Ashanti adae ceremony and mpadua rafts on Lake Bosumtwi, footage (1921) – R.S. Rattray *
9 mins, b&w, silent.
Source : Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, viewable here
Probably shot in 1921, in Ghana (then the Gold Coast), by R.S. Rattray, a British colonial civil servant who wrote a number of important early ethnographic works on the Ashanti. The first part of this footage shows certain scenes from one or possibly more than one Ashanti adae ceremony, in which the spirits of deceased rulers are propitiated with animal sacrifices and asked for favours. In the latter part of the ceremony, the current ruler parades in public, accompanied by his officials, and protected from the sun by large velvet and silk umbrellas.
The remainder of the footage shows mpadua rafts being used on Lake Bosumtwi. These rafts consist of logs made of a very light wood: these logs cannot be hollowed out, and must be propelled by arms rather than with a paddle, since it is considered that this would be offensive to Twe, the spirit guardian of the lake.
The ceremonial footage is of historical significance because it is relatively early and there are interesting comparisons to be made with similar ceremonies involving traditional local rulers shot a decade later by Melville Herskovits among the Ashanti and by Frédéric Gadmer in Dahomey (now Bénin). But the technical quality of the material is uneven, and the coverage of the ceremony is patchy.
Rattray, Robert Sutherland (1881-1938)*
Robert Sutherland Rattray – more commonly known as ‘R.S. Rattray’ and sometimes simply as ‘Captain Rattray’ – was a British colonial civil servant who wrote a number of important early ethnographic works on the Ashanti, the most illustrious of the traditional states within what was then the British colony of the Gold Coast and is now Ghana.
Rattray also shot some modest black and white footage, probably in 1921, of an adae ceremony, in which the spirits of deceased Ashanti rulers are propitiated and asked for favours. He also shot footage of people on mpadua rafts on the sacred Lake Bosumtwi.
This footage is viewable via the website of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford here. A more detailed description of the footage is given here.
Graham Bower, Ursula (1914-1988)*
Ursula Graham Bower was one of the first women to shoot ethnographic films, though she had little formal training as either film-maker or anthropologist.
She spent the period 1938-1944 living in the Naga Hills of Northeast India, at first carrying out anthropological research with the Zemi and from 1942, co-ordinating local resistance to the threatened Japanese invasion of India . Despite the wartime conditions, she managed to procure some 16mm film-stock, and shot around two hours of material. About half of this is in colour, which represents an early use of colour film by an anthropologist.
Most of this material, along with some ethnographic notes, has been put up on the web by Alan MacFarlane and may be viewed here, where it is also downloadable.
After the war, now married, Ursula moved to Arunachal Pradesh, also in Northeast India, and lived there from 1946 to 1948 with her husband, Tim Betts, who had been appointed Political Officer in the Subansiri district. Here she shot a further 40 minutes of footage on the local Apa Tani and Dafla (now known as Nyishi) groups, some in black and white, some in colour. This can be viewed, along with some further footage on the Naga, via the Pitt Rivers Museum website here.
Graham Bower’s footage is remarkably well-shot and although limited in quantity and somewhat fragmentary, it is of considerable historical and ethnographic interest. The high degree of rapport that she had with her subjects, particularly the Naga, comes through very clearly in her material and was unprecedented among ethnographic film-makers of her period.
Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von (1909-1995)*
An Austrian anthropologist and from 1951 to 1976, Chair of Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf shot some 50-60 hours of silent 16mm footage, mostly in India and Nepal, at various points between 1940 and 1973.
The early footage is in black and white, but already by the 1950s, he was also using colour film. In addition to the films that he made in South Asia, Fürer-Haimendorf also shot footage during visits in the 1960s to the Philippines, New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Egypt and Mexico. He also made many hours of audio recordings to accompany his films.
Between 1959 and 1972, Fürer-Haimendorf collaborated with the BBC producer Brian Branston to make four films for broadcast based primarily on the material that he himself had filmed on various expeditions in India and Nepal, almost invariably accompanied by his wife Betty, who appears in most of these films. He also edited two free-standing films of his own. All these films are listed on the South Asia page here. However, the great majority of his footage was shot for research purposes and/or to support teaching and seminars, and was rarely, if ever, shown to wider audiences. Much of it was edited in no more than a preliminary fashion.
Among leading anthropologists of his generation in the English-speaking world, Fürer-Haimendorf was by far the most prolific maker of ethnographic films, though this is not widely recognised since so little of his work was distributed. This situation has been to some extent remedied by Alan Macfarlane, one of Fürer-Haimendorf’s last doctoral students, who has put up a large selection of his films as a YouTube playlist. This can be accessed via Macfarlane’s ayabaya website here.
A filmic tribute to Christoph and Betty Fürer-Haimendorf by Mark Turin can be seen here
Texts : Turin 1997, Macfarlane 2010
Cuny, Louis (1902-1962)
Oroqen, The (1963) – dir. Yang Guanghai and others
78 mins., b&w, sound – non-diegetic music and voice-over
Production : Chinese Academy of Sciences. This film is one of the most substantial films in the Chinese Historical Ethnographic Film Series.
Others involved in the direction of this film were Zhao Fuxing, Lu Guangtian, Qiu Pu and Karsten Krüger.
Content – This film concerns the Oroqen, a nomadic group of hunters and gatherers in Northeast China, and one the smallest ethnic minorities in the country. It presents scenes of their everyday life, material culture, social organisation and their relationship with Anda traders. There are also sequences about their shamanistic rituals as well as about their marriage and funeral ceremonies.
Torres Strait expedition footage (1898) – Alfred C. Haddon
This material was probably shot on 5 and 6 September 1898 on Murray Island, today known as Mer, one of the most easterly islands in the archipelago lying between Papua New Guinea and the tip of Queensland, Australia.
The filmmaker was Alfred C. Haddon, a zoologist and leader of a multidisciplinary University of Cambridge scientific expedition to the archipelago. He used a hand-cranked 35mm N&G Kinematograph, which, to his great frustration, kept jamming. Even so, he managed to film around four minutes of material.
This appears to represent the first footage ever shot in the course of academic field research with explicit ethnographic objectives. However, as an example of ethnographic film more broadly defined as the filmic representation of customary practises in their original setting, it is preceded in time by the many Lumière films shot both in France and elsewhere from 1895 onwards and also by footage shot in Arizona in August 1898 by Burton Holmes and Oscar Depue of the Hopi Snake Dance as well as of a Navajo “tournament”.
Content
The footage can be subdivided into four different types:
(a) a brief shot of three men engaged in traditional fire making. This is 50 seconds long. Unfortunately the fire did not ignite before the shot ran out.
(b) three consecutive shots of Mer Islanders dancing at a beach-side location. The first shot is 45 seconds long, but the others are much shorter, suggesting the camera jammed for these two shots.
(c) four shots of a group of four Aboriginal men dancing in the same location as the Mer Islanders, accompanied by a fifth man beating out time on a pole. These four shots total some 65 seconds
(d) a single shot of three men wearing masks and skirts, and dancing in a circle before the camera. This dance represents the culminating moment of a male initiation ceremony traditionally dedicated to the Mer Island culture hero Malo-Bomai. This footage is viewable here.
Of all these dances, it is the last that is by far the most interesting. As explained in the text cited below, the dance shown in this sequence had long been abandoned under missionary influence and the masks that the dancers are wearing were made of cardboard since the original masks had been destroyed.
The precise significance of the dance was not determined by Haddon himself, but for reasons expounded in the text below, on the basis of the local legends reproduced in the Expedition reports, there is good reason to believe that the dancers are re-enacting the progress of Malo-Bomai as he proceeded around the islands of the archipelago for the first time.
A particularly interesting further feature, given that this sequence reproduces the dance traditionally performed at the culmination of the male initiation ceremony, is that the dancers appear to be wearing skirts of the kind normally worn only by women. In the text below, it is suggested that this may linked to a theme that recurs frequently in the ethnographic literature on Melanesia, whereby the boundaries between gender identities are considered highly malleable, particularly under the special ritual conditions of an initiation ceremony.
Text : Long and Laughren 1993, Henley 2013b
Ghost Dance (1894) – dir. W.K-L. Dickson and William Heise*
20 seconds, b&w, silent.
Production : Edison Manufacturing Co.
Source : Viewable on the Library of Congress website here
Along with Buffalo Dance, this is one of two films of Sioux dancers that were shot in the Edison ‘Black Maria’ studio in New Jersey on 24 September 1894. These two films are generally regarded as offering the first moving images of the Native peoples of America. The producer-director was W. K-L. Dickson while the cameraman was William Heise.
The Sioux subjects were members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show – a sign to this effect is just visible on the bottom right hand corner of the image. The show was about to depart on a European tour and it has been suggested that these films might therefore have been made for promotional purposes.
The Edison catalogue comments “One of the most peculiar customs of the Sioux Tribe is here shown, the dancers being genuine Sioux Indians, in full war paint and war costumes”.
However, the authenticity of the performance is questionable. It is highly unlikely that it had any meaningful connection to the millenarian Ghost Dance that developed among the Sioux after the killing of Chief Sitting Bull and 200 of his warriors in December 1890.
Text : Jordan 1992, pp. 26-29, 78-79.
Buffalo Dance (1894) – W. K-L. Dickson and William Heise *
14 seconds, b&w, silent.
Production : Edison Manufacturing Co.
Source : Viewable on the Library of Congress website here
Along with Ghost Dance, this is one of two films of Sioux performers that were shot in the Edison ‘Black Maria’ studio in East Orange, New Jersey on 24 September 1894. These two films are generally considered to constitute the very first moving images of North American First Nations people.
The producer-director was W. K-L. Dickson while the cameraman was William Heise. In some sources, this film is erroneously referred to as Indian War Council.
The names of the dancers were Last Horse, Parts-His-Hair and Hair-Coat : the name of the musician accompanying them is unknown. All of them were members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and they seem to be quite accustomed to performing for a public since one of them very pointedly looks at the camera.
The show was about to depart on a European tour, so it has been suggested that these films might therefore have been made for promotional purposes.
Text : Jordan 1992, pp. 25-28, 80-81.
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