Category: Film-makers

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Moreau, René (active 1921-1936) *

In his day, René Moreau was a highly renowned cameraman, working with some of the great names of French cinema, including Julien Duvivier (Les Cinq gentlemen maudits – 1931) and Jean Bertin (Vocation – 1928). But alongside these fiction films, he also had a particular commitment to the expedition film genre.

More than 60 of his films, made between 1921 (A travers le Tyrol) and 1936 (Le vieux Montmartre) have been restored by the CNC. In film circles generally, he is particularly remembered for A l’assaut des cimes  (1925) which is about mountaineering expeditions on Mont Blanc. However, from the point of view of ethnographic film-making, he is best known for the films that he shot in 1929-31, during an expedition to Central Africa and the Cameroon that he made in the company of the journalist-explorer, Jean d’Esme.

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Lejards, J. (active 1920 -1930?)

J. Lejards is something of an enigma, since little is known about him, not even what his initial stands for.

What is known is that around the time of the First World War, he was active in West Africa working for Pathé: the earliest work on which his name appears and of which we are aware is Danses soudanaises. This shows Dogon masked dancing, probably at Sangha in the Bandiagara Cliffs, in present-day Mali. This has been dated to 1915, though it would seem to have been shot in the same place and on the same occasion as the very interesting film Danses habés which has been dated to as early as 1913. However, this also appears in a Pathé catalogue as part of package of films released in 1922.

This latter date fits in better with the dates attributed to other Pathé films shot in West Africa on which Lejards name appears, such as La Ville de Djenné (1921) and Passage de rivière au Togo française (1922-23).

Lejards’ name then appears again as the director (along with a certain Monsieur Brut), of  Á Travers la Cochinchine et le Cambodge, which is dated in the Pathé-Gaumont archives catalogue to 1925. In 1930, the same catalogue indicates, he was involved in making another Pathé film, this time  in Andorra.

The photograph of  the ‘reporter Lejards’ (above) was published in Ciné Magazine no.7 in 1933, though it is not clear when the photograph was actually taken. However, it seems very likely that it was taken while he was shooting the sequence in the Royal Palace at Phnom Penh that features in Á Travers la Cochinchine et le Cambodge, probably in 1924 or 1925. (Many thanks to Joëlle Hauzeur for supplying this image).
 

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Koch-Grünberg, Theodor (1872-1924)*

Theodor Koch-Grünberg (seated) with his field assistant Hermann Schmidt (left) and his indigenous guide, Romeo Wapixana (right), photographed by the Manaus-based German photographer, George Hübner, in 1913. This photograph was probably taken  shortly after Koch-Grünberg and Schmidt had returned from the expedition during which they filmed in Koimélemon, a mixed Taulipang-Makushi-Wapishana village in Roraima, close to the Venezuelan border. This constituted probably the first footage ever shot of an indigenous group of the Amazon Basin.

Theodor Koch-Grünberg was one of the first great modern ethnographers of Amazonia, many of whom were also German. Between 1898 and 1913, he participated in three important expeditions: firstly, as the photographer on a multidisciplinary German expedition to the Upper Xingú river in Central Brazil in 1898-1900, and then on two of his own expeditions, to the Upper Rio Negro, in northwest Amazonia in 1903-1905, and then, in 1911-1913, to the Roraima region, on the frontier between Brazil, Guyana and the southeastern corner of Venezuela. It was only on this third expedition that he took a moving image camera.

Koch-Grünberg’s anthropological ideas were much more in tune with present-day thinking than those of his germanophone contemporary, Rudolf Pöch. In contrast to Pöch, and indeed to the two British ethnographic film-making pioneers, Alfred Haddon and Baldwin Spencer, Koch-Grünberg was not trained in biological sciences but came rather from a humanities background. He was a member of a turn-of-the-century cohort of German anthropologists who although practising a museum-based form of anthropology oriented strongly towards the collection of artefacts, had begun to place increasing importance on prolonged fieldwork as a means to achieve a better understanding of the social and cultural significance of the objects that they were collecting.

Gradually, over the course of his career and in a manner that anticipated in some senses the Malinowskian approach, the contextualizing field research became of greater interest to Koch-Grünberg than the collection of artefacts, to such an extent, indeed, that he came to see the latter as an unwelcome intrusion on the former.

Koch-Grünberg’s contribution to the history of ethnographic film is small but also significant in the sense that he appears to have been the first to film an indigenous Amazonian people. It is a contribution that is often overlooked in the standard histories of ethnographic film. Even Koch-Grünberg himself does not appear to have rated it very highly.

Although he was an accomplished and prolific photographer, there is no evidence that Koch-Grünberg was considering making a moving image film on his third expedition in 1911-13 until he was approached by the Freiburg-based production company, Express-Film.The founder of the company, Bernard Gotthart (1871-1950), proposed to travel to Brazil to make a series of travelogue films along the Amazon river and elsewhere before accompanying Koch-Grünberg to his field site in order to shoot more ethnographic footage there. But after shooting the travelogue material, Gotthart had suddenly been obliged to return to Germany, so Koch-Grünberg was left to shoot the ethnographic sequences on his own, supported by his field assistant, Hermann Schmidt (see above).

The result was the sequences that make up On the Life of the Taulipang in Guiana. Given that neither Koch-Grünberg nor Schmidt had any significant previous experience of using a moving image camera, the footage is creditable, but it is both cinematographically and ethnographically limited. The experience of making the film certainly did not convince Koch-Grünberg himself of the value of film as a tool of field research, and he continued to see it as no more than a means for the “embellishment” of a lecture.

In 1924, Koch-Grünberg was invited to join a major expedition to the headwaters of the Rio Branco, to be led by the North American geographer, Alexander Hamilton Rice. The aim of the expedition was to find an overland route connecting the tributaries of the upper Rio Branco to the headwaters of the Orinoco.

In the period immediately following the First World War, it was difficult to get funding for ethnographic field research, particularly for German scholars. In this context, film-making appeared to offer the possibility of raising the necessary funds. The release of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in 1922 had demonstrated the considerable financial potential of ethnographic film-making and Koch-Grünberg was encouraged by his Swiss colleague, Felix Speiser, who was also planning a film project in Amazonia, to propose a similar venture to Rice as a means of generating additional funding. But by then, Rice had already contracted the Portuguese-Brazilian film-maker, Silvino Santos, whose recent film No Paiz das Amazonas, had been rated a major success.

In 1926, Santos would release No Rastro do Eldorado as a record of the Rice expedition. But by that time, tragically, Theodor Koch-Grünberg was dead, aged only 52, having contracted malaria shortly after the Rice expedition began.

Texts : Hempel 2009, Fuhrmann 2013, Petschelies 2019.

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Haddon, Alfred C. (1855-1940)*

Alfred Haddon on his first visit to the Torres Strait in 1888.

Alfred Haddon was a University of Cambridge zoologist and the leader of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits of 1898. He had first visited the Torres Strait ten years before, but this time he returned with a multidisciplinary team which was equipped with the latest fieldwork technology, including two Edison wax-cylinder phonographs and a hand-cranked 35mm N&G Kinematograph, manufactured by the prestigious Newman and Guardia company of London.

The main base of the Expedition was on the island of Mer, then known as Murray Island, which lies off the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea, one of the most easterly in the archipelago of islands between Papua New Guinea and northern tip of Queensland, Australia.

It was here in September 1898, only a few days before the Expedition was due to move on from Mer that Haddon shot a few sequences of dancing and fire-making, mostly by the culturally Melanesian inhabitants of the island, but also by a group of Aboriginal men visiting from mainland Australia.

To Haddon’s intense frustration, as he was shooting, the mechanism of the kinematograph kept jamming. Nevertheless, he did manage to get some four minutes of material. This appears to be the very first time that a moving image camera was used for explicit ethnographic research purposes in the course of a fieldwork expedition. See here for a more detailed description.

Haddon did not return to the Torres Strait, nor did he ever employ a moving image camera in ethnographic field research again. In the six volume report on the Expedition, his filming is not mentioned, though there are few stills from the film in one of the plates. However, the filming is mentioned in a more popular account, even if briefly, and Haddon did show the film on a number of public occasions.

Haddon also encouraged both Baldwin Spencer and Rudolf Pöch to take a moving image camera with them on their respective field trips, to Central Australia in 1901 in Spencer’s case, and to mainland Papua New Guinea in 1904-1906 in case of Pöch. But both of them took Bioscope cameras with them, suggesting that Haddon did not recommend the Newman and Guardia model!

Text  :  Henley 2013b

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Gadmer, Frédéric (1878-1954)*

Frédéric Gadmer was the cameraman who shot some six-seven hours of footage for Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète on vodoun religious ceremonies and other topics in Dahomey (Benin) when travelling with Père Francis Aupiais in 1929-30.

Gadmer began working for Kahn in 1919. Prior to that he had worked as an army cameraman and photographer. In 1917-18, he had travelled all over Cameroon taking 3000 images of the territory that the French had recently taken over from the Germans. Once he started to work for Kahn, he travelled widely, shooting material in the Middle East, in various locations from Turkey to Afghanistan, as well as in Europe.

After Dahomey, he filmed the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale and also went to Tunisia. He shot his last material for Kahn in 1932 when the Archives de la planète project came to an end after Kahn lost much of his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929.

Text : Clet-Bonnet 1996.

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Fejos, Paul (1897-1963)*

Paul Fejos (also known by his original Hungarian name, Fejös Pál) began his career as a fictional feature film director. Starting in Hungary in 1920, he pursued this career with highly fluctuating fortunes, first in Hollywood, from 1927 to 1931, and then back in Europe, first in France, then Austria and again Hungary , and finally, in Denmark and later Sweden. Although Fejos made a number of films in the course of this career that were hailed as masterpieces, he also had his fair share of both critical and commercial flops.

Fejos first took up ethnographic film-making in 1935 when, after a run of particularly unsuccessful feature films, he was supported by his then-employer, the Danish production company, Nordisk Film, along with Svensk Filmindustri, a Swedish production company, to go on a film-making trip to southern Madagascar. Here he spent two months among the Bara and Antanosy groups before moving on to spend a further month in the Seychelles. He was accompanied by Rudolf Frederiksen (1897-1970), an experienced cameraman with whom he had worked on a number of feature films.

Fejos and Frederiksen shot the material for a series of short films, each approximately ten minutes in duration. Seven of these films have survived and were released in 1936. They deal with the usual subjects of ethnographic films of the period: dancing and religious ceremonies, subsistence activities and body decoration (more particularly, hairstyles). The best-known, and the only one to be distributed in English, is The Bilo, which documents a chief’s funeral ceremony.

There is evidence that a further three films were screened publicly shortly after Fejos returned from Madagascar but they are now lost. In the archives of the Danish Film Institute, there are also scripts for a further sixteen films, but it seems that these were never screened. There is also evidence that Fejos intended to produce a compilation film under the general title, Madagascar, but again it would seem that this project never came to fruition.

The fact that so few films appear to have been completed was probably due to the assessment made by the distribution department of Nordisk that the material that Fejos had brought back had very little commercial potential. Despite this disappointing outcome, Fejos managed to persuade Svensk Filmindustri, the secondary partner in the Madagascar project, to fund another expedition in 1937-38, this time to Southeast Asia and the Far East. Again he took Rudolf Frederiksen with him to act as cameraman.

On this expedition, Fejos and Frederiksen shot material for a further series of ten-minute films, of which the most ethnographically interesting are three ethnofictions shot on Sipora, an island in the Mentawai archipelago, off the coast of Sumatra. These are remarkable for the fact that they feature synchronous sound field recordings in the indigenous language.  The most effective is arguably Hövdingens son är död [The Chief’s Son is Dead].

As part of the same expedition, Fejos also went to Chiang Mai inThailand, and here shot a feature-length ethnofiction about the tribulations of a young couple (described as belonging to the ‘Li’ group) as they struggle to make a living as rice-farmers in the face of drought and the depredations of a large tiger.  This was first released as En Handfull Ris/ A Handful of Rice in 1940, but was then re-released in various different versions, with similarly variable titles over the coming years. An English-language version for the US market, under title Jungle of Chang, was finally released in 1951.

While working with Svensk Filmindustri, Fejos came into contact with the Swedish entrepreneur, Axel Wenner-Gren. The latter funded Fejos to go on an expedition to Peru in the years 1940-41, initially to do field research in the Andes. This consisted of surveying and photographing pre-Hispanic Inca settlements : in a monograph describing this research, Fejos claims to have discovered eighteen previously unknown sites. He then spent nine months living with the Yagua, an indigenous group whose territory lies close to  the Putumayo river in the north of the Peru, near to the Colombian border.  Here Fejos made another feature-length ethnofiction, Yagua, released in 1944. This film is structured around a rather feeble melodramatic story that echoes the story of A Handful of Rice in that here too the community is threatened by a tiger, though  this time a rather small one. However,  this film is nevertheless interesting in that it features indigenous actors engaged in apparently genuine dialogues, all immaculately recorded synchronously in the field.

This was the last film that Fejos would shoot. When he returned to the US in 1941,  Axel Wenner-Gren asked him to become the Director of Research of the Viking Fund, a charitable foundation that Wenner-Gren had set up in the US to support research activities in a range of different fields (and also seemingly to dispel US government suspicions due to his one-time friendship with Hermann Goering). Fejos persuaded Wenner-Gren that the foundation should focus exclusively on anthropological research as this would be of great importance in promoting  international understanding. Fejos then remained in his position as Director of Research at the Viking Fund and its successor body, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, until the end of his life.

 

 

Texts: Andersen (2017), Büttner (2004), Petermann (2004), Schneider (2004).

© 2018 Paul Henley