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.
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But despite great expenditure in both effort and money, the film was a commercial failure and after a short run was withdrawn from circulation.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.
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 by Milestone 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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’.
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.
`Texts: Holm and Quimby 1980, Gidley 1982, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 306-311, Evans and Glass 2014, Henley 2020: 90-99.
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