By Aeroplane to Pygmyland footage (1926-27/1960s) – dir. Matthew Stirling

approx. 250 min., b&w, original silent, English voice-over added later.

Production : Smithsonian Institution.

Source : HSFA, Smithsonian (OC-87.4.1) Approx. 120 mins. available on-line here.

Footage shot by cinematographer Richard Peck and/or anthropologist Matthew Stirling, leader of a large multidisciplinary Dutch and American scientific expedition in 1926-27 to what was then Netherlands New Guinea (and is now Papua or West Papua).

This footage was used to cut a free-standing film with the title By Aeroplane to Pygmyland (or some slight variation, e.g. Airplane, Pigmy Land etc.), which Stirling used to support his lecture tours in the years following the expedition. Unfortunately, this was irreparably damaged in a flood.

A copy of the Dutch version of the film with the title Wonderen Uit Pygmyland( Marvels from Pygmyland) is held by the Netherlands Film Archive in Amsterdam and an interpositive copy of that surviving film has also been deposited in the HSFA. An abridged version, entitled Expeditie door Nieuw-Guinea 1926  (80 mins.) was released by the Netherlands Film Museum in 1995.

Although this footage is readily accessible on-line, with excellent additional material, including a commentary by Stirling himself recorded in the 1960s, the sequences of ethnographic interest are clearly based on no more than superficial acquaintance with the indigenous Papuan subjects, the supposed ‘pygmies’ of the title.

Text:  Taylor 2006

Torres Strait expedition footage (1898) – Alfred C. Haddon

This material was probably shot on 5 and 6 September 1898 on Murray Island, today known as Mer, one of the most easterly islands in the archipelago lying between Papua New Guinea and the tip of Queensland, Australia.

The filmmaker was Alfred C. Haddon, a zoologist and leader of a multidisciplinary University of Cambridge scientific expedition to the archipelago. He used a hand-cranked 35mm N&G Kinematograph, which,  to his great frustration, kept jamming. Even so, he managed to film around four minutes of material.

This appears to represent the first footage ever shot in the course of academic field research with explicit ethnographic objectives. However, as an example  of ethnographic film more broadly defined as the filmic representation of customary practises in their original setting, it is preceded in time by the many Lumière films shot both in France and elsewhere from 1895 onwards and also by footage shot in Arizona in August 1898 by Burton Holmes and Oscar Depue of the Hopi Snake Dance as well as of a Navajo “tournament”.

Content

The footage can be subdivided into four different types:

(a) a brief shot of three men engaged in traditional fire making. This is 50 seconds long.  Unfortunately the fire did not ignite before the shot ran out.

(b) three consecutive shots of Mer Islanders dancing at a beach-side location. The first shot is 45 seconds long, but the others are much shorter, suggesting the camera jammed for these two shots.

(c) four shots of a group of four Aboriginal men dancing in the same location as the Mer Islanders, accompanied by a fifth man beating out time on a pole. These four shots total some 65 seconds

(d) a single shot of three men wearing masks and skirts, and dancing in a circle before the camera. This dance represents the culminating moment of a male initiation ceremony traditionally dedicated to the Mer Island culture hero Malo-Bomai. This footage is viewable here.

Of all these dances, it is the last that is by far the most interesting. As explained in the text cited below, the dance shown in this sequence had long been abandoned under missionary influence and the masks that the dancers are wearing were made of cardboard since the original masks had been destroyed.

The precise significance of the dance was not determined by Haddon himself, but for reasons expounded in the text below, on the basis of the local legends reproduced in the Expedition reports, there is good reason to believe that the dancers are re-enacting the progress of Malo-Bomai as he proceeded around the islands of the archipelago for the first time.

A particularly interesting further feature, given that this sequence reproduces the dance traditionally performed at the culmination of the male initiation ceremony,  is that the dancers appear to be wearing skirts of the kind normally worn only by women. In the text below, it is suggested that this may linked to a theme that recurs frequently in the ethnographic  literature on Melanesia, whereby the boundaries between gender identities are considered highly malleable, particularly under the special ritual conditions of an initiation ceremony.

Text : Long and Laughren 1993, Henley 2013b

Neu-Guinea (in memoriam Prof. Dr. Rudolf Pöch) (1904-06/1958) – dir. Paul Spindler

b&w, sound, 15 mins. German voice-over commentary.

Production: SHB Film – Vienna.

Source : Austrian Film-Archiv

This film was made by Paul Spindler, curator of the anthropological collection at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Originally released in 16mm, it describes the work of Rudolf Pöch in New Guinea during his expedition in 1904-1906, incorporating some of the 35mm film footage that Pöch shot during this expedition, as well as some of his photographs.

The film footage  consists mainly of short descriptive sequences of day-to-day life in the Motu and Koita village cluster of Hanuabada, close to Port Moresby. Although it is clear from Pöch’s own 1907 account of the expedition that he shot more footage in New Guinea than is shown in this film, these appear to be the only sequences to have survived.

Texts: Pöch 1907a and 1907b, Spindler 1974, Niles 2000

© 2018 Paul Henley