16:36 mins., b&w, silent
Production : L’Édition Francaise Cinématographique.
Source : CNC at Bnf
Nefta, la perle du Djérid [Nefta,Pearl of the Djerid] (1929) – Jean-Benoit Levy
East African footage (1906) – Karl Weule *
Karl Weule shot 38 short films during the course of a research trip in 1906 to the region around Lindi in southern Tanganyika, German East Africa (today Tanzania). A particular focus of this material was dance, though this was not spontaneous, but rather performed for the camera at Weule’s request.
This material was not viewed for The Silent Time Machine project, but from the account given by Wolfgang Fuhrmann, it is clear that its technical quality was very limited. Weule had no previous experience, nor training as a film-maker, and it appears that he had difficulty in framing the subjects and exposing the film correctly. The images were often unstable.
Although Weule himself thought the results were ‘superb’, this view was apparently not shared by the Ernemann company that had supplied him with the equipment, since they concluded that only 12 out of the 38 films were worth developing. In Weule’s view, however, around 2/3 of the films were of acceptable quality and according to his account, these were all much appreciated by non-specialist audiences.
Text : Fuhrmann 2015, pp. 133-148.
Musical performance in French West Africa and Angola, footage (c.1934) – Laura Boulton *
40 mins., b&w, silent
Source : NAFC
Technically accomplished but mute footage of music-making, first in Angola, and then in French West Africa. Includes some remarkable images of xylophone players in Angola, and of dancing among the Dogon of Sangha in present-day Mali, including not only their well-known masked dancing, but also a particularly interesting sequence of women dancing with calabash gourd drums, a form that to the best of our knowledge does not appear in the later films of Marcel Griaule and Jean Rouch.
Text : Boulton 1969
Yenendi : les hommes qui font la pluie [Yenendi : the rainmakers] (1951) – dir. Jean Rouch
25 min, colour, French voice-over, post-synchronised sound
Production : IFAN/CNC/ Musée de l’Homme.
Source : Jean Rouch (DVD collection) Éditions Montparnasse, 2005.
Text : Henley 2009: 56-62
Hadza, The : the Food Quest of an East African Hunting and Gathering Tribe (1966) – dirs. Sean Hudson and James Woodburn
40 mins, b&w, voice-over narration and intra-diegetic local music.
Production : Hogarth.
Source : distributed by Concord Media. An extract is viewable here.
A television version of this film, under the title Hope for the Hadza?, produced by Brian Branston, was broadcast in July 1967, as indicated in the television schedule of the period here.
Ashanti adae ceremony and mpadua rafts on Lake Bosumtwi, footage (1921) – R.S. Rattray *
9 mins, b&w, silent.
Source : Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, viewable here
Probably shot in 1921, in Ghana (then the Gold Coast), by R.S. Rattray, a British colonial civil servant who wrote a number of important early ethnographic works on the Ashanti. The first part of this footage shows certain scenes from one or possibly more than one Ashanti adae ceremony, in which the spirits of deceased rulers are propitiated with animal sacrifices and asked for favours. In the latter part of the ceremony, the current ruler parades in public, accompanied by his officials, and protected from the sun by large velvet and silk umbrellas.
The remainder of the footage shows mpadua rafts being used on Lake Bosumtwi. These rafts consist of logs made of a very light wood: these logs cannot be hollowed out, and must be propelled by arms rather than with a paddle, since it is considered that this would be offensive to Twe, the spirit guardian of the lake.
The ceremonial footage is of historical significance because it is relatively early and there are interesting comparisons to be made with similar ceremonies involving traditional local rulers shot a decade later by Melville Herskovits among the Ashanti and by Frédéric Gadmer in Dahomey (now Bénin). But the technical quality of the material is uneven, and the coverage of the ceremony is patchy.
Bushmen in the Kalahari {Buschmänner in der Kalahari} (1907-1909) rushes – Rudolf Pöch *
30 mins., b&w, silent
Source : Filmarchiv Austria
These are the rushes from Rudolf Pöch‘s expedition to southern Africa. Notwithstanding the formal title in the archive catalogue, they appear all to have been shot in 1908, in what is now Namibia and northern Botswana. They include not only more extended versions of the circular dance and technical process sequences extracted by Paul Spindler for his 1959 film of the same name, but also the original silent footage that appears in Buschmann spricht in den Phonographen post-synchronised in 1984.
These rushes also include some additional sequences that Spindler seemingly thought did not merit inclusion in his edited film. These include a shot of one of his subjects looking directly into the camera, smiling, laughing and apparently speaking to Pöch, perhaps the most intimate shot in all of his fieldwork (see above).
There are also two interesting shots of a boy running into the bush and back up to the camera, and finally, several shots of Pöch’s assistants wrangling the oxen that pulled his supply cart, which although of limited ethnographicness are the most cinematically striking shots in the rushes.
It seems likely that Spindler would have excluded these shots because they were all in some sense reflexive, and therefore in conflict with 1950s ideas about the need for ethnographic film to be ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’.
Text : Spindler 1974
Buschmänner in der Kalahari, 1907-1909 [Bushmen in the Kalahari, 1907-1909] (1959) – dir. Paul Spindler *
6:22 mins., b&w, silent
Production : SHB films
Source : Filmarchiv Austria
A series of sequences, edited by Paul Spindler, taken from the original rushes shot by Rudolf Pöch during his 1907-09 expedition to southern Africa. Apart from an initial sequence of a dance (above),this edited version consists of a series of single shot sequences of technical processes.
The original rushes contain a number of sequences which Spindler excluded possibly because they conflicted with 1950s ideas of what an ethnographic film should contain.
Text : Spindler 1974
Technique chez les noirs [African Techniques] (1942) – dir. Marcel Griaule
15 mins., b&w, sound – voice-over and titles in French.
Production : Société des Films Sirius.
Source : Gaumont-Pathé archive
Text : Jolly 2014, Jolly 2016
Traversée du Sahara en autochenilles, La [The Crossing of the Sahara in Half-track Vehicles] (1923) – Paul Castelnau *
49 mins., b&w, silent – French titles and intertitles.
Production : Société anonyme André Citroën.
This film covers the first Citroën crossing of the Sahara in half-track vehicles (the ‘autochenilles’ of the title, literally ‘auto-caterpillars’). This involved five vehicles which made their way from Algiers, via Touggourt, close to the Tunisian border, and then across to Timbuktu in what is now Mali. Including the return journey, the expedition lasted for three months from December 1922 to March 1923.
The expedition involved many of the same expeditionaries who would take part in the larger and better known second Citroën crossing of the Sahara that took place the following year and which is recorded in La Croisière noire(1926). The cameraman was Paul Castelnau, who was very experienced, having been an army cinematographer in the First World War as well as working on Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète project.
La Traversée was released in 1923. The material shot by Castelnau was then re-released in 1924 as a twelve-part series intended for educational audiences under the general title, Le Continent mystérieux. This drew on footage that had not been used in the original film and some of which was ethnographic in the broadest sense.
However, Castelnau was not considered accomplished enough to be entrusted with filming the more ambitious second Citroën expedition. For this, he was replaced by Léon Poirier, who had already made his name as a feature film director.
Text : Bloom 2006
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