To search the revived Haddon catalogue please go here.
Welcome to the revived website for HADDON, an online catalogue of archival ethnographic film.
Following the sad death of Marcus Banks in October 2020 these pages present a revival of the database of early ethnographic films that he created in the mid-1990s with support of the ESRC (grant R000235891)
The HADDON catalogue contains records of over 1500 films and lengths of film footage shot between 1845 and 1945. The material is largely documentary and was largely shot outside Western Europe; it is stored in archives, museums and other institutions around the world. Records on the holdings have been collated into the HADDON catalogue for the benefit of academic researchers and others interested in the visual representation of non-European peoples. The catalogue was online for several years following the completion of the project in 1997 until server and software changes took it offline. The files have now been restored, albeit the data has not been updated nor is there a mechanism for doing so. The data is therefore being made available on an 'as is' basis as originally licensed by the film archives with whom Marcus Banks originally collaborated when he created the Haddon catalogue. Most of the page content (from 1996) has been reinstated, so not all links will work.
Since the development of the Haddon catalogue there have been other efforts such as the Silent Time Machine (where this revived version is hosted) and the Colonial Film Database which has an entry for the Torres Straits films.
The HADDON project - named after Alfred Cort Haddon, the early British anthropologist and pioneer in the use of film in anthropological research - was established in October 1994 to collect information on the early history of ethnographic cinema. The prime objective of the project was to create an online database ethnographic film footage shot between 1895 and 1945. Both the date parameters and definition of 'ethnographic film footage' are being interpreted generously. HADDON should be flexible enough to include details of any piece of early film footage in which anthropologists, non-European historians and others with a primary interest in non-industrial society might reasonably be assumed to be interested.
While some of the anticipated users of HADDON will be visual anthropologists with a prior interest in archival ethnographic film, it is clear that a growing number of 'non-visual' academics in the humanities and social sciences are beginning to appreciate the value of documentary film archives as a source of data.
Most post-war ethnographic and anthropological films have been produced with distribution in mind. They are copied onto convenient media such as videotape, occasionally broadcast on television, screened at one of the many festivals of ethnographic film that are now held world-wide, and included in anthropological film libraries. Although by no means as good as it might be, information concerning these films is not difficult to obtain. Catalogues of the various anthropological film libraries are distributed widely, recent films are reviewed in a number of international journals, and individual films are discussed in a number of readily-available articles and books. A quite different position exists for the bulk of ethnographic film footage shot in the first 40 years of this century. Much of this material was shot by individual anthropologists, missionaries, colonial officers and travellers as an aid to their research or work. Often it was never intended for wider consumption. In many instances, the footage was never edited and thus never 'packaged' and distributed as a film.
While some unknown quantity of this material has simply been lost or destroyed, much of it remains but is little known. Most of the footage is to be found in the archives of ethnographic museums and similar institutions around the world. The larger museums and archives have documented their holdings, but many smaller institutions lack the skill or resources to do so. The aim of the HADDON project is to draw all this information together into a single catalogue.