variously reported as being between 96 and 140 mins in total, b&w, silent. 16mm shot at 16fps
Sources : Powell-Cotton Museum, British Film Institute
Background and Content : Italian Somaliland is the collective title given in the UNESCO catalogue of ethnographic films in sub-Saharan Africa to a series of short films shot by P.H.G. Powell-Cotton and his daughter, Diana in the course of an expedition in 1933-34 to what was then the Italian colony of Somaliland. Diana stayed on for eight months after her father left, so while some of the films are credited to them jointly, others are sometimes exclusively credited to her. However, at other times, all the films are attributed exclusively to the father – for example in the British Film Institute listing.
The films are given various different titles in the different sources, but the topics that they cover would appear to include the following:
(1) footage attributed jointly to P.H.G. Powell-Cotton and Diana (variously calculated between 29 and 45 minutes):
– Bread-making by both Arabs and Somalis at Gobuen
– Somali-Darod pillow-making at Afmadu
– Bowstring-making
(2) footage attributed jointly to P.H.G. Powell-Cotton and Diana (variously calculated between 33 and 60 mins):
– Miau woman making a winnowing basket
– Somali woman weaving a mat
– Beard-trimming
– Koranic school
(3) Somali footage sometimes attributed solely to Diana (15 mins):
– butter-making
– drawing blood from cattle
– watering of cattle and camels
(4) Pottery footage sometimes attributed solely to Diana (each film approx. 10 mins):
– Eile male potter
– Bimal female potter
Texts : UNESCO catalogue, p. 291; Nicklin 1981