The shooting is intimate and confident. Significantly, this mask does not appear in Blunden Harbour, suggesting that this part of the performance was shot by Heick before handing the 16mm colour camera over to the less experienced Jacquemin, thereby leaving himself free to shoot other aspects of the performance on 35mm black and white stock.
After a lengthy sequence of a dancer masked as bukwus, the wild man of the forest, which is shot from afar, there is a return to a more intimate style, first to show chief Willie Seaweed, making a short declaration, then to another hamatsa dance, featuring a larger and more elaborate mask, the “double cannibal bird” that faces both forwards and backwards and has a moveable lower beak.
Again, this mask is absent from Blunden Harbour suggesting that this sequence would have been shot by Heick.This mask hides the dancer’s face, but from his naked legs and energetic movement, it is clear that the dancer is male. In fact, he is Joe Seaward, son of Willie Seaward, who had carved the masked around 1915.
There is then a return to the more distant style for the dances featuring Owl and Hawk masks, both worn by Joe Seaward, who reveals himself and dances without a mask for a spell. The transitions from one dance to another are covered by cutaways to the audience, but again these are much more distant than in the equivalent cutaways in Blunden Harbour.
Finally, there is a sequence featuring dancers wearing a mask on their heads depicting the sun with a bird-like face and a cape covered in ermine skins: the first is again Joe Seaward but then, following a cutaway to the drums being struck, we see an older woman dancing in the same costume, but in a more sedate manner.
Following a close-up of her face, she leaves shot and the end title comes up.
10 min., b&w, no synch sound, but voice-over commentary in English by Margaret Mead
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