20 mins., b&w, sound – Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian music
Production : Établissements Jacques Haïk – Pathé
Source : CNC at the Bnf
This film was not reviewed for The Silent Time Machine but it has been recently restored by the CNC and from the content description, it would appear to be potentially of ethnographic interest.
[The following text is based on the CNC catalogue entry]
“In Annam (a French colony at the time the film was made, today central Vietnam), fishermen live in houses on stilts on the edge of the rivers or canals. They combine fishing with herding buffalos, horticulture and raising silk worms.
Most also harvest rice, the principal crop. While men work the soil, women and children plant the rice. Subsequently, they pull it up, hull it and then store the grains in jars or grind them into flour.
Life is structured by prayers and offerings in the pagoda, by marriages and by funerals. The large number of tombs in the region attest to the importance of the ancestors”.
It has not been possible to discover any biographical details about the director Monod-Herzen. However, the producer of the film was Jacques Haïk, who was of Tunisian-Jewish origins. Haïk was one of the leading producer-distributors of the interwar years in France, but his businesses were obliterated as a result of the combined effects of the financial crash of 1931 and the rise of the Nazis.
The music on the soundtrack was recorded by the Pathé company using the Cinevox-Haik process and in consultation with the Institut de Phonétique of the University of Paris.