Not viewed. Duration and other technical specifications unknown.
Background: Laura Adams Armer (1874-1963) was a Californian artist and writer who began painting and taking photographs of the Navajo in the 1920s.
In February 1928, with no previous experience as a film-maker and with financial support from the brothers Lorenzo and Roman Hubbell, who ran the local trading post at Ganado, Arizona, Armer made this film about the Mountainway chant, a ceremonial process performed by Navajo healers to relieve mental distress.
She later wrote an account of the making of this film, published in 1953. Here she describes how she came to film a widely respected healer, Na-Nai – known as ‘The Crawler’ since he had been born without feet – when he was asked to cure a man whose dreams were being disturbed by the presence of a child who had died some years before.
Armer directed the film but she was assisted by two cameramen. Before the ceremony began, she studied an account of the Mountainway chant written by Washington Matthews in 1884 so that she knew where the cameramen should position themselves.
Na-Nai diagnosed the man’s problem as deriving from the fact that before he was even born, his mother had seen a dead bear, which had been killed by lightning. The bear had been offended, Na-Nai concluded, and he undertook to resolve the problem by singing the Mountainway chant.
This took place in a pinewood lodge built specially for the purpose and involved an elaborate range of chants and dances, and the making of sandpaintings over a nine-day period. Armer briefly describes the ceremonial process and its symbolic significances, reporting that it was attended at its climax by 2000 people.
She comments that the Navajo subjects posed no obstacle to her filming and even removed some boards from around the smoke-hole of the lodge to let in more light and therefore make it easier for the cameramen to film the sandpainting, the first time that this had been permitted inside a ‘medicine-lodge’.
Armer initially hoped to interest a Hollywood producer in the material, but having failed to do so, she contented herself with showing the film in a number of more academic settings.
A copy of the film is said to have been deposited with the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, and possibly also with the Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe.
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