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.
Ursula Graham Bower in Arunachal Pradesh, 1946-47 [Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford].
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.
Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf introduces ‘Trading Societies of Western Nepal’ (1976)
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
Spindler, in his 1958 film, operating the Bioscope camera used by Rudolf Pöch between 1905 and 1915.
Paul Spindler was a curator at the Natural History Museum who, in the 1950s, was primarily responsible for rescuing from oblivion the footage shot by Rudolf Pöch in New Guinea and southern Africa in 1905-06 and 1908 respectively.
Spindler himself made a short 16mm film about Pöch’s expedition to New Guinea, incorporating some of Pöch’s original 35mm footage. Although it is clear from Pöch’s own account of this expedition that he shot further footage in New Guinea, the sequences copied into Spindler’s film appear to be the only ones to have survived.
Haut Amazone (1939) – Fred Matter-Steveniers introduces an Aénts Chicham (formerly ‘Jivaro’) to his camera
Fred Matter, also known as Fred Matter-Steveniers, was the cinematographer on the year-long French Ethnographical Expedition to Angmagssalik, East Greenland in 1934-35, led Paul-Émile Victor. The film that he made on this expedition, sharing the directorial credit with Victor, was called Quatre du Groenland. A copy is held by the CNC and may be viewed at the Bois d’Arcy site.
Matter was also the cinematographer on the expedition led by the ethnologist, Bertrand Flornoy in 1936-37 to the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the director of the resulting film, Haut Amazone, released in 1939 (see the image above).
The CNC catalogue also refers to a much later film directed by Matter, Printemps au Val, produced in France by Jad Films and dated to 1960. It is identified as a short, colour, non-fiction film. But the catalogue provides no details about content, nor offers a copy to view.
In general style, manner and ambition, as well as in purely chronological terms, the main body of Robert Gardner’s work belongs to the period of ethnographic film-making that follows on after the early period that is the focus of The Silent Time Machine website.
But although widely and justly regarded as a highly original innovator, in some respects his work represents a reprise of earlier modes of non-fiction film-making.
In technical terms, the clearest expression of this was his refusal to use synchronous sound recorded on location, even after this became practically feasible in the course of the 1960s.
In stylistic terms, it is evident in the poetic aesthetic that he brought to his work, in which the subjects of the film are primarily foils for the philosophical reflections of the film-maker.
This is particularly true of his first two films, Blunden Harbour and Dances of the Kwakiutl, both made in collaboration with William Heick and released in 1951, which, in their asynchronicity and poetic voice-over, as well as in their technical simplicity, have much in common with films of ethnographic interest made earlier in the century.
As an anthropologist, Colin Turnbull’s reputation rests primarily on two much-cited books on the Mbuti hunter-gatherer ‘pygmies’ who live in the Ituri forest, in what was still the Eastern Province of the Belgian Congo when Turnbull began his studies in the 1950s. Later, after independence from Belgium in 1960, it became part of Zaire, and more recently, in 1997, three years after Turnbull had died, the Democratic Republic of Congo (Turnbull 1962, 1965).
Turnbull reputation became more controversial following a later book, on the Ik people, of northeastern Uganda, with whom he carried out fieldwork in the period 1965-67. Turnbull claimed that the Ik were hunter-gatherers who had been obliged to become sedentary, and that as a result, all human norms of civility and social organisation had collapsed among this people (Turnbull 1972). This book was severely contested at the time that it was published, and subsequently it has been claimed that it was based on an inadequate understanding of both the language and the most basic social facts of Ik society (Heine 1985, Grinker 2000).
Turnbull was unusual among British anthropologists of his generation in having an interest in film-making, and made films during the course of his fieldwork both with the Mbuti and with the Ik. While conducting fieldwork in 1954, Turnbull collaborated with his cousin, Francis S. Chapman, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cameraman, to shoot footage with the Mbuti.
Almost two decades later, in 1971-72, he collaborated with fellow anthropologist, Joseph A. Towles (1937-1988) to shoot further material among the Mbuti. In between these shoots, he also worked with Towles on a film about the Ik during their joint 1965-67 fieldwork. It is not clear who, if anyone, provided technical assistance in these two later shoots.
Turnbull and Towles were not only colleagues in the field, but also partners in life, exchanging marriage vows in 1960, long before homosexual relationships became legal in either the US or the UK. When Towles died in 1988 of complications arising from AIDS, Turnbull donated not only their joint work, but also all his own work to the Avery Research Center for African History and Culture, College of Charleston, South Carolina, where both bodies of work now make up the Joseph A. Towles Papers.
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