Category: Films

9 min., shot in 16mm colour stock. Extra-diegetic sound of Native chanting and a brief passage of voice-over commentary in English.

Production: Produced by Orbit Films, Seattle, for distribution through Dimensions Inc.

Source : Now distributed through Documentary Educational Resources (DER), details here. A black-and-white print is viewable on YouTube here.

Background: For general background to the making of a series of films about the Kwakwaka’wakw by Orbit films and the involvement of Robert Gardner, see the entry for Blunden Harbour.

This film was also shot in Blunden Harbour, a small village on the coast of the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. Although Gardner was the producer and also performed the voice-over, he did not know how to operate a moving image camera at this stage of his career and was not present during the shooting.

As with Blunden Harbour, the cinematography is credited to William Heick. The sound-recording is credited to Morris Dowd but he was not present for the shoot either. The Native chanting on the soundtrack appears to have been recorded for Fort Rupert, an earlier film produced by Orbit Films at the eponymous village on Vancouver Island, on the other side of Queen Charlotte Strait from Blunden Harbour.

It is not credited, but there is also a brief passage of voice-over performed by Gardner.

This film was shot on the same occasion as the closing sequence of Blunden Harbour. This shows a number of winter ceremony (‘potlatch’) dances performed in the village’s Big House at the filmmakers’ request and paid for by them.  In Dances of the Kwakiutl, both the performers and the dances are mostly the same, though they are presented in a different order and at different lengths. The singers and even certain audience members are common to both.

The quality of the image is very different in the two films: the Blunden Harbour sequence was shot in black-and-white, probably 35mm, and the quality is superb while this film was shot on 16mm colour stock and the quality is less than perfect, probably on account of the lack of illumination.

Although shots of some dancers are unique to Dances of the Kwakiutl, most shots in the film seem to have been taken simultaneously with shots of the same dancers in the Blunden Harbour sequence, albeit from a different angle. But the cinematographic style of these duplicate shots is very different: it is more remote and much less confident.

This suggests that much of Dances of the Kwakiutl was shot by a second cameraman. If so, this would probably have been Heick’s assistant, Pierre Jacquemin. Though he is not named in this film’s credits, Jacquemin is named in the credits of Blunden Harbour, so he clearly knew how to shoot.

Content: The film opens with a sequence showing a woman dancer wearing a hamatsa or “cannibal bird” mask. The voice-over explains that these are winter ceremony dances, but they are now performed for personal rather than ceremonial reasons.

The shooting is intimate and confident. Significantly, this mask does not appear in Blunden Harbour, suggesting that this part of the performance was shot by Heick before handing the 16mm colour camera over to the less experienced Jacquemin, thereby leaving himself free to shoot other aspects of the performance on 35mm  black and white stock.

After a lengthy sequence of a dancer masked as bukwus, the wild man of the forest, which is shot from afar, there is a return to a more intimate style, first to show chief Willie Seaweed, making a short declaration, then to another hamatsa dance, featuring a larger and more elaborate mask, the “double cannibal bird” that faces both forwards and backwards and has a moveable lower beak.

Again, this mask is absent from Blunden Harbour suggesting that this sequence would have been shot by Heick.This mask hides the dancer’s face, but from his naked legs and energetic movement, it is clear that the dancer is male. In fact, he is Joe Seaward, son of Willie Seaward, who had carved the masked around 1915.

There is then a return to the more distant style for the dances featuring Owl and Hawk masks, both worn by Joe Seaward, who reveals himself and dances without a mask for a spell. The transitions from one dance to another are covered by cutaways to the audience, but again these are much more distant than in the equivalent cutaways in Blunden Harbour.

Finally, there is a sequence featuring dancers wearing a mask on their heads depicting the sun with a bird-like face and a cape covered in ermine skins: the first is again Joe Seaward but then, following a cutaway to the drums being struck, we see an older woman dancing in the same costume, but in a more sedate manner.

Following a close-up of her face, she leaves shot and the end title comes up.

Texts: Jacknis 2000: 113, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 318-319, MacDonald 2015: 52-54.

Approx. 51 mins, b&w 16mm footage. Silent. Intertitles in English.

Source : In 1973, an edited version of this footage, prepared by the late art historian Bill Holm (1925-2020), of the Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle, was released in the from a 55 min. documentary entitledThe Kwakiutl of British Columbia. This was accompanied by an extensive explanatory text based on notes by the original film-maker, Franz Boas, and interviews with still-surviving participants. 

Some of this footage, approx. 15 mins,  is held by the NAFC (formerly HSFA) under catalogue entry NA-87.17.4: Northwest Coast Indian Dance.

Since 2018, the Bill Holm Center at the Burke Museum, University of Washington, has been developing a project in collaboration with  the Kwakwaka’wakw community to bring all Boas’s films and audio recordings together into a digital book to be published by Washington University Press. This is now nearing completion. For further details see here.

Background: This footage was shot by Franz Boas, a foundational figure in the history of US anthropology who spent many years researching the social and cultural life of the group whom he called the Kwakiutl but who are now more generally referred to as the Kwakwaka’wakw.

It was shot at Fort Rupert (Tsaxis), on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, on Boas’s last field trip to the Kwakwaka’wakw in the winter of 1930-1931. He also made recordings on a wax cylinder phonograph. 

Boas’s intention was not to produce a documentary with a narrative, but rather raw documentation footage that would allow him to explore the relationship between ‘motor behaviour’ (i.e. bodily movement) and dancing and singing among the Kwakwaka’wakw, one of his long-standing research interests.

All the material was performed at Boas’s request, out of its normal context, sometimes in the yard of a European-style house, at other times in open countryside with a palisade or iconic totem pole in the background.

Although the subjects often wear traditional dress, other figures in modern Euro-American dress are also sometimes plainly in shot (as in the case of the man beating time in the frame grab at the head of this entry). The phonograph is also visible  in some shots, as is Julia Averkieva, Boas’s field assistant, when she moves into one shot to wind it up.

As Boas’s  film-making skills were very limited – understandably since he appears to have had no prior training – the technical quality of the material is very poor: there are frequent jump cuts and the exposure level is often incorrect.

Both conceptually and technologically, this use of the moving image camera for ethnographic purposes was very old-fashioned by 1930 and not dissimilar to the “chronophotographic” project of Regnault and Comte when they filmed African locomotion in Paris in 1895.

In the event, Boas never used this footage to write up any conclusions, in part because he believed, erroneously, that it had been stolen.  What had been stolen, however, were the wax cylinder sound recordings.

Content: A substantial part of the footage consists of shots of dances – seventeen in total. The Hamatsa Cannibal Dance is demonstrated by men while women demonstrate a number of dances, including the Summer, Salmon, Paddle, Bird, and the Woman’s Cannibal dances.

The Salmon dance is demonstrated by Agnes Hunt, the daughter of Boas’s principal informant, George Hunt, while the Woman’s Cannibal Dance is demonstrated by his daughter Mary and is viewable here (see also the image at the head of this entry).

Also demonstrated were examples of chiefly competitive oratory, a healing ceremony,  some craft processes (including wood carving, basket weaving as well as fishing and gathering practices) and children’s games.

Texts: Ruby 1980, Jacknis 1987, Morris 1994: 55-66, Jacknis 2000: 103, Griffiths 2002: 304-309, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 311-315, Henley 2020:66-67.