37.5 mins., colour, silent, with English inter titles
Source : accompanied by ethnographic notes, this film is viewable here, where it is also downloadable. A version without ethnographic notes is available on YouTube here.
Unfortunately, these versions appear to have been transferred to a digital format at an incorrect speed. Ursula Graham Bower would have shot her material at 16-18fps, which was the standard speed for 16mm cameras in the 1930s, but it would appear that the material has been transferred at the more recent standard of 24 or 25fps, with the result that the movements of the subjects appear unnaturally rapid.
Content : although this material has clearly been edited, and there are some carefully made inter titles, there is no principal title, nor credits. Graham Bower’s field diaries indicate that she was shooting on the then relatively recently released Kodachrome.
The footage includes a diverse range of sequences, but all of them were shot among the Zemi Naga, many of them at a time when the Naga Hills were threatened by Japanese invasion.
More intimate domestic and personal sequences, such as one of Graham Bower’s Naga interpreter’s ear adornments and another of a young man playing a one-stringed bow instrument, are interspersed with shots of collective activities, including a fish poisoning expedition, the carrying of a large tree trunk that will serve as the beam of a collective house and the dragging in of a large gravestone in preparation for the Hgangi festival at Laisong, the principal village of the area.
There are also various sequences of young men’s sports, including spear-throwing and jumping over a stone obstacle known as a hazoa, and sequences of women engaged in weaving and spinning.
The material ends with a sequence of the playing of drums and dancing at the Hgangi festival, though this is interrupted by an unusual sequence in which Naga men are being issued with guns by British colonial officers in preparation for the threatened Japanese invasion.
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