Category: Africa

15 mins., b&w, silent (Portuguese intertitles)

Production : Agência Geral das Colonias.

Source : Cinemateca Digital Portuguesa, viewable on-line here

One of several films made in Mozambique by the Brigada Cine-Portuguesa led by João Fernandes Tomaz. This team was one of three such teams dispatched to the Portuguese colonies in Africa in 1929 by the Agência Geral das Colonias, a department of the Ministry of the Colonies, in order to produce films to be shown at various colonial exhibitions that were due to take place in Europe, including in Seville in 1929, Antwerp in 1930 and also in Paris in 1931.

These films mostly concerned the Portuguese and their modernising colonial activities, but this film, unusually, is exclusively concerned with local customary life.

Content : This film mostly consists of a series of set-up shots of craft activities within a village, filmed in a competent but mostly unimaginative way. However, towards the end of the film there are some sequences of dancing, supposedly of war-like character, accompanied by drums and marimba players, first at Angonia and then at Inhambane. This is cinematographically more interesting, and also seems more authentic, not only in the vigour with which the dancers are dancing, but also in that quite a number of the participants are wearing a mixture of European and traditional African dress.

There then follows a very awkward set-up shot of a chief, seated on the grounds, with his many wives, who, as the camera pans across them, all look very ill-at-ease.

The film ends with what is perhaps the most interesting sequence of all, which is identified by an inter title as having been shot at Tete. This shows a group of masked dancers dressed as Europeans (see frame grab above)

Text : De Rosa 2018

variously reported as being between 96 and 140 mins in total, b&w, silent. 16mm shot at 16fps

Sources : Powell-Cotton Museum, British Film Institute

Background and Content : Italian Somaliland is the collective title given in the UNESCO catalogue of ethnographic films in sub-Saharan Africa to a series of short films shot by P.H.G. Powell-Cotton and his daughter, Diana in the course of an expedition in 1933-34 to what was then the Italian colony of Somaliland. Diana stayed on for eight months after her father left, so while some of the films are credited to them jointly, others are sometimes exclusively credited to her. However, at other times, all the films are attributed exclusively to the father – for example in the British Film Institute listing.

The films are given various different titles in the different sources, but the topics that they cover would appear to include the following:

(1) footage attributed jointly to P.H.G. Powell-Cotton and Diana (variously calculated between 29 and 45 minutes):
– Bread-making by both Arabs and Somalis at Gobuen
– Somali-Darod pillow-making at Afmadu
– Bowstring-making

(2) footage attributed jointly to P.H.G. Powell-Cotton and Diana (variously calculated between 33 and 60 mins):
– Miau woman making a winnowing basket
– Somali woman weaving a mat
– Beard-trimming
– Koranic school

(3) Somali footage sometimes attributed solely to Diana (15 mins):
– butter-making
– drawing blood from cattle
– watering of cattle and camels

(4) Pottery footage sometimes attributed solely to Diana (each film approx. 10 mins):
– Eile male potter
– Bimal female potter

Texts : UNESCO catalogue, p. 291;  Nicklin 1981

variously described as being 29 or 40 mins, b&w, 16mm, silent. Shot at 16fps.

Source : Powell-Cotton Museum, British Film Institute

Background and Content : This film was made by P.H.G. Powell-Cotton,  a hunter and explorer who made a series of self-funded expeditions to Africa, almost annually between 1920 and 1939. He had no formal training as either ethnographer or film-maker, but on a number of these expeditions, he took a Bell & Howell Filmo 70 and shot some ethnographic footage.

In 1933-34, he visited the Southern Sudan and shot the material for this film. According to the UNESCO catalogue of ethnographic films about sub-Saharan Africa, it includes the following sequences:

• Lango – enacted war-dance, manufacture of spear shafts, washing of beads, making of a spoon, rope. A potter at work.
• Bari – construction of a house, hair-styles
• Didinga – men making roof thatch
• Latouka – warriors in costume, pounding of millet, ploughing, blacksmith, woman potter
• Azande – drums and dances, hair-styles, potter
• Dinka – women pounding millet, ploughing, beating grain, making roof thatching, man setting a trap, man making a pipe, woman potter
• Jur – woman potter at work

Texts : UNESCO catalogue, p.302; Nicklin 1981

20 mins., b&w, silent (English intertitles)

Production: Field Museum of Chicago.

Source: Some 15 minutes of fragments of the film are available on the website of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford here.

Background: The film-maker, Wilfrid D. Humbly (1886-1962), was the then Assistant Curator (later Curator) of African Ethnology at the Field Museum in Chicago and the leader of the Frederick H. Rawson – Field Museum expedition to Angola and Nigeria in 1929-30.

The main purpose of the expedition was to make a collection of artefacts and to take anthropometric measurements. At the same time, Hambly also took photographs and shot the material for this film.

65/76 mins., b&w, silent

Source : IWF/TIB

This film was distributed for a period by the IWF but since the IWF collection was incorporated into the German National Library (TIB), it has not been available for distribution, due to copyright restrictions. It can, however, be viewed at the TIB itself.

As it was not possible to view the film, the descriptions offered here are derived from secondary sources.

Background – This film is made up primarily of material shot during an expedition led by Hans Schomburgk  to northern Togo in 1913-14, but also incorporates some material shot on a previous expedition that he had made to Liberia. The material was shot by professional cameramen: James S. ‘Jimmy’ Hodgson in the case of the Togo footage, Georg Bürli in case of the Liberian footage. Schomburgk had a very low opinion of Bürli, but Hodgson had previously worked for Pathé and Gaumont and would go on to develop a distinguished career as a newsreel cameraman.

Another prominent member of the expedition was the German actress Meg Gehrts, whom Schomburgk had invited along to play the lead role in a number of fictional melodramas, notably The White Goddess of the Wangora, but also Odd Man Out, The Outlaw of the Sudu Mountains and The Heroes of the Paratau – all seemingly now lost.

Schomburgk planned to make these fictional films alongside the more ethnographic footage, hoping to pay for the expedition as a whole through later box-office takings. Shortly after their return, in 1915, Gehrts published a memoir about the expedition that is interesting, though often irritatingly prejudiced to a modern reader. It includes some good photographs mostly taken by Schomburgk but also some by Gehrts herself. This is available on the web here.

The principal expedition film appears to have been released in various versions. A first version was premièred at the Royal Philharmonic Hall in London in 1914 under the title “Treks and Trails in West Africa”, but the material then appears to have been re-edited and presented under the title Im Deutschen Sudan for the first time in 1916 with a running time of 65 minutes. Other sources refer to a 76-minute version released in 1917. Either way, this was exceptionally long for an expedition film of ethnographic interest made prior to the First World War in Africa.

Content – Although some of the footage concerns wildlife, notably the sequence showing the capture of a pygmy hippopotamus which was filmed during the earlier expedition to Liberia and which is inserted in the middle of the film, most of the footage concerns the indigenous groups of northern Togo, particularly the Kotokoli. This material includes market scenes, cotton harvesting, spinning, men weaving on a treadle loom and women weaving on a vertical loom, selling of the cloth, games, basketry, making of belts from palm nut shells, men fishing collectively, equestrian games, and a visit to a traditional ruler (Uro Dyabo Bukari IV).

Market scenes recorded at Sansane-Mango mainly show the making of leather goods by the Hausa, but there are also scenes of salt and kola trading. Childcare and the preparation of food were filmed among the Tyokossi. Also important are iron processing among the Bassari and Konkomba archers shooting their bows and arrows. The film as a whole is framed by scenes of expedition life.

Texts: Gehrts 1915/1996, Zwernemann 1978.