Naga porter – ‘Naga Hills, early colour footage’ (1939) – dir. Ursula Graham Bower
13 mins., colour, silent with English inter titles
Source : accompanied by ethnographic notes, this film is viewable here, where it is also downloadable. A version without ethnographic notes is available on YouTube here.
Unfortunately, these versions appear to have been transferred to a digital format at an incorrect speed. Ursula Graham Bower would have shot her material at 16-18fps, which was the standard speed for 16mm cameras in the 1930s, but it would appear that this material has been transferred at the more recent standard of 24 or 25fps, with the result that the movements of the subjects are unnaturally rapid.
Content : although this material has clearly been edited, and there are some carefully made inter titles, there is no principal title, nor credits. Graham Bower’s field diaries indicate that this is the first material that she shot on colour film, which was the then relatively recently released Kodachrome.
The topics that she covers are not ambitious. The first shot shows people walking along a road in a town, probably an experimental shot before she left for the field. Thereafter, there is an intimate scene of her Naga porters inspecting her camera bag, as well as some more ethnographic, though brief, sequences of weaving, boys wrestling and some girls singing. There is a more extended sequence of a mock head-hunting raid, while the footage ends with some competitive spear-throwing.
Tangkhul spring festival, Ukhrul – ‘Naga Hills, festivals and other footage’ (1938-39) – dir. Ursula Graham Bower
17 mins., b&w, silent with English intertitles
Source : a version of this footage, along with ethnographic annotations, is available on the University of Cambridge SMS site here, where it is downloadable. The same version, without annotations, is also available on YouTube here.
This material can also be found in a third form on the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) Film Collection site here, where it comprises the first 17 minutes of “Culture and Crafts in Manipur, northeast India (1939) – Part 1”.
The Cambridge version is the best from a technical point of view also the best supported ethnographically. But, unfortunately, it appears to have been transferred to a digital format at an incorrect speed. Ursula Graham Bower would have shot the material at 16-18fps, the standard speed for 16mm cameras in the 1930s, but it would appear that the material has been transferred at the later standard rate of 24-25fps, with the result that movements of the subjects are unnaturally rapid.
Although the PRM version is not accompanied by detailed ethnographic notes, it does appear to have been transferred at the correct speed.
Content : Ursula Graham Bower’s diary entries indicate that this material was shot in 1938 – 1939 when she was travelling in the Naga Hills, Manipur State, Northeast India. The original footage has clearly been edited, and there are even well-made intertitles, but there is no principal title or end credits.
The material is generally well shot and covers a range of diverse topics: along with sequences of traditional festivals and a wedding procession, there are some more personal sequences, such as one showing Graham Bower’s porters inspecting her camera accessories, and another of some European women learning to perform an indigenous dance on a lawn in front of a bungalow in the colonial town of Imphal.
Tangkhul pottery, Nungbi Khunou village – ‘Naga Hills, crafts footage’ (1938-39) – dir. Ursula Graham Bower
33 mins., b&w, silent, with intertitles in English
Source : a single unified version of this footage, with ethnographic annotations, is available on the University of Cambridge SMS site here, where it is downloadable. The same version, without annotations, is also available on YouTube here.
This material can also be found in a third form on the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) Film Collection site, but split over two different entries: the last ten minutes of Part 1 of “Culture and Crafts in Manipur, northeast India (1939)” and the whole of Part 2. Both parts can be accessed here.
The Cambridge version is the best supported technically and ethnographically but, unfortunately, it appears to have been transferred to a digital format at the wrong speed. Ursula Graham Bower would have shot the material at 16-18fps, which was the standard speed for 16mm cameras in the 1930s. But it seems that the material on the Cambridge site has been transferred at the more modern standard rate of 24- 25fps, with the result that the movements of the subjects are unnaturally rapid.
By contrast, although the PRM version is in other ways somewhat less well presented, it does appear to have been transferred at the correct speed.
Content : Ursula Graham Bower’s diary entries indicate that this material was shot between November 1938 and March 1939 as she was travelling through the Naga Hills of Manipur state, Northeast India. The original footage has clearly been edited, and there are even well-made inter titles, but there is no principal title or end credits.
The material, which is well shot, consists of a straightforward sequence of craft processes, as practised by various Naga subgroups: weaving using backstrap looms, pottery, and brass casting using the ‘cire-perdu’ method.
Source : this film can be viewed on the BFI site here
A remarkable early film of a durbar held in Delhi around the turn of the year 1902-03. The film does what the durbar itself was meant to do, namely, offer an extravagant display of wealth and power, as some sixty sumptuously decorated elephants file past the camera, bearing howdahs where equally sumptuously dressed human figures are sitting.
But although the form of the display, as well as most of the participants, might be associated with the traditional princely states of India, in the howdahs of the first two elephants, leading the display, are British officers in their uniforms and white helmets. This was because, notwithstanding its Indian appearance, this durbar had been organised by the colonial government to celebrate the accession to the British throne of Edward VII, who thereby also became ‘Emperor of India’.
A number of different film production companies covered the diverse aspects of the durbar, which went on for two weeks. Another film offering a view of the more military procession that opened the durbar is also available on the BFI site here.
Although this was as much a political as a cultural event, it is arguable that these accounts of the 1902-03 durbar may constitute the first films of ethnographic interest shot in India or South Asia more generally.
A durbar on a similar scale, if not greater, was held to celebrate the accession of George V in 1912, and on this occasion, the King himself, and his Queen, attended in person. A record of this too is available on the BFI site here.
Cover of the book describing the results of Weule’s research trip, published in 1908.
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.
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.
Daily life in the Apalai-Wayana village of Tucano – Yopi : chez les Indiens de Brésil (1945) – Felix Speiser/ Georges Lobsiger
75 mins., b&w, sound, with voice-over commentary in French and extradiegetic music. Titles and intertitles in French, with German subtitles available in some versions.
Production: uncertain, though possibly Les Films Indépendents S.A., the company of the Swiss producer Max Linder.
Source: Archival copies are held by the Cinémathèque suisse. Video copies may consulted at the Musée d’ethnographie, Geneva and the Museum der Kulturen, Basle. In addition, the Museum der Kulturen holds around 500m (approx. 30 mins) of fragmentary material that appears to have been part of one or more earlier versions.
Background
Note: it was not possible to view this film for The Silent Time Machine project. This entry is based primarily on an article by the Swiss film historian, Roland Cosandey (see ‘Texts’ below).
This film was cut from material originally shot in 1924 by the leading Swiss anthropologist, Felix Speiser, and his travel companion, Arnold Deuber, in Tucano, an Apalai-Wayana village at the headwaters of Paru River, a tributary of the lower Amazon, in Pará state, northern Brazil.
Speiser was already established as the Professor of Ethnology at the University of Basle while Deuber was a dentist by profession, and also from Basle. Up until this point, Speiser had carried out all his research in Melanesia but it seems that he decided to do some comparative work and turned to Theodor Koch-Grünberg, the leading German Americanist, for advice.
Koch-Grünberg presumably encouraged him to work in Amazonia since they travelled to Brazil together, on a ship departing from Liverpool in June 1924. While Speiser and Deuber stopped off at Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon river, Koch-Grünberg continued to Manaus in order to join the Branco-Uraricoera expedition being prepared by the American amateur geographer, A. Hamilton Rice. (Three months later, shortly after the Rice expedition began, Koch-Grünberg contracted malaria and died).
Due the political unrest then affecting the region, Speiser and Deuber were obliged to remain in Belém for longer than they expected. During this time, they met up with Yopi, the headman of Tucano and five Apalai companions, and agreed to go with them on their return to their village. They appear to have remained in Tucano for a period of around six weeks and to have shot at least two hours of silent footage.
What Speiser did with this footage once he returned to Basle is unclear, though he certainly developed it and organised it into various categories. He may have used it in his teaching and may even have shown it around the local Kulturfilm circuit in Basle (i.e. to non-academic but educated audiences).
At some point during the Second World War, when the importation of films about exotic places was highly restricted in Switzerland, Speiser appears to have been approached by Georges Lobsiger (1903-1988), a civil servant with an active accademic interest in Americanist matters, and a film producer, Max Linder, with a view to producing a film from his material aimed at popular audiences.
With a commentary scripted and performed in French by Lobsiger himself, and a music track composed by the Swiss musician, Alexander Krannhais (1908-1961), this film was released in 1945.
It is not clear what role, if any, Speiser himself played in the editing. However, in his correspondence with Koch-Grünberg prior to going to Brazil, Speiser had encouraged his German colleague to propose the making of a film to Hamilton Rice, aimed at popular audiences, as a means of raising funds to support his research (Fuhrmann 2013, p.53n17).
In the event, the film of the Rice expedition was made by the Brazilian documentarist, Silvino Santos. But given that he made such a proposal to Koch-Grünberg, it seems very likely that Speiser would have approved of the plan by Lobsiger and Linder to use his footage for a similar purpose.
Film content
As described by Roland Cosandey, Yopi conforms to the conventional expedition film format of the period. By using the name of the headman of the Apalai village as the principal title of the film, the producers may have been trying to suggest that Yopi was a film of the same kind as Nanook of the North, which had enjoyed great commercial success.
But, in fact, Yopi the headman does not play a particularly prominent role in the film. Meanwhile, the photographs and productions stills of the film reproduced by Cosandey suggest that the cinematographic skills of Speiser and Deuber were very much more modest than those of Robert Flaherty.
The film begins by documenting various stages of the journey upstream through the rapids of the Paru river. The film-makers eventually reachTucano, which proves to be a small village of less than twenty people.
The film then documents their day-to-day life, including subsistence and craft activities, the daily bathing of the women in the river, the collective meal of the men and a healing session in which a shaman deals with a gum abscess.
Children are shown learning various life skills, such as shooting with bow and arrow, avoiding snakes, climbing trees. The making of a ceremonial mask is followed by a masked dance.
The film concludes with scenes of the return downstream, ending at the last set of rapids before the Amazon river itself.
A “relaxed” 1940s North American mother dries her baby after her bath – ‘Bathing Babies in Three Cultures’ (1954) – dir. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead
12 mins., b&w, silent with English voice-over narration by Margaret Mead
This is one of seven films that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead shot in Bali and New Guinea during their fieldwork there in the years 1936-39. All but one of these films, Learning to Dance in Bali, formed part of a series entitled Character Formation in Different Cultures, and focused particularly on parent-child relations.
By the time that these films were edited, mostly in the early 1950s, Mead and Bateson had gone their separate ways both professionally and personally, and the editing was supervised exclusively by Mead, assisted by the editor Josef Bohmer. However, even though Bateson was not involved in the editing, Mead insisted that his name should appear in the credits, and even be put first in accordance with alphabetical principles.
This is one of two comparative films in the Character Formation series (the other being Childhood Rivalry). This film compares that the way in which mothers bathe their babies in three different cultural settings: in a bowl in the open air in a highland village in Bali, at the edge of the Sepik River in New Guinea, and in two different North American bathrooms in two different decades (the 1930s baby being a boy, the 1940s baby being a girl).
This one of the seven films that Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead shot in Bali and New Guinea during their fieldwork there in the years 1936-39. All but one of these films, Learning to Dance in Bali, formed part of a series entitled Character Formation in Different Cultures, and focused particularly on parent-child relations.
By the time that these films were edited, mostly in the early 1950s, Mead and Bateson had gone their separate ways both professionally and personally, and the editing was supervised exclusively by Mead, assisted by the editor Josef Bohmer. However, even though Bateson was not involved in the editing, Mead insisted that his name should appear in the credits, and even be put first in accordance with alphabetical principles.
This is one of two films in the Character Formation series that were comparative (the other being Bathing Babies in Three Cultures). It shows children of the same age in two cultures responding differently to their mother attending to another baby, to the ear-piercing of a younger sibling, and to the experimental presentation of a doll. Where the Balinese mother handles sibling rivalry by theatrical teasing of her own child and conspicuous attention to other babies, the mother from the New Guinea people known as the Iatmul, makes every effort to keep her own child from feeling jealous, even when nursing a new born infant.
A film in two parts, but involving some of the same dancers. Although the film is held within the Ananda Coomaraswamy Collection in the NAFC, the quality of both the stock and the shooting seems to be rather better than in the films that Ananda Coomaraswamy shot himself. This suggests that this may be a film that Coomaraswamy bought in, or alternatively, asked a professional cameraperson to shoot.
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