Crocodile models for the Kambrambo initiation ceremony. On the left front, two genuine crocodile skulls with inserted wooden pegs as eyes; on the right, some men in devout silence. Photograph probably taken by Felix Speiser in 1930 and reproduced in the study guide published by Carl August Schmitz in 1964, p.4
5½ mins., b&w, silent – titles and intertitles in German.
This film was edited by Carl August Schmitz (1920-1966), a Melanesianist anthropologist based at the University of Basel, and Werner Rutz of the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film (IWF), Göttingen. The original material was shot in November 1930 under the direction of the leading Swiss anthropologist, Felix Speiser. According to some accounts, it was filmed by a zoology student, Heini Hediger (1908-1992), whereas according to others, it was Speiser himself who did the shooting.
A study guide written by Schmitz and published by the IWF in 1964 is available here.
At some point after the Second World War, this material also appears to have been incorporated into Mystères du Pacific, a longer film of 24 mins., aimed at more general audiences and produced by the Swiss producer, Max Linder. This carries a voice-over commentary by the Genevan anthropologist Marc-Rodolphe Sauter (1914-1983) and is reported to have been screened to the Société de géographie of Geneva.
Film Content:
Note: it was not possible to view this film for the Silent Time Machine project. The description below is based on the IWF/TIB catalogue entry.
This film shows the last phase of a boys’ initiation ceremony in the village of Kambrambo, on the lower Sepik River, in Papua New Guinea.
After an establishing shot of men and women in ceremonial dress on the verandah of the men’s house, the Sepik river in the background, the film opens with a sequence of men playing elaborately decorated sacred flutes as they dance around a long line of initiands.
It then shows the two ‘crocodile’ models, constructed on a bamboo frame and covered with painted palm leaves. The neck of each ‘crocodile’ features a skull, which is reminiscent of Sepik canoe shields.
The crocodiles are then shown being carried on the shoulders of a number of senior men. One of the initiands, gripped with fear, tries to escape, but the senior men grab him and force him into the wide-open mouth of the crocodile and then lift it up. Eventually, the initiand climbs out of the crocodile and sits astride it.
The next scene involves the ritual blood-letting of the intiands by rubbing their bodies with thorny vines. The intiands are considered dead at this point and cannot walk themselves, so they have to be carried on the shoulders of their godparents. A close-up shows the parallel scars that typically appear on the back on an initand as result of this blood-letting. A young initiate is then lifted up by several men and his skin scratched with the lower jaw of a crocodile.
The concluding part of the film shows the destruction of the symbolic crocodiles. The painted palm leaf coverings are taken into the men’s house and the bamboo frames are burned. The final sequence shows the swinging of a bull-roarer, the beating of a water drum and once again, dancing with the sacred flutes.
Musicians accompany the male initiation ceremony – ‘Bougainville’ (1935) – dir. Patrick O’Reilly
70 mins, 35mm, b&w, silent with French intertitles in the original version. At the same time, a much shorter version, of only 20 minutes and with a different title, Popoko – île sauvage, was also produced. This featured two songs and some general atmospheric effects on a soundtrack.
In the early 1970s, a restored version of the main film was released, of only 37 minutes, and with a voice-over commentary by the director.
Source : Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). The shorter voiced-over version can be viewed on-line in the CNRS videotheque here.
Background : this film was shot between August 1934 and February 1935 in the course of a field-trip to the North Solomons island of Bougainville. The island was then part of Australian New Guinea, but became an Autonomous Region within the republic of Papua New Guinea (PNG) after the latter became independent in 1975. Following a referendum in 2019 demonstrating an overwhelming majority in favour of Bougainville having its own independence, as of March 2021 negotiations were continuing between local leaders and the PNG government about the implementation of this result.
Both the direction of the film and the fieldwork on which it was based were carried out by Père Patrick O’Reilly, a Marist priest who had also studied at the Institut d’Ethnologie. Funding for the project was secured through Paul Rivet, Director of the Musée d’Ethnologie du Trocadéro, the predecessor of the Musée de l’Homme.
For the purposes of the film, O’Reilly took with him a Debrie Parvo with a 120m magazine and a lightweight Bell & Howell as a back-up. Initially, he was assisted by a professional operator, Pierre Berkenheim, but he appears to have shot the remainder of the footage himself.
Content : The film can be roughly subdivided into four main parts. The first part concerns life on the coast – fishing, some impressive look-out towers in the sea to observe the shoals of tuna, the making of nets and canoes, boys swimming. A tropical storm.
Towers built off the shore allow the men to spot shoals of tuna from afar.
The second part, the longest, moves to the volcanic interior of the island and shows everyday life in a typical village – girls playing musical bows, old people chewing betel, herding pigs, basket weaving, women looking after children, followed by a lengthy sequence on men making pottery smoking pipes, carving wooden statuettes and women making pots. A young woman leaves her home and a marriage feast ensues. There is an expedition to the gardens to collect yams. These are distributed and cooked in banana leaves.
The bride is washed with protective herbs before being carried to her new home.
The third part begins with a woman painting herself with white clay in memory of her late husband, which then segues into a funerary ritual, a cremation, curiously only apparently attended by women. The fourth part concerns a male initiation ceremony that takes place in the forest. This involves a ritual battle, and the appearance of some impressively large masked figures who represent the spirits who will eat the spirits of the boys so that they can become men.
A woman mourns her late husband.
In commenting later on the film, O’Reilly claimed that the film was made with the greatest respect for the subjects: no one was asked to add or take off items of clothing, no-one was asked to take off a medallion (the occasional crucifix is indeed visible), nor to add a flower to their hair (as the tropes of ‘South Seas’ films of the time required). For the ceremonies, particularly the initiation ceremony, the camera maintains a respectful distance. O’Reilly explains that it was only possible to film the early part of the ceremony.
In general, the quality of the cinematography is excellent for the era. While the voice-over commentary – spoken in the by-then elderly voice of O’Reilly himself – certainly enriches the account, there is a certain tendency for it merely to describe what one can see on the screen anyway.
Masked dance on the Mortlock Islands – Hamburg South Seas expedition (1909)
10:50 mins., b&w, silent
Production : Hamburg Ethnological Museum
Source : IWF/TIB. An on-line version of the film may be viewed here.
General Background – This film consists of a series of mostly single-shot ‘views’ taken during the course of the expedition of the Hamburg Ethnological Museum in 1908-1910 to the ‘South Seas’, that is, to various islands in Micronesia, New Britain (then the German colony of Neu-Pommern) and the northern coast of Papua New Guinea (then the German colony of Neu-Guinea).
This expedition was conceived and co-ordinated by Georg Thilenius (1868-1937), the director of the Museum, but he remained in Hamburg. In the field, during first year, which was dedicated to the exploration of German Melanesia, the expedition was led by a tropical medicine specialist, Friedrich Fülleborn (1866-1933), while in the second year, dedicated to Micronesia, it was led by the ethnologist and trained doctor Augustin Krämer (1865-1941).
These cinematographic ‘views’ were but one very modest element in the extensive collection of local artefacts, photographic plates, drawings and sound recordings that the expedition brought back to Hamburg. It is not clear who took the ‘views’, but it seems to have been various different members of the expedition. Whoever it was, their competence as film-makers was clearly very limited.
Film Background – This particular assembly of the views appears to have been put together in the late 1930s, under the direction of Herbert Tischner (1906-1984) of the following generation of German Melanesianists. In the sort of ‘study guide’ that he wrote to accompany the film, Tischner acknowledges the poor technical quality of the material but argues that their value as a record of by-then disappeared customs outweighed their deficiencies and hence justified their ‘publication’.
It is not clear what proportion of the total amount of material filmed during the expedition that this film represents in its current form. It certainly does not represent all the material, since of the various dances that Tischner describes, there is one missing from the film, the first, suggesting that at some point, this was omitted, either because it was lost, or more probably, because the technical quality was very poor.
Tischner gives no reason for the order in which the ‘views’ have been placed in the assembly. It certainly does not correspond to the order in which they were shot since the film begins with Micronesian dances and ends with Melanesian crafts, whereas in reality the expedition visited Melanesia in the first year, and Micronesia in the second. It seems rather to have been ordered on a thematic principle, with dances first and crafts second.
Another curiosity is that the Micronesian dances are shot from very far away, while the Melanesian dances and the crafts are shot from much closer, suggesting that different operators were involved in the two different years of the expedition.
It seems very likely that the ordering of the assembly, giving priority to dance, was chosen on account of the theory, widespread in German anthropology in the early twentieth century, and reiterated in Tischner’s study guide also, that dance was extremely important to ‘Naturvölker’ as a means of expressing social sentiment.
Tischner acknowledges, however, that the Expedition had managed to discover very little about the significance of the dances, which he considers particularly lamentable since in recent times, he explains, even local men had often forgotten their meaning and, if they performed the dances at all, they did so merely to please their womenfolk.
Film Content – As described in Tischner’s study guide, the film contains the following sequences:
Paddle Dance – this was a dance performed on the Micronesian island of Ponape, in the Eastern Carolines, and was unusual in the region in that both men and women were involved. It was performed on a special stage on the occasion of the inauguration of a new canoe, and involved highly decorated ceremonial paddles, carved from the breadfruit tree. But although Tischner offers a very beautiful drawing of one of these paddles in the study guide, the dance is missing from the film.
Masked Dance – this is now the dance with which the film opens and is performed by a group of men on a beach in the Mortlock Islands (see above). The masks were carved from wood and painted white and black with limestone paste and soot. Tischner claims that these dances were originally intend to ward off the typhoons that afflict these islands, and that the name of the masks, tapuanu, is a reference to a spirit being, suggesting some deeper religious significance. In the film, the sequence lasts only 45 seconds, and has clearly been performed explicitly for a camera placed so far away from the action that it is difficult to see what is going on. The European trousers of some of the performers hint at a degree of acculturation.
Stick Dance– this is performed by the same group of men in the same location and involves two lines of men facing one another who joust with sticks about 1.25 long. Women wearing European dresses scurry past in the background. Tischner says that it takes place ‘in honour of certain spirits’.
Dances on Truk – These were shot on the cluster of Central Caroline islands now known as Chuuk and are all performed by women. The first two sequences, totalling only about a minute, are probably of the same dance in which two women are standing, one of whom performs a hula-like dance with much wiggling of the hips, while all the other women move energetically while sitting down. But again the event is filmed from very far away and it is only possible to see the women’s backs. The third dance from Truk, longer at just over a minute, is somewhat better filmed, in that the women stand in a line before the camera, but the film material itself is clearly damaged and as the dance is obviously a performance on demand, it lacks a certain vitality.
Drum Dance – this sequence of 45 seconds, with the camera much closer to the action, was shot on the south coast of New Britain (formerly Neu-Pommern), and shows three men wearing tall, conical headdresses who are dancing in circle and playing small, typically Melanesian hourglass-shaped drums at the level of their knees. The film is material is fogged but the performance is good.
Spear Dance – around 40 seconds, and also shot much closer to the action, this sequence shows a group of men, again on the south coast of New Britain, dancing back and forth with spears beside the sea or a river. Unfortunately, the film material is badly damaged. Tischner comments that these Melanesians dances are often associated with feasts for which large amounts of food is marshalled. On mainland New Guinea, he adds, as many as 800 pigs might be slaughtered, but this was exceptional even for Melanesia and certainly would not have been possibly on the materially much poorer Micronesian islands.
Pottery on the New Guinea mainland and in the Admiralty Islands – two sequences showing different stages of pottery-making. The first is about 1 min 20 seconds with two breaks, though with no significant change of angle, while the second is nearer 1 min 30 seconds. Both sequences are shot close to the subjects, though the first one particularly is fogged. Tischner comments that whereas pottery is widespread in Melanesia, it is unknown in Micronesia and most of Polynesia, where receptacles of wood and shell are used instead.
Fire making on the Admiralty Islands– a single shot of 1 min 26 seconds, also shot close to the action. The two subjects look off to someone off-screen as well as at the camera, probably because there was a certain amount of anxiety as to whether the fire would ignite before the end of the roll of film.
Weaving on St. Matthias Island– this sequence was shot on an island lying north of New Ireland (then Neu-Mecklenberg) and as such on the boundary between Melanesia and Micronesia. This is the only sequence in the assembly in which there is an obviously purposeful change of angle, clearly designed to show the weaving from both the front, in a shot of one minute, and from the side, in a further shot of 30 seconds. As weaving is unknown elsewhere in Melanesia, Tischner speculates that it has been introduced from Indonesia via Micronesia.
‘Spirit dance’ of the inland Kate – Richard Neuhauss (1909)
6:32 mins., b&w, silent
Source : A version of this film was distributed for a period by the IWF but was incorporated into the collection of the German National Library (TIB) when the IWF closed down. It has recently been made available on the TIB portal here.
Background
This film was shot by the eminent medical doctor and anthropologist Richard Neuhauss in the course of his two year visit to German New Guinea in 1908-10. As the title of the film indicates, it concerns the ‘Kate’, a highland Papuan group who then lived in the forested hinterland of the Gulf of Huon.
This name, today more usually spelt as ‘Kâte’ and interchangeable with ‘Kai’, literally means ‘forest’. In a companion text published some twenty years after Neuhauss had died, the German Melanesianist Hans Nevermann (1902-1982) explains that ‘Kai’ is the term used of them by their neighbours on the coast, the Jabim. At the time that Neuhauss was in New Guinea, the Kâte were estimated to number around 3000-4000 people.
Film Content
The technical quality of the film, both in terms of the material itself and in terms of film craft skills, is, at best, no more than modest. In terms of content, it can be divided into three parts. The first part, lasting around a minute, offers what Neuhauss himself described as a ‘study of facial expressions’ and consists of a series of head and shoulder shots of two men, standing with a white sheet behind them, as they laugh and shout.
The second part, also of roughly a minute’s duration, then documents two everyday activities: a woman cooking bananas in what appears to be a rough ceramic pot on an open wood fire, and two men (poorly framed in the left hand corner of the image) relaxing by the sea shore and smoking cigars of rolled up tobacco leaves.
The remainder of the film consists of four dances, all shot from a considerable distance and seemingly performed for the camera as there is no evidence of any local audience. The dancers are mostly finely attired with skirts and tall headdresses, and they beat out a rhythm on typically Melanesian hourglass-shaped drums. Unfortunately, the framing is again often poor, with the dancers lost over to one side of the frame.
These four dances are respectively identified in the intertitles as a ‘knee dance’ (the dancers are squatting down as they dance), a ‘war dance’ (the dancers form two lines and engage in mock combat with spears or staves) and then two ‘spirit dances’, one from the coastal region, one from inland. The headdresses in the latter case are particularly elaborate (see image above).
However, the description given by Neuhauss himself of a screening in Berlin in 1911 suggests that he shot much more than this. On this occasion, he showed around 40 minutes of material, which, in addition to the above, also included a sequence of men and women returning from the fields, the women carrying heavy burdens in nets hanging from their foreheads, the men carrying only their weapons in case of attack. Other topics included the processing of sago and coconut , fishing from canoes, clearing the rainforest and the crossing of a rushing mountain stream by a bridge made of lianas. What has happened to all this additional material is not clear, but it seems quite probable that it has been lost.
By the time that Nevermann wrote his companion text in the 1930s, the way of life portrayed in the film had been radically changed through the combined impact of missionaries and of incoming miners attracted by the discovery of gold deposits in the area.
Source : three extracts from this material, as well as more general information about the tjintjingalla ceremony are available on the Museums Victoria website here
Although Spencer shot considerably more footage of the Arrernte, most of this was of secret ceremonies and therefore is not now normally available to anyone other than initiated Arrernte men. The tjintjingalla, on the other hand, was neither sacred, nor secret and was open to women and children, as well as to modern viewers.
This material was shot in April 1901 and is one of the earliest sets of moving images made of Aboriginal people.
Source : This footage has been put up on YouTube by the Tiwi Land Council and is viewable here
This is remarkably early footage of a Tiwi pukumani, a funeral event conventionally held two to six months after a person’s burial during which a number of poles, as seen in the film, are erected in commemoration of the deceased.
Although this footage is not attributed on the YouTube site, there can be little doubt that it was taken by W. Baldwin Spencer since he was travelling in this region of Australia with his camera at this time, and because the wooded setting is very similar that of certain photographs that he took around this time, possibly on the same occasion.
Beatrice Blackwood was one of the few women to shoot ethnographic film footage before the Second World War. At the time that she shot this material in 1936-37, she was a member of staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford.
The principal purpose of her trip to the highland interior of Morobe Province in New Guinea was to make a collection of the artefacts produced by the Anga people (then often referred to as the ‘Kukukuku’), in particular their stone tools. She shot the film footage, not to make a free-standing film as such, but simply to document how Anga artefacts were made with a view to using this footage for research purposes or to support the display of the material that she brought back.
In addition to the making of stone tools and other artefacts, Blackwood also shoot footage on a number of other topics, including fire-making, women working in their yam gardens and looking after their children, as well everyday views of village life. A particularly intriguing sequence shows some boys swinging bull roarers in the forest prior to an initiation ceremony though, sadly, she was not then permitted to film the ceremony itself.
The final part of Blackwood’s material concerns various groups living around Salamaua, on the coast of Morobe Province, and across the sea on the southwestern shore of New Britain. Topics of particular interest covered in this part of the footage include the manufacture of barkcloth and the binding of a baby’s head in order to elongate it. Her footage concludes with the dramatic arrival by canoe of some splendidly decorated men who have come to celebrate the coronation of King George VI at a ceremony organised by the local colonial district officer.
The camera that Blackwood was using, the 16mm Simplex Pockette was designed for the amateur market, and was advertised as being the first commercial camera that took pre-loaded cassettes of film. However, being an amateur model, the lens was not of superior quality, which would account for the somewhat soft images of Blackwood’s material. It is also unlikely that she had had any training in the use of the camera.
But regardless of its technical deficencies, Blackwood’s footage is neverthless of both ethnographic and historical interest.
For further background see the film Captured by Women, directed by Alison Kahn, also available on the Pitt Rivers Museum website here.
A longer version entitled With the Headhunters in Papua was released in 1923. National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra. Clips from the original 1921 version reconstructed in 1979 are available at http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/pearls-and-savages/
Paddle Dance
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