37 mins., b&w, silent (French titles and intertitles)
Production : Société de Géographie
Source : CNC at the Bnf.
Background – A rare film concerning the last surviving groups of indigenous Fuegians, the Alakaluf (today often referred to as Kawéskar) , the Yaghan and the Ona. At the time this film was made, all three groups were already substantially acculturated to non-indigenous ways and their future survival, not only culturally, but even physically, was threatened. Despite its rather downbeat subject matter, the film enjoyed great success when it was first released.
This film was made in the course of an expedition organised by the Société de Géographie which left Punta Arenas in Chile in March 1925 on board the cutter, Jupiter, with the specific aim of producing a filmic documentation of Tierra del Fuego and its inhabitants.
The principal film-maker and head of the expedition was Paul Castelnau (1880-1944), a geographer by training but also a highly experienced cameraman who had acquired this skill in the French army film unit during the First World War and had then worked for Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète. After leaving the Kahn project in 1919, he had made various films in Africa, including the film covering the first Citroën expedition across the Sahara in 1922-23.
Film content – The copy of this film that is held by the CNC opens with a title that reads ‘Second Part’. If this film had conformed to the conventional expedition film trope of the period, the missing first part would probably have consisted of a series of departure sequences, showing the ship loading up and leaving port, with possibly an introduction to the leading participants in the expedition.
This second part continues with a series of shots of the majestic natural environment of ice floes, glaciers, mountains, alternating with shots of the crew, before around six minutes into the film, the Jupiter drops anchor off Clarence Island. One of the crew members then slaughters two seals for food, which duly attracts a small group of Alakaluf in a dinghy.
The next 15 minutes of the film consists of a series of sequences of this Alakaluf family on the beach. They put on clothes and smoke the tobacco that the expeditionaries have given them. The senior man, a shaman named as ‘Loukemi’, demonstrates aspects of his curing technique. Intertitles explain that the Alakaluf depend primarily on shell-food and have only two types of possession: their dogs, of which we see many, and their canoes. The latter are no longer made from tree bark but rather from planks taken from wrecked ships.
There is then a good sequence of the Alakaluf building some shelters, with close ups showing animal skins being sewn onto a frame. However, the Alakaluf then detect the presence of olapatou, described as ‘invisible were-wolves’ in the intertitles, so they set light to the shelters and take off in their dinghies.
The Castelnau Mission decides to abandon “these unfortunates” to their “idiocy and distress” (“à leur abrutissement et à leur détresse”) and to go off down the Beagle Channel in search of the Yaghan and the Ona.
There are further shots of glaciers before the expedition eventually arrives at Ushuaia and there are then some four minutes showing the Yaghan living in shacks on the edge of the settlement and engaging in the hunting of dolphins with harpoons. A well-executed sequence shows a small group building a fire and engaging in face-painting, though the intertitle claims, dubiously, that these ‘totemic’ designs are intended to protect them from the consequences of eating rotten dolphin meat.
The final four minutes of the film moves to the very different pampas environment on the Atlantic side of Tierra del Fuego. Here the film introduces the “completely civilised” Ona very briefly in the form of three old women in shawls hiding from the wind, a younger woman and child, and a young man, possibly young woman, who turns to address the camera.
But before we see the Ona engaged in any kind of social life, an inter title declares that the expedition has completed its mission of documenting Tierra del Fuego. The last few shots of the film offers further views of the natural environment as the expedition heads off to explore some islands even further south.