Source : Viewable on the Library of Congress website here
Along with Buffalo Dance, this is one of two films of Sioux dancers that were shot in the Edison ‘Black Maria’ studio in New Jersey on 24 September 1894. These two films are generally regarded as offering the first moving images of the Native peoples of America. The producer-director was W. K-L. Dickson while the cameraman was William Heise.
The Sioux subjects were members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show – a sign to this effect is just visible on the bottom right hand corner of the image. The show was about to depart on a European tour and it has been suggested that these films might therefore have been made for promotional purposes.
The Edison catalogue comments “One of the most peculiar customs of the Sioux Tribe is here shown, the dancers being genuine Sioux Indians, in full war paint and war costumes”.
However, the authenticity of the performance is questionable. It is highly unlikely that it had any meaningful connection to the millenarian Ghost Dance that developed among the Sioux after the killing of Chief Sitting Bull and 200 of his warriors in December 1890.
Source : Viewable on the Library of Congress website here
Along with Ghost Dance, this is one of two films of Sioux performers that were shot in the Edison ‘Black Maria’ studio in East Orange, New Jersey on 24 September 1894. These two films are generally considered to constitute the very first moving images of North American First Nations people.
The producer-director was W. K-L. Dickson while the cameraman was William Heise. In some sources, this film is erroneously referred to as Indian War Council.
The names of the dancers were Last Horse, Parts-His-Hair and Hair-Coat : the name of the musician accompanying them is unknown. All of them were members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and they seem to be quite accustomed to performing for a public since one of them very pointedly looks at the camera.
The show was about to depart on a European tour, so it has been suggested that these films might therefore have been made for promotional purposes.
The Thunderbird dances in the prow of one of three canoes arriving for the wedding party. Frame grab from the film.
The original film, now lost, was probably around 90 minutes in duration. It was shot in b&w 35mm stock, tinted at postproduction and carried an extra-diegetic musical score. It featured a large number of melodramatic intertitles, in English, many of which supposedly reported the characters’ speech.
Production/ Background: This film concerns the Kwakwaka’wakw people of northeastern Vancouver Island, Canada, and adjacent parts of the British Columbia mainland, who were known for many years as the Kwakiutl, following the example of the leading US anthropologist, Franz Boas (1858-1942), who studied them for many years,
As originally conceived by its director, Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), this film was a commercial melodrama through which he hoped to raise money, in the form of box-office receipts, to finance The North American Indian, his celebrated twenty-volume encyclopaedic endeavour to assemble a photographic record of the traditional ways of life of the Native peoples of the subcontinent.
Curtis’s production base was Fort Rupert (Tsaxis), a village on the northeastern coast of Vancouver Island, and then the largest Kwakwaka’wakw settlement. However, most of the film was shot in a specially constructed set on a small island, Deer Island, a few hundred metres offshore from Fort Rupert.
On the left, Deer Island, with the adjacent smaller Eagle Island, in May 2019. The outskirts of Fort Rupert are visible on the right.
Here Curtis erected house fronts and totem poles to evoke a Kwakwaka’wakw village as it would have been before they had extensive contact with Europeans.
But despite great expenditure in both effort and money, the film was a commercial failure and after a short run was withdrawn from circulation. It was then lost for many years, until a much deteriorated copy was rediscovered in a skip and donated to the Field Museum in Chicago in 1947. To save this copy from further decay, it was transferred to 16mm film.
In the 1960s, this material was re-edited by Bill Holm (1925-2020) and George Quimby (1913-2003) of the Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle. This version was released in 1973 as In the Land of the War Canoes, with a running time of 47 minutes.
Holm and Quimby changed the title of the film as they believed it overemphasised the importance of head-hunting among the Kwakwaka’wakw, and replaced the many melodramatic intertitles with fewer and more soberly ethnographic texts.
They also recorded a new soundtrack based on the chanting that Kwakwaka’wakw audiences had spontaneously produced when shown rushes of the material during the research phase of the reconstruction.
However, this version was subsequently criticised for treating the film as if it were an imperfectly realised ethnographic documentary rather than the ‘motion picture drama’ that Curtis had intended it to be.
In 2014, a second reconstruction was released under the original title. This was put together by Brad Evans, an English literature scholar of the University of Chicago, and Aaron Glass, an anthropologist and film-maker who was working with the Kwakwaka’wakw. It also involved close collaboration with U’mista, a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural organisation.
The aim was to make this version as close as possible to Curtis’s original conception. Additional elements of the original film, discovered in the interim since the 1973 version, afforded a clearer idea of the original structure of the film as well as prolonging the length of the reconstruction.
Each scene was independently tinted, just as they were in many early fictional feature films.
The melodramatic intertitles were restored and a soundtrack was added, based on a new recording of the score originally composed for the film.
The scenes were tinted one by one, just as they would have been for a film made for theatrical release in 1914.
But though undoubtedly closer to the original, even with the additions, this new version runs to 66 minutes, only about 2/3rds of the original length. It is distributed byMilestone Films and a trailer is available here
Content: This film is often claimed as part of` the history of ethnographic film, but its production involved so many fictional elements and so much reconstruction that by present-day criteria, its status as ethnography or any form of non-fiction film would be seriously contested.
Although Curtis claimed that the story of the film was based on ‘tribal lore’, it was structured around a melodramatic plot of the kind that was common at this time in the emergent cinema industry. As this was played out in a Native setting by Native actors, it could be classified as an ethnodrama.
The actors were mostly Kwakwaka’wakw, many of them related to George Hunt (1854-1933), a part British, part Tlingit man who was married to a Kwakwaka’wakw woman of noble rank. He had been the primary informant of Franz Boas for many years, and Curtis took him on as a general consultant. He appears to have played a major role both in casting and in the general organisation of the production.
By the early twentieth century, the Kwakwaka’wakw had adopted many Euro-american social and cultural norms, and had largely abandoned traditional modes of dress and architecture. Their magnificent winter ceremonies, often referred to as ‘potlatches’, had been banned by the Canadian government
Winter ceremonies (‘potlatches’) had been banned since 1884 but were sumptuously recreated for the film.
As Curtis wanted to place his story in a pre-contact period, with Hunt’s assistance, he commissioned the making of many traditional costumes and artefacts, including particularly the masks worn in their winter ceremonies which form an important part of the story. A number of war canoes, by then abandoned, were recuperated and redecorated. Other items were taken on loan from museums. Most of the actors wore wigs.
Motana watches Naida depart after they have exchanged tokens of their love.
The plot revolves around a love story between Motana, a young warrior and Naida, a princess who has been betrothed to an ‘Evil Sorcerer’ against her will. When Motana and his family kill the sorcerer and offer his head to Naida’s father, the latter agrees that they may marry and a wedding ceremony ensues.
But when Motana returns home, his village is raided by Yaklus, the ferocious brother of the sorcerer, who leaves Motana for dead and takes Naida off to his village where he holds a magnificent ceremony in celebration.
Motana and Naida flee from Yaklus’s settlement
Motana is not dead however, and having been revivified by a ‘Medicine Man’, he sneaks into Yaklus’s house at night and carries Naida off in his canoe. Their flight is soon discovered by Yaklus who pursues them through a surging gorge, only for his canoe to capsize and he is drowned. The film ends abruptly with the young couple safe in their canoe followed by a sunset.
Grizzly Bear dances in an approaching canoe.
Although Curtis was a magnificent photographer, his experience as a film-maker was limited. There are many remarkable individual sequences in the film, none more so than the scene in which three war canoes arrive for the wedding party, with masked figures impersonating the Thunderbird (see image at head of this entry), Grizzly Bear (see left) and the Wasp dancing ecstatically in the prow, arms outstretched.
Naida was played by three different actresses. The actress in this scene wears nose ornaments borrowed from a museum.
But the narrative of the film is confused, not helped by the fact that some roles were played by several actors while some actors played several roles.
A great deal of care was lavished on the performance of the winter ceremonies, but they are shot as a series of wide-angle tableaux, with few shots of detail.
They also do not make a great deal of sense narratively. The ‘wedding’ ceremony is in fact a winter ceremony and there is no sign of either bride or groom. It is also rather less grand than the subsequent ceremony held by Yaklus, the principal ‘baddie’.
A visiting chief takes a drink of candlefish oil, a high prestige item. But shots of detail of this kind are rare in the ceremonial footage.
Curtis had sought to make a film that was commercially successful while at the same time being culturally authentic. Sadly, he failed substantially on both counts; while some of the reconstruction is authentic, there is much that is completely inauthentic. And while the film was much appreciated by cinema critics when it was first released, the public voted with their feet and stayed away.
By the time that Curtis came to make the film, the Kwakwaka’wakw were already accustomed to performing their ‘tradition’ for outside visitors. This film may not be an ethnographically trustworthy document of what their life was like before contact, but it serves nevertheless to show how the Kwakwaka’wakw chose to present themselves at a particular moment of their history.
Als Anthropologe im Kriegsgefangenenlager – Muslimische Kriegsgefangene bei Tanz und Gebet – Russian soldiers from Central Asia in a prisoner-of-war camp, 1915. Later in the same sequence, they are shown kneeling at prayer in the Muslim fashion.
In 1915, unable to travel abroad on account of First World War, Rudolf Pöch started a programme of research in various Austrian and German prisoner-of-war camps. The primary focus of this research was biological, as he sought to gain further data to establish his raciological theories. However, in the early phase of this research, he also made a number of films of a more ethnographic character about Russian prisoners-of-war, at least some of whom were Muslims from Central Asia (see above). In total, there are 11 different ethnographic sequences, totalling just over 13 minutes of footage.
As with Pöch’s previous films in New Guinea (1905-06) and in southern Africa (1908), the primary subject matter of these films is dancing and technical processes, mostly, in this case, the construction of artefacts of various kinds (ranging from straw sandals to children’s toys, even a balaika). In the background in many shots, one can see the camp fences and prowling prison-camp guards with rifles over their shoulders.
From a technical point of view, these are the most accomplished films that Pöch made. In one of the sequences, showing a man making a bone pendant, there is a cut from a wide to a close shot, an unprecedented device in Pöch’s film work. But the most ambitious sequence shows a moment in a pantomime about a peasant wedding, which also involves dancing. This ends with a remarkably long, 180-degree pan over the audience, who are all soldiers sporting a variety of headgear, suggesting their diverse ethnic origins. This pan is unique in Pöch’s film work and would only have been possible due to his acquisition of a tripod with a panning head, a relatively recent technical development.
The quality of the film stock itself is also apparently much higher than in his earlier films, though this may be due to the conditions for the development of the negative and subsequent storage: even in a prison camp, these would have undoubtedly been better than in New Guinea or Botswana at that time.
These rushes also include a further three-minute sequence showing two of Pöch’s assistants, bizarrely dressed in masks and aprons, making a plaster cast of the head of a (living) camp guard.
These are the rushes from Rudolf Pöch‘s expedition to southern Africa. Notwithstanding the formal title in the archive catalogue, they appear all to have been shot in 1908, in what is now Namibia and northern Botswana. They include not only more extended versions of the circular dance and technical process sequences extracted by Paul Spindler for his 1959 film of the same name, but also the original silent footage that appears in Buschmann spricht in den Phonographen post-synchronised in 1984.
These rushes also include some additional sequences that Spindler seemingly thought did not merit inclusion in his edited film. These include a shot of one of his subjects looking directly into the camera, smiling, laughing and apparently speaking to Pöch, perhaps the most intimate shot in all of his fieldwork (see above).
There are also two interesting shots of a boy running into the bush and back up to the camera, and finally, several shots of Pöch’s assistants wrangling the oxen that pulled his supply cart, which although of limited ethnographicness are the most cinematically striking shots in the rushes.
It seems likely that Spindler would have excluded these shots because they were all in some sense reflexive, and therefore in conflict with 1950s ideas about the need for ethnographic film to be ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’.
A series of sequences, edited by Paul Spindler, taken from the original rushes shot by Rudolf Pöch during his 1907-09 expedition to southern Africa. Apart from an initial sequence of a dance (above),this edited version consists of a series of single shot sequences of technical processes.
The original rushes contain a number of sequences which Spindler excluded possibly because they conflicted with 1950s ideas of what an ethnographic film should contain.
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.
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