Hans Krieg was a Bavarian zoologist who participated in various German scientific missions to South America. During an expedition to the Paraguayan and Brazilian areas of the Gran Chaco in 1931-32, of which he was the leader, Krieg shot the material for Indian Life in the Gran Chaco, though this was only released in 1950. Krieg was a talented zoological illustrator and he also made a number of films on zoological subjects.
Prior to the Second World War, Krieg was a leading academic proponent of National Socialism, but he survived the war and the institutional purge that followed it, to become the director of the Bavarian Natural Sciences Collection as well as a well-known popular writer on zoological topics. However, he made no further contributions to ethnographic film-making.
Robert Haupt was an American teacher based at the Woodstock School for Missionaries’ Children in Landour, a hill-station close to Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Between 1933 and 1937, he travelled extensively around the India and what would become Pakistan, shooting some sequences of ethnographic interest in the process. Further details here.
Matthew Stirling at the Tombe camp in the West Papua Highlands 1926.
Matthew Stirling studied anthropology under Alfred Kroeber at the University of California, graduating in 1920. He is best known in ethnographic film history for By Aeroplane to Pygmyland, the footage that he shot while leading the Dutch-American expedition to New Guinea in 1926.
However, this corresponded to what was merely an early and transitory phase in a lengthy career that was mostly dedicated to Mesoamerican archaeology, a subject about which he also made a number of films.
Umutina man, upper Paraguay river, Mato Grosso – photographed by José Louro, 1922. [Acervo do Museo do Índio/ FUNAI – Brasil, CRNV294].
José Louro Fernandes, usually referred to simply as José Louro, was a Brazilian photographer and film-maker who worked over a twenty year period, from 1915 to 1935, mostly for government organisations directed by Colonel (later General) Cândido Rondon. In the early years of the 20th century, Rondon was a major figure in Brazilian public life, having played a leading role in the ‘opening up’ of the Amazonian interior of the country, first as head of his own Rondon Commission, and later as the director of the Inspetoria de Fronteiras.
In 1928, Louro made No Río Içana, which primarily concerns the Wanano people of the Uaupés river in the upper Rio Negro region, in the extreme northwest of Brazil, on the border with Colombia. From an ethnographic point of view, with the exception of Luiz Thomaz Reis’s work, Rituais e festas borôro(1917), this is the most interesting film produced in Brazilian Amazonia prior to the Second World War. For this reason, it was chosen as the film that runs permanently on the About page of the Silent Time Machine website. Sadly, it also seems to have been the only film that Louro made.
The biographical documentation for Louro is scant and it has not been possible to discover anything about his personal background, dates of birth or death, nor even identify a photograph of him. What is clear, however, is that unlike many of those who worked on the projects associated with Rondon, Louro was not a member of the Brazilian military, but rather a civilian photographer by profession. His participation in Rondon’s projects also appears to have been intermittent.
When Louro was first recruited to the Rondon Commission, it was to work as a photographer. He showed from the beginning that he was not only both technically and aesthetically highly skilled, but also had the rare ability to establish a close rapport with his indigenous subjects. Of all the many photographers who worked on the projects associated with Rondon, he was surely the most talented.
Takwatib headman Timóteo, Jiparana River, 1915 (Rondon 1946, p.152)Woman of Timóteo’s group, Jiparana River, 1915 (Rondon 1946, p.153).
Louro’s first photographs were taken in the course of expeditions in 1915-1916 and 1919 to the headwaters of the Jamari, Jiparana and Cautario rivers in what is now Rondônia in the extreme west of the country, close to the Bolivian border. In the course of these expeditions, Louro produced some remarkable images of the indigenous groups of these regions, many of which were only then entering into contact with the outside world, and many of which, as result of disease and the depredations of extractive industries, have since become extinct. Among these groups were the Takwatib (Tacuatepe), two of whom are shown in the images above.
Some years later, in 1922, Louro was commissioned to take a series of photographs of the telegraph stations set up by the Rondon Commission throughout Rondônia and adjacent headwater regions in Mato Grosso. In the course of doing so, he also took further striking photographs of the Paresí (Ariti, Haliti), the Nambikwara and the Umutina (see the image at the head of this entry).
Paresí hunter holding a device to which he attached foliage as a hide when approaching animals, Utiariti, 1922 (Rondon 1946, p.99).
Louro was clearly greatly appreciated by the Rondon Commission at this point since in the collection of its photographs that it published in 1922 to celebrate the centenary of Brazilian independence, the number of photographs by Louro is greater than that of any of the other twelve named photographers whose work is included there. However, there then appears to have been an interlude in his participation in Rondon’s projects.
It seems that it was only in 1927, when he was recruited to the Inspetoria de Fronteiras as an assistant to the film-maker Luiz Thomaz Reis, that Louro began making films. In the first year of his appointment, while Reis was engaged in making Viagem ao Roroimã with Rondon on the frontier with Venezuela (see the filmography of Reis here), Louro was sent on a smaller, subsidiary expedition up the nearby Uraricoera River, during the course of which he took some magnificent photographs of Ninam Yanomami (‘Xirianá’) and Ye’kuana (‘Maiongong’). He may also have carried out a limited amount of filming.
The following year, 1928, while Reis went to make another film with Rondon, Parimã, about the frontier regions with the French and Dutch Guianas, Louro was again assigned to a subsidiary expedition, this time led by Major (later Marshall) Boanerges Lopes de Sousa, to the upper Rio Negro. It was during this expedition that Louro shot No Rio Içana. This showed him to be as talented a cinematographer as Reis, if not more so.
Louro also participated in the expeditions led by Rondon in 1929-1930 along the Araguaia River and the frontiers of Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná in the southwest of the country. During these trips, he took photographs of the Kadiweu and Kaiowa as well as of frontier installations and natural phenomena, including some extraordinary wide angle images of Iguazu Falls. He may also have assisted Reis on the two films that he made during the course of those expeditions, Posto Alves de Barros and Matto Grosso e Paraná. What is certain is that, unfortunately, Louro made no films of his own.
Caduveo, Mato Grosso do Sul, 1930 (Rondon 1946, p.320).
In February 1935, Louro was appointed as a cinematographer by the Inspetoria Especial de Fronteiras, the organisation that succeeded the inspectorate led by Rondon which had come to end with his resignation for political reasons in 1930. However, only five months later, in July 1935, Louro was replaced, for unspecified reasons, by Reis’s daughter Argentina, without seemingly having made any films.
It has not been possible to establish any details of José Louro’s life after that point.
Ananda Coomaraswamy in 1916, shortly before he started making his films about Asian dance
Ananda Coomaraswamy’s contribution to the history of ethnographic film consists of a series of films about Asian dance that he shot himself in the 1920s. These films now form part of the Ananda Coomaraswamy Film Collection housed by the NAFC in Washington.
Of mixed Anglo-Tamil descent and brought up in England, Ananda Coomaraswamy trained initially as a geologist at University College, London. But while carrying out doctoral fieldwork in Sri Lanka in 1902-06, he became interested in Sinhalese art and returned to London committed to the idea of educating Western audiences about the art of the Indian sub-continent. This led eventually to his appointment to a curatorial position as Keeper of Indian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA, in 1917. Thereafter he would become an internationally renowned writer, not only on Indian art, but more generally on the philosophy of art, metaphysics and religion.
Stella Bloch in Asian dance costume
Shortly after he arrived in the US, Coomaraswamy came to know Stella Bloch, a dancer of Jewish-Polish ancestry, who was associated with Isadora Duncan’s dance troupe in New York, and who also had a particular interest in Asian dance. They married in 1922.
Even before then, in the autumn of 1920, Coomaraswamy and Bloch travelled extensively through Asia, studying local dance traditions in India, Sri Lanka, Java, Bali, Cambodia, China and Japan. It was probably during this trip that Coomaraswamy began to make his films about Asian dance. They travelled through Asia again in 1924 and it seems that Coomaraswamy shot further films during this second trip.
George Dorsey in naval attaché’s uniform, probably therefore in the period 1919-1921
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.
Brian Branston was a BBC producer who in the early days of anthropology on British television collaborated with anthropologists on a number of occasions in preparing their footage for broadcast.
Similarly, in a programme broadcast in January 1967, as indicated here, Branston acted as the producer of a television version of The Hadza (1966), directed by Sean Hudson and the anthropologist James Woodburn.
Branston also produced his own television programmes combining natural history with scenes of local life in Oceania, Amazonia and among the Inuit of Pelly Bay (Nunavut). He was also a writer of popular books about pagan religious beliefs in Saxon England and among the Vikings.
Beatrice Blackwood working with a still camera, British Columbia, Canada, 1925 [Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford].Beatrice Blackwood was one of the few women to shoot ethnographic film footage prior to the Second World War.
She was an academic member of staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, from 1935 to 1959, and during this time, made a number of expeditions to collect materials for the museum.
It was in 1936-37 that she made her principal contribution to ethnographic film history when she took an amateur 16mm camera with her on an expedition to Morobe Province in Highland New Guinea to make a collection for the museum of the artefacts produced by the Anga people.
The principal motivation for taking the camera was to shoot footage showing how the Anga made and used stone tools, though she also shot a number of sequences on other aspects of their life. Although limited in scope and duration, and not intended to work as a free-standing film, this footage, which can be viewed here, remains of considerable ethnographic and historical interest.
More general details about Beatrice Blackwood’s career are available here
Auguste François was the French consul in southern China, first in Guangxi province, then in Yunnan, from 1896 to 1904. He travelled widely in China, and also Vietnam, and was an accomplished photographer and filmmaker. While he was resident in Kunming, capital of Yunnan, from 1901 to 1904, he shot a series of film sequences in and around the city. These seem to be the very first moving images shot in China.
François was in direct contact with the cinema industry pioneer Léon Gaumont who supplied him with stock for his still cameras, and presumably for his moving image camera as well. This seems likely because a number of his Kunming sequences are preserved – without attribution – in the Gaumont-Pathé Archives. Also, in 1905, Gaumont released a compilation of some this footage under the title, Au pays des mandarins. The quality and variety of the material in this film are remarkable, providing a rich account of everyday urban life in the final years of the Qing dynasty.
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