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De Wavrin, Marquis Robert (1888-1971)*

The Marquis de Wavrin as he appears in the title sequence of Au Pays du Scalp (1931),  preparing to load his 35mm Debrie Parvo camera.

Robert de Wavrin de Villers au Tertre, more commonly referred to simply as the Marquis de Wavrin, was  a Belgian aristocrat from Flanders who due to a family fortune derived from the ownership of coal-mines was able to dedicate his early adult life almost entirely to exploration and film-making in Latin America.

Although he had no formal training as an ethnologist, and thought of himself primarily as an adventurer and explorer, he became particularly interested in the indigenous peoples of South America and first took a Gaumont camera on his expeditions in order to document their way of life. Between 1924 and 1937, he released four major expedition films, all of which include passages of ethnographic interest: Au Centre de l’Amérique du Sud inconnue (1924), Au Pays du Scalp (1931), Chez les Indiens Sorciers (1934) and Vénézuéla, petite Venise (1937).

In addition, he produced a number of shorter, single subject films, but most of these are lost. One exception is a short film about a secondary burial ceremony as practised by the Yuko of the Sierra de Perijá on the Colombia-Venezuela border. As well as these films, de Wavrin also produced several books about his travels and took a large number of photographs.

The Second World War effectively brought de Wavrin’s travels in South America to an end. After the war, his participation in the world of South American ethnology and film-making became increasingly sporadic, and by the time that he died in 1971, both his writings and his films had fallen into obscurity.

It is only very recently that de Wavrin’s films have been recovered from this neglect, largely due to the remarkable work of Grace Winter, an archivist at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. All of his films required a great deal of restoration, particularly the first, Au Centre de l’Amérique du Sud inconnue which had to be almost entirely reconstructed from dispersed fragments, some of them located in Paris.

This excellent work of restoration has been presented in a DVD collection released in 2017 by CINEMATEK, the publishing arm of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. This contains all four major films, plus the Yuko ceremony film, as well as a number of other extras, including Marquis de Wavrin, Du manoir à la jungle, a biographical film about de Wavrin by Winter herself, produced in collaboration with the editor, Luc Plantier.

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Tsunekichi Shibata (1850-1929)*

Tsunekichi Shibata was one the pioneers of Japanese cinema. He was working at the Konishi Photographic Store, the first Japanese company to import a moving image camera, when he was commissioned by the Lumière company to shoot five Tokyo street views in April 1898.

The following year, he was commissioned by Komada Koyo, an early film producer, to make a series of three films on geisha dances. These were first shown in June 1899. Later that same year, Komada commissioned Tsunekich to make two short story films, said to be the first Japanese fiction films, and then, in November, Momiji-gari (Maple Leaf Hunters) the film for which Tsunekichi is best known.

This is a short film, possibly 3 mins. long, which presents scenes from a well-known kabuki play, performed by two very famous actors. Notwithstanding Tsunekichi’s own work the previous year for Lumière, this film is often said to be the earliest surviving film by a Japanese film-maker and in 2009 was officially declared an Important Cultural Property.

The following year, 1900, Tsunekichi, by now the most experienced cinematographer in Japan, left for China with the Japanese army to film the Boxer Rebellion. Little is known of his later life, but he said to have filmed further kabuki plays.

Further details available here

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Amours exotiques: 1. Andantino – Zazavavindrano; 2. Allegro – L’Ève africaine [Exotic Love : 1. Andantino – Zazavavindrano; 2. Allegro – The African Eve] (1925) – dir. Léon Poirier *

56 min., b&w, silent – French titles and intertitles

Source : Part 1 of Amours exotics,  Zazavavindrano is viewable at the Musée Albert-Kahn.

Background – The first part of this film, Zazavavindrano, was made by Léon Poirier in 1924, in parallel with directing the final stages of the La Croisière noire expedition, as it reached Madagascar. Georges Specht, the leading cinematographer on La Croisière noire, also worked on this film and as a result, the technical quality of the film is of the highest standard.

The second part, Allegro- L’Eve africaine, was not viewed for The Silent Time Machine project, but from the accounts available on the web, it appears to consist of a sort of catalogue of rites related to love, as practised by a range of different peoples across sub-Saharan Africa.

Film content – Zazavavindrano is what might now be called an “ethnofiction”, that is, a fictional story with an ethnographic foundation that is performed by local, non-professional actors.

It concerns a young Malagasy couple whose parents forbid them to marry because in the course of a trial cohabitation, the woman has not become pregnant. The couple hatch a plot, which involves the man pretending that he has died. In the meantime, the woman asks for help to conceive from Zazavavindrano, a water sprite who is played by an actress, naked from the waist up, and who is shown, through trick photography, to be living underwater in a natural pool. At his funeral, the man suddenly sits up and all the mourners scatter. In the confusion, the couple elope and shortly afterwards, the story ends happily as the woman realizes that she has become pregnant.

 

© 2018 Paul Henley