A Resource for the Study of Early Ethnographic Film
27 mins., b&w.
Source: ?
This film was made in the course of an expedition to India by George Amos Dorsey, then Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago.
It has been described by Marcus Banks (2007:64) as probably the only substantial non-fiction film shot in India prior to 1920.
Text: Banks 2007
24 mins., b&w, some post-synchronised sounds and English voice-over.
Source: this film may be viewed here.
This is a television film based on footage that Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf shot during an expedition that he made in 1962 with this wife Elisabeth (‘Betty’) to a then-remote high altitude district of central Nepal, known as ‘Dolpo’, close to the border with Tibet. It was “presented” – i.e. the editing was overseen – by Joan Duff for the BBC series, Travellers Tales, while the series editor was Brian Branston, who worked with Haimendorf on a number of BBC television projects. An archival version of the BBC television schedule for 1965, available here, indicates that The Land of the Dolpo was broadcast in September of that year.
The voice-over commentary may now seem very dated, but this film includes some remarkable footage of the distinctive Bon Buddhist practices of the region, as well as of horse-racing at a traditional fair in the Muktinath valley. It is also of particular historical interest as it includes footage of a group of refugees recently arrived from Tibet following the imposition of Chinese direct rule.
The original rushes are also available, in rather better quality, via the Haimendorf playlist on Alan MacFarlane’s ayabaya website here. See, among possible others, films nos. 1, 60, 70, 72-74, 80-83, 86-87.
48 mins, colour, voice-over in English, with some post-synchronised sound.
Source : this film can be downloaded from the Digital Himalayas website here
This is a BBC television programme, jointly co-produced with the Bavarian television station, Bayarischer Rundfunk, that is extensively based on footage shot by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf among the Konyak and Wanchu Naga of North East India (the former head hunters of the title) as well as among the Apa Tani of the same region (who did not hunt heads). It was “presented” for television – in effect, the editing of the footage was overseen – by Anne Winder, who would later become a leading BBC producer. An archival version of the BBC television schedule for 1972, available here, indicates that it was broadcast as part of The World About Us series in January of that year.
The film is structured around Haimendorf’s return visit in 1971 to a region that he had first visited in the 1930s and he provides a framing voice-over in his aristocratic Germanic accent. The film exudes the same general ethos as the early Disappearing World films that were being broadcast by Granada Television around the same time, though Haimendorf’s archival footage marks it out as distinctive.
Notwithstanding the prioritising of the Naga in the general story-line of the film as well as the title, the Apa Tani archival material is equally interesting, particularly the footage of the traditional aerial acrobatics performed on the occasion of the Spring Festival. Some of the Naga footage had previously appeared in Wanchu Nagas (1962).
Text : Macfarlane 2010
30 mins., b&w, voice-over in English. Production: BBC Television.
Source : this film can be viewed here
This is a television film based on footage shot by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf in the course of a lengthy expedition during which, accompanied by his wife, Elisabeth (‘Betty’), and a team of porters, he travelled overland from Gorkha in western Nepal, through Katmandu, right across to the eastern frontier with the Darjeeling District of India. The title is somewhat misleading in that the film includes scenes not only of the life of the Gurkhas, but also of other groups that the expedition visited along the way, including the Gurung, the Tamang, the Sherpa and the Rai. The material was “presented” – that is, ordered and edited – by the BBC producer, Brian Branston, who worked on several programmes with Haimendorf, while the voice-over, which was scripted by Haimendorf himself, was performed by the then 33-year-old David Attenborough. An archival copy of the BBC television schedules, available here, indicates that this programme was first broadcast in August 1959.
At least part of the footage on which the Sherpa sequences in the film are based is available independently on the web, under the title Among the Sherpas of Nepal, here. Probably on account of the fact that it is in colour, this footage is sometimes erroneously dated to the 1970s, but as it appears in Land of the Gurkhas, it must have shot before 1959. Interestingly, when incorporated into this film, the Sherpa footage was not only transferred to black and white stock (as colour television did not exist in the UK at that time), but was also horizontally “flipped”, so that the right hand part of the image appears on the left and vice versa. The reason why this was done is unclear, but it may have been a by-product of copying from the original colour stock to monochrome stock.
Text: Macfarlane 2010
16 mins., colour, silent
Source: viewable on-line here
An ethnographic expedition film shot by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, who studied the Naga over many years. However, it is clear that Haimendorf did not know the subjects of this film at all well: in the opening sequence, some older women hide from the camera, and there are a number of shots of villages and groups of people taken at considerable distance. In another sequence, Fürer-Haimendorf hands out small gifts to the subjects from behind the camera. The film ends with a sequence of an aeroplane dropping supplies.
Although the film has clearly been edited, beginning and ending with general shots of the mountain environment, there is no systematically developed narrative. Instead, the film offers a series of sequences, showing traditional house styles, some craft activity or simply groups of people standing in front of the camera. Towards the end of the film, the subjects perform a mock assault on an enemy, apparently in some government post, since they creep along a neatly defined stone-lined path.
However, within these limitations, this film offers some remarkable images of traditional Naga dress and architecture. There is also a very interesting sequence of a group of men striking a vast slit gong.
Texts: see Fürer-Haimendorf 1969, and also the website, The Nagas: Hill Peoples of Northeast India which may be accessed here.
9:08 mins., b&w, silent.
Production : Pathé and the Medizinisch-Kinematographischen Universitäts-Institut.
Source : Gaumont-Pathé Archives
This is a short film of a high technical standard that offers a series of portraits – remarkably intimate for the period – of artisans (embroiderers, barbers, lantern-makers) and also of beggars in the street, before concluding with a sequence of open-air stalls selling bowls of steaming food.
42 mins, b&w, silent
Source : A version of this film, without introductory titles, is held by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and is available via its website here. A similar version is also held by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is available here.
Short assemblies of this and other footage clearly shot at the same time can also be found – without authorial attribution – on the website of the Gaumont-Pathé Archives (by entering ‘Chine’ and ‘<1910’ into the search engine).
This film is based on a compilation of footage shot by the French Consul, Auguste François, in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, southwest China, in the years 1901-1904. This footage appears to be the first moving images to be shot in China. Although this compilation was released in 1905, some parts of it may have been released earlier.
This film offers a rich account of everyday life in and around Kunming in the last years of the Qing dynasty that is remarkable both for its technical quality and ethnographic variety. In effect, it is a sort of miniature precursor to the ‘city symphonies’ of the 1920s.
9 mins, b&w, silent.
Source : Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, viewable here
Probably shot in 1921, in Ghana (then the Gold Coast), by R.S. Rattray, a British colonial civil servant who wrote a number of important early ethnographic works on the Ashanti. The first part of this footage shows certain scenes from one or possibly more than one Ashanti adae ceremony, in which the spirits of deceased rulers are propitiated with animal sacrifices and asked for favours. In the latter part of the ceremony, the current ruler parades in public, accompanied by his officials, and protected from the sun by large velvet and silk umbrellas.
The remainder of the footage shows mpadua rafts being used on Lake Bosumtwi. These rafts consist of logs made of a very light wood: these logs cannot be hollowed out, and must be propelled by arms rather than with a paddle, since it is considered that this would be offensive to Twe, the spirit guardian of the lake.
The ceremonial footage is of historical significance because it is relatively early and there are interesting comparisons to be made with similar ceremonies involving traditional local rulers shot a decade later by Melville Herskovits among the Ashanti and by Frédéric Gadmer in Dahomey (now Bénin). But the technical quality of the material is uneven, and the coverage of the ceremony is patchy.
78 mins., b&w, sound – non-diegetic music and voice-over
Production : Chinese Academy of Sciences. This film is one of the most substantial films in the Chinese Historical Ethnographic Film Series.
Others involved in the direction of this film were Zhao Fuxing, Lu Guangtian, Qiu Pu and Karsten Krüger.
Content – This film concerns the Oroqen, a nomadic group of hunters and gatherers in Northeast China, and one the smallest ethnic minorities in the country. It presents scenes of their everyday life, material culture, social organisation and their relationship with Anda traders. There are also sequences about their shamanistic rituals as well as about their marriage and funeral ceremonies.
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
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