9 mins., b&w, sound – voice-over commentary and titles in Swedish.
Production : Svensk Filmindustri and Nordisk Film.
This film was made in the Seychelles as a side trip from the expedition that Paul Fejos made to Madagascar in 1935. The subject of the film is the many uses to which the coconut palm may be put. Although it is beautifully shot and offers a number of idyllic scenes, there is very little on the social and cultural significance of the coconut tree and as such, it is a film of limited ethnographicness.
10:29 mins., b&w, sound – voice-over commentary and titles in Swedish.
Production : Svensk Filmindustri and Nordisk
Source : ?
A film about a remote burial ground in southern Madagascar, final resting place for, amongst others, an Antandroy chief. The carved anthropomorphic images are very arresting and the commentary interesting, but not a single living person appears in the film.
The camerawork is also decidedly inferior to that of other films that Paul Fejos made in Madagascar. Is this perhaps a film that he shot himself rather than rely on Rudolf Frederiksen, the professional cameraman who was with him?
10:19 mins., b&w, sound – Swedish titles and voice over.
Production : Svensk Filmindustri and Nordisk
Source : ?
One of several films made by Paul Fejos in Madagascar.
This film shows a series of remarkable dances performed by the Bara people of southern Madagascar, contrasting these with the “miserable spectacle” of acculturated Bara and Antanosy dancing a French quadrille wearing pith helmets and fedoras, and European-style clothes.
9:40 mins., b&w, sound – Swedish narration and titles.
Production : Svensk Filmindustri and Nordisk Film
Source : ?
This is one of several short films that Paul Fejos made in Madagascar.
The opening titles identify this film as being part of a series called Svarta horisonter (literally , black horizons) but the voice-over also distinguishes the film from the kind of film made in the past in Africa, that is “exotic travelogues with clear racist connotations”. However, this is pronounced over a short sequence in which a Swedish hunter is confronted by a rhinoceros, which he shoots dead, while his African porters climb a nearby tree.
The main body of film shows the daughter of a Bara chief having her hair styled. The voice-over adopts an ironic tone, but this is more sexist than racist in that when the chief’s daughter’s hair is being twisted into shape, it suggests that like their white “sisters”, African women are prepared to suffer to achieve a beautiful hair-style. The final part of the film shows what it claims is the current hair fashion of Anastosy men.
A reportage film that shows a short playlet involving masked dancers as performed by the Dogon of the Bandiagara Escarpment in what is now Mali, but was then still the French Soudan (hence the title of the film).
Although the interpretation of the meaning of the playlet is dubious, the film offers some interesting shots of Dogon masks, including the Hare mask, above (erroneously identified in the film as being of a ‘little monkey’).
The film-maker, J. Lejards was a Pathé cameraman who made various films in West Africa, and also later in Cambodia and Andorra. This film was clearly shot on the same occasion as Les Danses Habés, which shows the masked dancing performed at a dama, the ceremony to bring a period of mourning to an end. In the background in Danses soudanaises, one can see the kanaga masks, in the shape of a double-armed cross, that are a defining feature of the dama ceremony (see the image above).
The Stephendelroser website dates this film to 1915, but it seems very unlikely that a Pathé cameraman such as Lejards would have been making films on ethnographic topics in West Africa at the height of the First World War.
Rather more likely is that it would have been shot in the early 1920s, at the same time as Lejards was shooting a number of other films in West Africa, including La Ville de Djenné (1921). Djenné is also in what then the French Soudan, and is only about 200 kms by road from the Bandiagara Escarpment where this film was shot. Even with the transport available at the time, it is easy to imagine Lejards moving from one location to the other.
A reportage film made by the enigmatic figure of J. Lejards, a Pathé cameraman who was active both in West Africa and Southeast Asia in the 1920s. This film is dated on the playlist to 1921, and is one of several films that are attributed to Lejards around this time.
It shows some brief glimpses of the celebrated adobe architecture of Djenné and makes the claim that the grand mosque (the largest adobe building in the world) was designed by a French colonial officer, a M. Bleu. There are also some intimate shots of Songhai and Bambara women dancing to drum music.
An expedition film shot by Marcel Borle during a Swiss scientific mission to Angola (1928-1929). It is mostly concerned with the journey itself, and is of limited ethnographic interest, but during the latter part of the film there are some sequences showing the expeditionaries meeting some local indigenous people and some brief sequences of masked dancing.
Text: Castro 2016. See also a report on the plans of the expedition that appeared in August 1928 in De Cinema, a Lisbon monthly journal, here
Footage shot in and around the Ndaka (Bantu) village of Epulu, in the Ituri Forest in the northeast region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire and the Belgian Congo). This material appears to have been shot primarily under the direction of Joseph Allen Towles, but Colin Turnbull may also have been involved, and in the copy held by the NAFC, Turnbull provides a commentary on the material.
It is generally well shot but it is not clear by whom: certainly it was not by Towles as he appears in shot. Towles and Turnbull were partners in life as well as anthropological work and 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, where it forms the “Joseph A. Towles Collection”
This footage shows how both subsistence and ritual practices bring the villagers and the local Mbuti ‘pygmies’ into contact. Sequences cover a range of topics, including house types, the harvesting of rice, the local market, and digging and kneading clay for use in house construction. They also cover the first nkumbi male initiation ceremony to take place in the Ituri forest since the Simba Revolt of 1964. They show the nkumbi camp, the training of initiates, masked dancers and an initiate’s head being shaved. Also included is a flag-raising ceremony at a nearby government post in commemoration of independence from Belgium in 1960.
Boy having his head shaved during nkumbi initiation ceremony, near Epulu, a Bantu village in the Ituri forest, northeast Democratic Republic of Congo (1970-71)
In his commentary, Turnbull analyses the various stages of the nkumbi ceremony but surmises that some of the material must be lost because only the latter part of the ceremony is shown. He also comments that the painting of the bodies of the initiates with a blue colour was an innovation that had been adopted around the time of the Simba Revolt. It was associated at that time with blue plastic, but also with violence and death.
See also Turnbull’s earlier edited film on the nkumbi ceremony, made in collaboration with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cameraman, his cousin Francis S. Chapman in 1954.
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