6:32 mins., b&w, silent
Source : A version of this film was distributed for a period by the IWF but was incorporated into the collection of the German National Library (TIB) when the IWF closed down. It has recently been made available on the TIB portal here.
Background
This film was shot by the eminent medical doctor and anthropologist Richard Neuhauss in the course of his two year visit to German New Guinea in 1908-10. As the title of the film indicates, it concerns the ‘Kate’, a highland Papuan group who then lived in the forested hinterland of the Gulf of Huon.
This name, today more usually spelt as ‘Kâte’ and interchangeable with ‘Kai’, literally means ‘forest’. In a companion text published some twenty years after Neuhauss had died, the German Melanesianist Hans Nevermann (1902-1982) explains that ‘Kai’ is the term used of them by their neighbours on the coast, the Jabim. At the time that Neuhauss was in New Guinea, the Kâte were estimated to number around 3000-4000 people.
Film Content
The technical quality of the film, both in terms of the material itself and in terms of film craft skills, is, at best, no more than modest. In terms of content, it can be divided into three parts. The first part, lasting around a minute, offers what Neuhauss himself described as a ‘study of facial expressions’ and consists of a series of head and shoulder shots of two men, standing with a white sheet behind them, as they laugh and shout.
The second part, also of roughly a minute’s duration, then documents two everyday activities: a woman cooking bananas in what appears to be a rough ceramic pot on an open wood fire, and two men (poorly framed in the left hand corner of the image) relaxing by the sea shore and smoking cigars of rolled up tobacco leaves.
The remainder of the film consists of four dances, all shot from a considerable distance and seemingly performed for the camera as there is no evidence of any local audience. The dancers are mostly finely attired with skirts and tall headdresses, and they beat out a rhythm on typically Melanesian hourglass-shaped drums. Unfortunately, the framing is again often poor, with the dancers lost over to one side of the frame.
These four dances are respectively identified in the intertitles as a ‘knee dance’ (the dancers are squatting down as they dance), a ‘war dance’ (the dancers form two lines and engage in mock combat with spears or staves) and then two ‘spirit dances’, one from the coastal region, one from inland. The headdresses in the latter case are particularly elaborate (see image above).
However, the description given by Neuhauss himself of a screening in Berlin in 1911 suggests that he shot much more than this. On this occasion, he showed around 40 minutes of material, which, in addition to the above, also included a sequence of men and women returning from the fields, the women carrying heavy burdens in nets hanging from their foreheads, the men carrying only their weapons in case of attack. Other topics included the processing of sago and coconut , fishing from canoes, clearing the rainforest and the crossing of a rushing mountain stream by a bridge made of lianas. What has happened to all this additional material is not clear, but it seems quite probable that it has been lost.
By the time that Nevermann wrote his companion text in the 1930s, the way of life portrayed in the film had been radically changed through the combined impact of missionaries and of incoming miners attracted by the discovery of gold deposits in the area.
Texts : Neuhauss 1909, Neuhauss 1911, Nevermann 1939, Jordan 1992, pp. 174-175.
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