A thorough investigation of early ethnographic film in China, Japan and Korea lay beyond the scope of The Silent Time Machine project, and the entries on this page should be regarded as no more than provisional

CHINA

Wealthy opium-smokers – ‘Au pays des mandarins’ (1905) – dir. Auguste François.

A good starting point for an investigation of early ethnographic film in China would be Au pays des mandarins, a compilation of footage of everyday life in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, southwest China. This was shot in 1901-04 and appears to provide the very first moving images of China.

Another early film of particular ethnographic interest is Artisanat et scènes de la rue en Chine. This has been dated to 1908 and shows a series of craftspeople at work in a manner that is not only remarkably intimate for the period but is also of extraordinarily high technical quality.

Much later, but also important to any comprehensive account of early ethnographic film in China, would be the Chinese Historical Ethnographic Film Series, produced by the Chinese Academy of Sciences between 1957 and 1966. One of the most substantial films in the series was The Oroqen.

For further details, see Chio 2003. See also the film made to accompany this text, which features extracts from the series, here.

JAPAN

The first person of any nationality to make films of ethnographic interest in Japan appears to have been the Lumière cameraman François-Constant Girel who, between January and December 1897, shot a dozen ‘views’ of various different aspects of Japanese life, described here.

The first Japanese film-maker to make films of ethnographic interest about Japan appears to have been Tsunekichi Shibata who shot a series of five Tokyo street scene ‘views’ for Lumière in April 1898. The following year, 1899, he made a brief film about a celebrated kabuki play, Momijigari, featuring two equally celebrated actors.

François-Constant Girel was replaced by Gabriel Veyre, who shot ten ‘views’ for Lumière between October 1898 and March 1899. These all concerned dance and music and are described here. Otherwise, most of the early films of ethnographic interest about Japan were shot by French reportage cameramen working either for the Gaumont and Pathé newsreel companies, or for Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète.

Somewhat later, from the 1920s, Japan also appears to have held a particular fascination for US travelogue film-makers. It was also in the 1920s that the Tamil art-historian Ananda Coomaraswamy visited the country and made a descriptive film about a Noh theatre performance of the Hagoromo legend.

The only films of an intentionally ethnographic character made by Japanese film-makers in the first half of the twentieth century appear to be a series of films funded by the businessman Keizō Shibusawa (1896-1963), patron of the arts and amateur folklorist. These films were shot between 1926 and 1937 and concerned traditional life in rural Japan and also Taiwan.

Shibusawa would later play a part in the setting up of the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka which, since the 1970s, has been the principal supporter of ethnographic film-making by Japanese film-makers.

KOREA

Between 1910 and 1945, most of the period covered by The Silent Time Machine project, Korea was under Japanese annexation. So far there is only one film about Korean in the selection below, a brief film shot in 1912, two years after the formal annexation had taken place.

CHINA, JAPAN & KOREA – a selection of films of ethnographic interest

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