16 min., b&w, English voice-over
Source: Pennsylvania State University.
Character Formation in Different Cultures series.
Text: Henley 2013a
By Aeroplane to Pygmyland footage (1926-27/1960s) – dir. Matthew Stirling
approx. 250 min., b&w, original silent, English voice-over added later.
Production : Smithsonian Institution.
Source : HSFA, Smithsonian (OC-87.4.1) Approx. 120 mins. available on-line here.
Footage shot by cinematographer Richard Peck and/or anthropologist Matthew Stirling, leader of a large multidisciplinary Dutch and American scientific expedition in 1926-27 to what was then Netherlands New Guinea (and is now Papua or West Papua).
This footage was used to cut a free-standing film with the title By Aeroplane to Pygmyland (or some slight variation, e.g. Airplane, Pigmy Land etc.), which Stirling used to support his lecture tours in the years following the expedition. Unfortunately, this was irreparably damaged in a flood.
A copy of the Dutch version of the film with the title Wonderen Uit Pygmyland( Marvels from Pygmyland) is held by the Netherlands Film Archive in Amsterdam and an interpositive copy of that surviving film has also been deposited in the HSFA. An abridged version, entitled Expeditie door Nieuw-Guinea 1926 (80 mins.) was released by the Netherlands Film Museum in 1995.
Although this footage is readily accessible on-line, with excellent additional material, including a commentary by Stirling himself recorded in the 1960s, the sequences of ethnographic interest are clearly based on no more than superficial acquaintance with the indigenous Papuan subjects, the supposed ‘pygmies’ of the title.
Text: Taylor 2006
Blunden Harbour (1951) – Robert Gardner and William Heick*
22 min. Most of the film was shot in 16mm b&w stock, but the final passage of masked dancing seems to be of superior quality, so may have been shot in 35mm. Most of the soundtrack consists of unsubtitled Native chanting. There is also an occasional voice-over spoken in English.
Source: NAFC, catalogue number NA-93.24.3; distributed by Documentary Educational Resources (DER). It is also available on Vimeo here.
Background: Blunden Harbour is located on the mainland side of Queen Charlotte Strait, which separates the mainland of British Columbia from the northern tip of Vancouver Island. In 1950, it was the site of a village of the Kwakwaka’wakw (historically known as the ‘Kwakiutl’).
Around that time, Robert Gardner (1925-2014), then a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle set up the Orbit Films production company in conjunction with the avant-garde film-maker Sidney Peterson (1905-2000) who had recently moved up from California.
Both having been inspired by reading the works of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, they planned to make a fiction film about a white man who wants to marry a Kwakwaka’wakw princess.
As part of the research for this film, they arranged for the shooting of some 16mm colour footage of winter ceremony (‘potlatch’) dances, performed out of context, at Fort Rupert (Tsaxis) on Vancouver Island. This material would later become the film Fort Rupert.
But when the 35mm black and white footage shot for the fiction film was developed, it proved entirely unusable for technical reasons. The project was therefore abandoned and Gardner produced Blunden Harbour “to retrieve something from the wreckage” of this project.
At this stage of his career, Gardner did not know how to operate a camera, so he sent William Heick (1916-2012), a cinematographer who had been a student of Peterson in California. Heick was assisted by his friend, Pierre Jacquemin, a French exchange student at the University of Seattle.
Gardner was not actually present in Blunden Harbour when Heick did the shooting. Nor was there a sound recordist: instead the chants recorded in Fort Rupert by Morris Dowd for the research film and/or the abandoned fiction film were used, along with a voice-over scripted by Gardner and recorded in a studio by an actor, Richard Selig. Both Gardner and Heick later claimed to have edited the film.
The chief of the community was Willie Seaweed (c.1873-1967), widely regarded as a major Kwakwaka’wakw artist on account of his carving of totem poles, house fronts and ceremonial objects – masks, rattles, screens – despite the ban on ‘potlatch’ ceremonies until 1951. Seaweed is not identified at any point, but he appears in various scenes in the film.
Heick spent about ten days in the village, probably in June 1951, and mostly shot scenes of everyday life on 16mm black and white stock. He also paid for the performance of a series of masked dances.
The dances were mostly shot in black-and-white too, but the quality seems superior, suggesting that it may have been shot on 35mm. A small amount of 16mm colour film was shot also. This colour footage was used to cut a separate film, nine minutes long, entitled Dances of the Kwakiutl.
Although Blunden Harbour continues to fall within a Native reserve, it no longer exists as a village. In 1964, the community was obliged to move to Port Hardy, on Vancouver Island, when the Canadian government proposed to cut off support for housing, education and services. The village itself was burnt to the ground.
Content: The first part of the film records day-to-day life in the village in an observational manner but with a romantic, poetic voice-over performed in an actorly manner.
As the camera approaches the waterside jetty of the village, a legend of how the killer whale became a man and established the village is told in the voice-over.
There are then various scenes of everyday life and subsistence (clam-digging, fishing, woodcarving) which is mostly covered with chanting but occasionally punctuated by poetic comment.
The village is shown to be a world that combines old and new: there is industrial fishing with nets (though apparently not very successful), a family eats a meal in the modern manner, at a table, with canned milk and buttered bread.
A man seen from afar is fishing for crabs in a skiff; this is Willie Seaweed. We also see him decorating a mask in his workshop. There is a brief shot of mortuary boxes placed in trees.
The last quarter of the film consists of a remarkable series of shots of masked dancing, supported by drumming on the sound-track. This was filmed in the Big House and was orchestrated by Willie Seaweed (see image at the top of this entry).
The dancers include a woman wearing a cape decorated with an extraordinary number of ermine skins. Other dancers wear masks depicting an owl, an eagle and a bukwus (wild man of the forest). There are shots of copper prestige objects and drumming, and cutaways to the audience of women and children.
The film ends with a montage recapitulating earlier scenes in the film.
Texts: Loizos 1993: 142-143, Jacknis 2000: 110-113, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 315-318, MacDonald 2015: 52-54.
Bathing Babies in Three Cultures (1954) – dir. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead
12 min., b&w..
Dist: Pennsylvania State University.
Character Formation in Different Cultures series
Balinese Family, A (1951) – dir. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead
20 min., b&w., no synch sound, but with English voice-over commentary by Margaret Mead, and English inter titles.
Source : ?
This is one of seven films that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead shot in Bali and New Guinea during their fieldwork there in the years 1936-39. Together they made up a series entitled Character Formation in Different Cultures, which focused mostly on parent-child relations.
By the time that these films were edited – all but one of them in the early 1950s – Mead and Bateson had gone their separate ways both professionally and personally, and the editing was supervised exclusively by Mead, assisted by the editor Josef Bohmer. However, even though Bateson was not involved in the editing, Mead insisted that his name should appear in the credits, and even be put first in accordance with alphabetical principles.
This film, which was the first in the series, follows parent-child interaction in one particular family, the Karma family, over a three year period.
Text : Henley 2013a
Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) footage (1930-1931) – Franz Boas
Approx. 51 mins, b&w 16mm footage. Silent. Intertitles in English.
Source : In 1973, an edited version of this footage, prepared by the late art historian Bill Holm (1925-2020), of the Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle, was released in the from a 55 min. documentary entitledThe Kwakiutl of British Columbia. This was accompanied by an extensive explanatory text based on notes by the original film-maker, Franz Boas, and interviews with still-surviving participants.
Some of this footage, approx. 15 mins, is held by the NAFC (formerly HSFA) under catalogue entry NA-87.17.4: Northwest Coast Indian Dance.
Since 2018, the Bill Holm Center at the Burke Museum, University of Washington, has been developing a project in collaboration with the Kwakwaka’wakw community to bring all Boas’s films and audio recordings together into a digital book to be published by Washington University Press. This is now nearing completion. For further details see here.
Background: This footage was shot by Franz Boas, a foundational figure in the history of US anthropology who spent many years researching the social and cultural life of the group whom he called the Kwakiutl but who are now more generally referred to as the Kwakwaka’wakw.
It was shot at Fort Rupert (Tsaxis), on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, on Boas’s last field trip to the Kwakwaka’wakw in the winter of 1930-1931. He also made recordings on a wax cylinder phonograph.
Boas’s intention was not to produce a documentary with a narrative, but rather raw documentation footage that would allow him to explore the relationship between ‘motor behaviour’ (i.e. bodily movement) and dancing and singing among the Kwakwaka’wakw, one of his long-standing research interests.
All the material was performed at Boas’s request, out of its normal context, sometimes in the yard of a European-style house, at other times in open countryside with a palisade or iconic totem pole in the background.
Although the subjects often wear traditional dress, other figures in modern Euro-American dress are also sometimes plainly in shot (as in the case of the man beating time in the frame grab at the head of this entry). The phonograph is also visible in some shots, as is Julia Averkieva, Boas’s field assistant, when she moves into one shot to wind it up.
As Boas’s film-making skills were very limited – understandably since he appears to have had no prior training – the technical quality of the material is very poor: there are frequent jump cuts and the exposure level is often incorrect.
Both conceptually and technologically, this use of the moving image camera for ethnographic purposes was very old-fashioned by 1930 and not dissimilar to the “chronophotographic” project of Regnault and Comte when they filmed African locomotion in Paris in 1895.
In the event, Boas never used this footage to write up any conclusions, in part because he believed, erroneously, that it had been stolen. What had been stolen, however, were the wax cylinder sound recordings.
Content: A substantial part of the footage consists of shots of dances – seventeen in total. The Hamatsa Cannibal Dance is demonstrated by men while women demonstrate a number of dances, including the Summer, Salmon, Paddle, Bird, and the Woman’s Cannibal dances.
The Salmon dance is demonstrated by Agnes Hunt, the daughter of Boas’s principal informant, George Hunt, while the Woman’s Cannibal Dance is demonstrated by his daughter Mary and is viewable here (see also the image at the head of this entry).
Also demonstrated were examples of chiefly competitive oratory, a healing ceremony, some craft processes (including wood carving, basket weaving as well as fishing and gathering practices) and children’s games.
Texts: Ruby 1980, Jacknis 1987, Morris 1994: 55-66, Jacknis 2000: 103, Griffiths 2002: 304-309, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 311-315, Henley 2020:66-67.
Hadza, The : the Food Quest of an East African Hunting and Gathering Tribe (1966) – dirs. Sean Hudson and James Woodburn
40 mins, b&w, voice-over narration and intra-diegetic local music.
Production : Hogarth.
Source : distributed by Concord Media. An extract is viewable here.
A television version of this film, under the title Hope for the Hadza?, produced by Brian Branston, was broadcast in July 1967, as indicated in the television schedule of the period here.
Trading Societies of Western Nepal (1976) – dir. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf
55 mins, colour, voice-over in English with some post-synchronised sounds. Production: School of Oriental and African Studies in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Source: viewable on-line in a poor copy here.
The last major film made by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, based on footage that he shot during an expedition made in 1972 to the then-remote Humla District, northwest Nepal. The film, which is structured by a continuous commentary by Haimendorf, proceeds up the valley of the Karmali river connecting this part of Nepal with the Tibetan market town of Taklakot. Traditionally, and still at the time that this film was made, despite the Chinese presence in Tibet, this served as an important local trade route, through which salt produced in Tibet was traded against cereals and rice cultivated lower down in the valley. However, at the end of the film, it is suggested that even then, the viability of this exchange was threatened by the importation of cheap rice from India.
Although trading serves as its general narrative focus, the film is also about a great deal more than this. Through Haimendorf’s commentary, we learn about the history of the region, still present in the form of stone monuments, the significance of which is unknown to the present inhabitants of the Karmali valley, as well as about the relations between the upper caste Hindu communities living in the lower part of the valley, and the Buddhist Bhotiya communities, of Tibetan cultural origin, who live in the upper part.
In passing, there is a great deal of commentary on subsistence practices, crafts, house-building and kinship organisation. A particularly memorable sequence concerns a ceremony in which Untouchables living in the Hindu community become possessed by spirits and while in this condition, diagnose the cause of illnesses. Another striking sequence concerns the ritual restitution of an abandoned Bhuddist temple by a Bhotiya community.
Text: Macfarlane 2010
Hill Tribes of the Deccan (1960) – Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf
29 mins, b&w, voice-over in English, some post-synchronised sounds. Production: BBC Television
Source : this film may be viewed on-line here
This is a television programme based on footage shot by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, “presented” by Brian Branston – that is, organised editorially – and fronted, as well as voiced-over by a youthful David Attenborough. The programme begins with a sequence in which Attenborough interviews Haimendorf and his wife, Betty, in a studio and, in general, this film emphasises the Haimendorfs’ expedition much more than both Land of the Gurkhas (broadcast earlier in 1960), and also the later film Land of Dolpo (broadcast 1965), even though all three films were screened as part of the the same BBC television series, Travellers’ Tales. An archival version of the BBC television schedule for 1960, available here, indicates that Hill Tribes of the Deccan was broadcast in August of that year.
This film chronicles what appears to be a series of very brief visits to the Chenchu, the Reddi and ‘the following year’ to the Koya, the Bondo and Gadaba. Haimendorf carried out extensive fieldwork in the Deccan over the period 1940-48, but it is not made clear exactly when these visits shown in the film took place. Although the voice-over commentary suggests at some points that the visits were recent, at other points, it is said that material being presented was shot ‘twenty years ago’.
There are quite a number of clearly posed shots of both Christoph and Betty conducting the expedition, indicating that at some point, there was certainly a cameraperson with them. This raises the possibility that the film may consist of footage shot in the 1940s by Haimendorf combined with more recent footage shot specifically for the television programme in which old and new material are presented together as if they were recorded around the same time.
The voice-over is very dated, emphasising the primitiveness of the various groups, at one point even comparing the Chenchu to monkeys. But the film also contains some interesting sequences of cultural traditions that are no longer practiced.
Some of the rushes on which this film is based are available in the playlist of Haimendorf’s films on Alan Macfarlane’s ayabaya website accessible here. See particularly nos. 3-5, 15, 22.
Text : Macfarlane 2010.
Dorsey, George Amos (1868-1931)*
In a varied career, George Dorsey was Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum, Chicago, when he made Native India (1916) in the course of an expedition to the subcontinent, possibly in 1914.
Best known in anthropological circles for his earlier work on Native American groups, he later became a US naval attaché in Madrid and then Lisbon as well as an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
He then appears to have attempted to become a freelance creative writer in New York but in 1925, returned to academic life as an anthropology lecturer at the New School of Social Research.
Further details here.
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