Author: Paul Henley

10 mins. , b&w,  silent, German titles and intertitles.

Production: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film

Source : IWF/TIB collection, viewable here

Background:

This film is of particular historical interest since it is based on what is probably the first footage ever shot in an indigenous Amazonian community.

It consists of a  compilation of short sequences shot in September 1911 in the indigenous village of Koimélemon, located in the Surumu river valley in the state of Roraima, in the north of Brazil, very close to the Venezuelan border. The first half of the film mostly shows young women engaged in various domestic subsistence tasks. These are then followed by two sequences about boys’ games and a concluding sequence showing the parishara, a collective dance.

The original material was shot by the pioneer Amazonist anthropologist, Theodor Koch-Grünberg and his field assistant, Hermann Schmidt, towards the end of a six-week stay in Koimélemon. This visit is described at some length in the first volume of Koch-Grünberg’s classic work, Vom Roraima zum Orinoco, first published in German in 1917, and republished in Spanish in 1979 (see ‘Texts’ below).

Koch-Grünberg relates that at the time of his visit, Koimélemon  (meaning literally, ‘village of honey’) had only recently been established and that it was unusually large for indigenous villages of the region, numbering around 400 people when all the houses were occupied. (Most indigenous villages of this region would probably have numbered 50 people or less).

Koch-Grünberg attributes this large population in part to the presence of a nearby Catholic mission and in part to the prestige of its headman, both of which had attracted people from villages further afield. However,  the natural resources in the vicinity of Koimélemon were not sufficient to sustain such a large population all year round, and many families would return to their own villages for part of the year.

The title of the film refers only to the Taulipang, who are a subgroup of the Pemon,  a Carib-speaking people distributed widely throughout the region. But many of the inhabitants of the village, including the headman, were Makushi, another Pemon subgroup, whose dialect and culture are very similar to those of the Taulipang. There were also a number of Wapishana, members of an Arawak-speaking group who had moved south from what was then British Guiana. Many of them were women married to Taulipang or Makushi men.

Although the original material was shot in 1911, it was not until 1962 that it was organised into this compilation by Werner Rutz, then a young producer working with the IWF in Göttingen (and later a distinguished professor of geography at the University of Bochum).

Rutz was advised by Otto Zerries (1914-1999), a leading German Amazonist of the period, though one whose principal research concerned the Yanomamï, a group whose territory lies some distance to the west of the region where Koch-Grünberg was working, and who, culturally-speaking, are very different to the Taulipang. In 1964, Zerries published a study guide to accompany the compilation (see ‘Texts’ below).

Rutz made the compilation on the basis of footage that the Swiss anthropologist and photographer, René Fürst, had come across in the Museum für Völkerkunde (now the Five Continents Museum) in Munich. This material was contained in a number of dusty old film cans bearing Koch-Grünberg’s name, which had probably been deposited with the museum by his widow Else, at some point after his premature death in 1924.

Being an Amazonia specialist, Fürst recognised the potential value of the material and made the necessary contacts for it to be sent to Göttingen, where due to the fire-risk associated with the original nitrate film-stock, it was transferred to safety film.

In Vom Roraima, Koch-Grünberg reports that he also made some phonograph sound recordings whilst he was in Koimélemon, though what happened to these is not clear.

The material sent to Göttingen consisted of some 500m of 35mm film, which at 16 fps, would have had a total running time of around 25 minutes. But due to the general deterioration the material, only ten minutes were in a sufficiently sound state to be included in the compilation.

Interestingly, it was not raw footage:  it had clearly been edited and included both titles and intertitles. This suggests that it had originally formed part of the footage that Koch-Grünberg shot for Express-Film, a Freiburg-based production company that  had provided him with a camera and 3000m of film-stock, sufficient to shoot almost three hours of material.

The material on the Taulipang was originally supposed to have formed part of a series of travelogues shot by the professional cameraman and also founder of Express-Film, Bernhard Gotthart (1871-1950). These covered such topics as local fauna, life along the Amazon river, the hustle and bustle of Manaus, even the Brazilian military. But having shot the material for these films, Gotthart was suddenly obliged to return to Germany, leaving Koch-Grünberg, with Schmidt’s assistance, to shoot the material on the Taulipang himself.

Express-Film later released three films based on Koch-Grünberg’s footage: two short films, Leben in einem Indianerdorf (Life in an Indian Village) and Der Parischerátanz der Taulipang (The Parishara Dance of the Taulipang), and a longer film to accompany Koch-Grünberg’s lectures, Sitten und Gebräuche der Taulipang (Habits and Customs of the Taulipang).

All these films appear in an international catalogue of films for sale published in 1913, the same year as Koch-Grünberg returned to Germany. It seems very probable that the material discovered in Munich and used to cut this compilation film consisted of fragments of one or more of these earlier films.

Koch-Grünberg had received some introductory training in practical film-making from Express-Film prior to his departure for Brazil. He was, moreover, an experienced and highly accomplished still photographer. Even so, he found the experience of using a moving image camera highly exasperating.

As he describes in Vom Roraima, even though he followed the instructions to the letter, the film kept jamming and in order to unload and then reload the camera, he had to huddle inside a tent that served as his darkroom in temperatures of up to 35°C.  It was hard, all-consuming work – he even found himself dreaming about cranking the handle of the camera in the middle of the night.

Although the final results were reasonably good in a straightforwardly technical sense, they are distinctly limited in a more cinematographic sense. Much of the material is shot at a considerable distance from the subjects and all from a single position. The framing is often poor, with the action so far over to one side that it almost disappears, as in the shot above.

The modest quality of the cinematography would no doubt have contributed to the lack of commercial success of the films produced by Express-Film. Although in Vom Roraima Koch-Grünberg expresses some satisfaction with the quality of his work, more generally he was not convinced of the value of film as medium for ethnographic research. In later correspondence with a colleague, he would describe his films as a mere “embellishment” for his lectures.

Nevertheless, as Zerries observes in the study guide, although Koch-Grünberg’s material may suffer from  various  technical deficiencies, it remains important from an historical point of view.

Film Content

The film begins with at a shot of Koch-Grünberg himself surrounded by his indigenous hosts as he waits to be served with some food by a young woman. At one point, he signals to the camera with a beckoning gesture, presumably intending to indicate to Schmidt that he should begin shooting.

There is then a series of sequences showing young women engaged in domestic subsistence activities: grinding maize in a hole in the ground with a long pole, grating manioc roots (see image above) and extracting the juice of the resulting manioc mash by means of the long cylindrical basket known as a tipití. A woman is then shown setting up a loom to weave a hammock. In a photograph that appears in Vom Roraima, obviously taken at the same time, she is identified as Wapishana.

With the possible exception of this last sequence, all these sequences were clearly performed for the camera and they are generally very wooden. The subjects keep looking up at the camera to make sure that they are doing what is required. At one point in the first sequence, a clothed arm momentarily appears from the left, pointing. Presumably this was either Koch-Grünberg or Schmidt telling the subjects what to do.

The absence of any sequences of men’s subsistence tasks or crafts in the compilation is striking and highly unusual for films of this period.  Basket-weaving, the making of bows and arrows, house-building etc., all primarily male tasks, predominate in most early ethnographic films about the region.  It seems entirely probable that sequences dealing with these topics would have been among the material that has been lost or was too deteriorated to use.

The women’s subsistence sequences are followed by two sequences showing boys’ games. The first of these (see the image at the head of this entry) shows two boys making string figures, a topic of inexplicably great interest to many early ethnographers. This sequence is closer and more intimate, and generally more lively, than any of the other sequences in the film. The boys are clearly enjoying showing off their skills.

The other sequence is of a game involving maize shuttlecocks, but this is very brief and shot from very far away. Since the shuttlecocks themselves are barely visible, Zerries helpfully provides a drawing of them in the study guide.

The final sequence concerns a large collective performance of the parishara dance in the centre of the village. This was arranged at Koch-Grünberg’s request specifically for the purpose of filming and visitors came from far and wide to take part, swelling village numbers to over 500. Some 200 people actually joined in the dancing , a much greater number than would normally participate in a dance, and many had taken great trouble to dress up in their finest feather crowns and ceremonial palm-leaf skirts.

Köch-Grünberg found this sequence particularly frustrating to shoot as the film-stock kept jamming and he was constantly having to reload and ask the dancers to start again, which completely undermined their spontaneity. As a result, rather than dancing in a lively manner, as is usually the case with the parishara, the dancers appear to be simply walking round and round in some sort of leaden-footed carnival pageant.

Texts : Rutz 1963, Zerries 1964, Koch-Grünberg 1979, pp.47-78, 90, 93;  Hempel 2009, p.205n18; Fuhrmann 2013, pp. 45-50.