Category: Film-makers

Posted on

De Wavrin, Marquis Robert (1888-1971)*

The Marquis de Wavrin as he appears in the title sequence of Au Pays du Scalp (1931),  preparing to load his 35mm Debrie Parvo camera.

Robert de Wavrin de Villers au Tertre, more commonly referred to simply as the Marquis de Wavrin, was  a Belgian aristocrat from Flanders who due to a family fortune derived from the ownership of coal-mines was able to dedicate his early adult life almost entirely to exploration and film-making in Latin America.

Although he had no formal training as an ethnologist, and thought of himself primarily as an adventurer and explorer, he became particularly interested in the indigenous peoples of South America and first took a Gaumont camera on his expeditions in order to document their way of life. Between 1924 and 1937, he released four major expedition films, all of which include passages of ethnographic interest: Au Centre de l’Amérique du Sud inconnue (1924), Au Pays du Scalp (1931), Chez les Indiens Sorciers (1934) and Vénézuéla, petite Venise (1937).

In addition, he produced a number of shorter, single subject films, but most of these are lost. One exception is a short film about a secondary burial ceremony as practised by the Yuko of the Sierra de Perijá on the Colombia-Venezuela border. As well as these films, de Wavrin also produced several books about his travels and took a large number of photographs.

The Second World War effectively brought de Wavrin’s travels in South America to an end. After the war, his participation in the world of South American ethnology and film-making became increasingly sporadic, and by the time that he died in 1971, both his writings and his films had fallen into obscurity.

It is only very recently that de Wavrin’s films have been recovered from this neglect, largely due to the remarkable work of Grace Winter, an archivist at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. All of his films required a great deal of restoration, particularly the first, Au Centre de l’Amérique du Sud inconnue which had to be almost entirely reconstructed from dispersed fragments, some of them located in Paris.

This excellent work of restoration has been presented in a DVD collection released in 2017 by CINEMATEK, the publishing arm of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. This contains all four major films, plus the Yuko ceremony film, as well as a number of other extras, including Marquis de Wavrin, Du manoir à la jungle, a biographical film about de Wavrin by Winter herself, produced in collaboration with the editor, Luc Plantier.

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

Posted on

Nemeth, Ted (1911-1986)*

Ted Nemeth in the studio, c.1936

Ted Nemeth became well-known in the 1950s and 1960s as an avant-garde experimental film-maker, but he  combined this with working for television on entirely conventional entertainment shows and animation projects, such asThe Muppets.

Earlier in his career, he also made commercials and documentaries and it was during this phase that in 1941, he worked with Penn Museum, editing two films from the footage brought back by the 1931 expedition to the Mato Grosso in Brazil which produced the travelogue feature film, Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness.

One of these two films concerned the indigenous peoples of the upper Xingu, while the other concerned the Bororo.

SaveSave

Posted on

Petrullo, Vincenzo (1906-1991)*

Vincenzo Petrullo in 1931, left,  discussing his archaeological discoveries with E.R. Fenimore Johnson, principal sponsor of  the Pennsylvania Museum expedition to Mato Grosso. (Frame grab from the expedition film footage).

The principal contribution of Vincenzo Petrullo to ethnographic film history relates to his participation in the Matto Grosso Expedition of 1930-1931. It was during this expedition that Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness (1932) was shot, though Petrullo himself made a more significant contribution to two shorter, more ethnologically oriented films that also arose from this expedition but which were released only in 1941. One of these concerned the Bororo, the other the indigenous groups of the Xingu headwaters.

Later in his career, Petrullo shot a limited quantity of footage while he was carrying out fieldwork among the Pumé (Yaruro), an indigenous group living in the llanos of southwestern Venezuela

Biographical detail

Vincenzo Petrullo was born in Italy in 1906 but entered the US in 1913. He became a US citizen in 1930. At the time that he joined the Matto Grosso Expedition, he was a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of staff at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum)

During the course of the expedition, Petrullo and the assistant cameraman, Arthur P. Rossi, spent three weeks shooting footage in the upper Xingu river region, primarily in the villages of the Yawalapiti and the (now-extinct) Naravute. This footage was initially incorporated into Matto Grosso, but in a misleading manner, as if it had been shot in a Bororo village.

Ten years later, the Xinguano footage was re-edited and released in a new film by Penn Museum, with a new voice-over that had been largely scripted by Petrullo before he left the museum in 1935. However, the circumstances of his departure had been acrimonious and probably for this reason, his name does not appear in the film credits, nor is he named when he appears on screen.

Although he had not been involved in shooting the main Bororo sequences that had appeared in Matto Grosso, Petrullo also wrote the voice-over script for the reversion of the Bororo footage that Penn Museum released at the same time, but again his name does not appear in the credits.

In 1933 and 1935, Petrullo made two further ethnographic research trips to South America on behalf of Penn Museum, on both occasions to Venezuela. In the first of these, he carried out fieldwork among the Pumé (Yaruro) of the Venezuelan llanos, during which he and/or an associate shot some technically poor footage of the Pumé subjects dressed in traditional loincloths (which they no longer wore) and engaged in traditional crafts and fishing activities.

On his second visit to Venezuela, Petrullo led a joint Columbia-Pennsylvania universities expedition to the Guajira peninsula in the extreme northwest of the country. The original plan was for this expedition also to do some ethnographic film-making, but this never happened because the expedition ended prematurely due to interpersonal conflicts within the team, particularly between Petrullo and the Columbia University representative, Paul Kirchoff. When Petrullo returned to Philadelphia, he discovered that he had been summarily dismissed by Penn Museum

Thereafter Petrullo developed his career as an anthropologist in various directions but he had no further involvement with ethnographic film-making. In 1990, he was finally reconciled with Penn Museum and when he died the following year, many of his papers were deposited with the museum.

Texts: Petrullo 1932, King 1993, Petrullo 1993, Pourshariati 2013, Pezzati 2017, Pezzati 2018,  Further biographical detail about Vincenzo Petrullo is available here

Posted on

Kahn, Morton C. (1896-1959)*

Morton C. Kahn explains the significance of Maroon carvings to Myrna Loy, star of ‘Too Hot to Handle’, partly set in a South American rainforest. MGM studios, July 1938.

Morton Charles Kahn was a medical doctor attached to the University of Cornell Medical Center and the American Museum of Natural History who made several research trips to Surinam to study the Maroon population, particularly the Saramaka and the Ndjuka.

He published a number of respected ethnographic accounts and shot footage of ethnographic interest on at least two expeditions, in 1927 or 1928, one which he made jointly with Melville J. Herskovits travelling up the Saramaka River, the other, which he apparently made alone, travelling up the Tapanahoni river and visiting both Amerindian and Ndjuka communities on the way.

SaveSave

SaveSave

Posted on

Lamster, Johann Christian (1872-1954)*

J.C. Lamster in a photograph taken at some point between 1895 and 1910, shortly before he began making films.

J. C. Lamster was a soldier in the Dutch colonial army in the East Indies when, on the recommendation of a senior officer who had noted his interest in local life, he was commissioned by the Koloniaal Institut in Amsterdam to make a series of films in the Dutch East Indies.

After training for a brief period with Pathé Frères in Paris, he returned to the Dutch East Indies and between March 1912 and May 1913, he shot footage primarily of European life and colonial activities (vaccination programmes, missions, prisons, docks, street scenes, the colonial army) but also to a limited extent of local life in Java.  This footage constitutes, in effect, the first films of ethnographic interest shot in what would later become Indonesia.

Initially, Lamster was assisted by a Pathé cameraman, Octave Collet, but from August 1912, he was obliged to shoot his own material. For the period, the images in his films are generally well composed and the few camera movements are assured, though as was normal for the period, close ups are rare – the majority of shots are wide angle shots at a certain distance from the subjects. The films are structured around a series of intertitles.

Lamster was instructed by the Koloniaal Institut not to stage performances since it was anxious that his work should not be seen as a form of entertainment. However, the limitations of the early camera with which he was working, thought to have been a Pathé Professionel, would have obliged him to intervene in the action simply in order to be able to film it within the camera’s field of vision. On occasion, he would even engage in full-scale reconstruction of past events – as in his staging of a mock battle in his film about the colonial army.

Lamster returned to the Netherlands in 1924 and in later life, became a senior figure in the Department of Ethnology of the Koloniaal Institut.

For details about Lamster and his work see the EYE Film Archive website here.  EYE’s holdings of Lamster’s films can be accessed here.

Text : de Klerk 2013

Posted on

Dumas, Roger (1891-1972)

Roger Dumas was one of the principal cameramen who worked on the Archives de la Planète project. He joined the project in June 1920 and was initially based at Kahn’s house, at Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris. Here, he was the person primarily responsible for the autochrome photographic portraits of Kahn’s distinguished guests and those who had been awarded the Société Autour du Monde travel bursaries.

In spring 1926, he went on his first major mission abroad. This was  to Japan, a country to which he became particularly attached, even learning the language.

En 1927, he was sent by Kahn to cover the Golden Jubilee celebrations of Kahn’s friend the Maharajah of Karthupala. He remained for several months travelling around India, mainly as a guest of other Maharajahs and Nawabs, but also visiting certain sites of great religious significance such as Varanasi and the Golden Temple at Amritsar.  In 1985, the footage that he shot in India was edited and released by the Musée Albert-Kahn in the form of two films, Le Jubilé du Maharajah de Karputhala, and Bénarès, Indes.

In 1929, he went on a joint mission with Camille Sauvageot to Brittany where he both took photographs and shot film for the Archives.

Dumas was particularly interested in developing a colour film process and conducting various experiments on behalf of the Archives de la Planète based on the Keller-Dorian process, continuing with these after he left the service of the Archives in October 1931.

Dumas one of the few people present at the funeral of Albert Kahn in 1940.

Posted on

De la Falaise, Henry (1898-1972)*

Henry de la Falaise plays himself in ‘Kliou the KIller’

Henry de la Falaise was a feature film director of French aristocratic origins. Although he had shown an interest in film-making even as a boy, his introduction to the world of cinema appears to have been when he married the American film star, Gloria Swanson in 1925, after they met in Paris where she was making a film and he was acting as her interpreter.

They divorced in 1931 and De la Falaise got married again almost immediately to another American star, Constance Bennett. It was she who bankrolled Legong – Dance of the Virgins, shot in Bali in 1933 and released in 1935.

This was the only film of any ethnographic interest that De la Falaise directed. Two years later,  he went on to the French colony of Annam, in Indochina, where he made his last film, Kliou the Killer. This had an absurd plot about a tiger that terrorises local villagers who have no religion other than the fear of the tiger, whom they call Kliou. This is said to be the first feature film to have been made in the country that would later become Vietnam.

Posted on

Weule, Karl (1864-1926)*

Karl Weule in Tanganyika, German East Africa (Tanzania) in 1906.

Karl Weule was a German geographer and ethnologist. Having studied at Leipzig and Göttingen Universities, he became an assistant to Adolf Bastian at the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin. In 1899, he was appointed the assistant director of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig (today part of the Grassi Museum complex), and in 1907, he became its director.

The year before, in 1906, Weule went on a research expedition to Lindi in what is today southern Tanzania, during which he shot 38 short films and made phonograph sound recordings. In making these films, he concentrated particularly on dances, performed for the camera at his request.

However, Weule had had no prior training, nor any previous experience, and from the description of his film work provided by Wolfgang Luhrmann, it is clear that the technical quality of his film-making was very limited.

Text : Fuhrmann 2015, pp. 133-148.

Posted on

Speiser, Felix (1880-1949)*

Felix Speiser on Ambrym island, Vanuatu, New Hebrides, 1911.

Felix Speiser is a foundational figure in the history of Swiss ethnology. Having studied under Felix von Luschan in Berlin in 1907-08, he was appointed Professor of Ethnology at the University of Basle in 1917, the first such post in the country.

Although he is probably best known for his work in the New Hebrides (1910-12) and, later, in Melanesia (1929-31), he also carried out a brief period of fieldwork in 1924 among the Aparaï of the Paru river, in northern Brazil, close to the border with French Guiana (now Guyane).

During his Brazilian expedition, Speiser made a film, though this was not edited and released until 1945. A further restoration took place long after his death, in 1994. The title of this film is Yopi: Chez les Indiens du Brésil. Even today, it remains very difficult to see.

Speiser is reported to have made a second film, Mystères du Pacifique, dated to 1930. However, this does not feature in the UNESCO catalogue of ethnographic film in the Pacific region (Rouch and Salzman 1970) and whether it has survived is not clear.

Text : Cosandey 2002-03

© 2018 Paul Henley