A Resource for the Study of Early Ethnographic Film
probably less than a minute, b&w, silent
Production : Lumière, catalogue no. 1026
This is one of ten “views” shot in Japan between October 1898 and March 1899 by the leading Lumière cameraman, Gabriel Veyre. Details of the others are available on the page dedicated to Veyre.
Background – This series was produced by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and consisted of films shot in many different parts of China, with ethnic minorities of very different cultural traditions. They were shot on 35mm black and white film and the production values were generally very high.
Source : Through the efforts of Karsten Krüger, Rolf Husmann and others, the series was transferred onto DVD with English translations by the IWF at Göttingen and made available for distribution in the West in 1998. With the closure of the IWF in 2015, this material was transferred to the German National Science Library at Hannover (TIB) and will become available again once the situation with rights over the films has been clarified.
In the meantime, selection of the films in the series is available in the Film Library of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester and there may be similar collections elsewhere.
For the moment, the only access via the web known to The Silent Time Machine is via a film by Jenny Chio about the series, made while the author was a graduate student at Goldsmiths College, London, and which contains extracts from a number of the films. This can be accessed on Vimeo here
Film Content – The films in the Chinese Historical Ethnographic Film Series invariably emphasised the benefits that the communities portrayed had gained from the ascent to power of the Communist Party by virtue of the fact that it had put an end to a variety of abuses from which these communities had suffered, be at the hands of feudal landlords, corrupt officials of the Kuomintang regime, European colonial powers or Japanese invaders. They also tended to deride the efficacy of the traditional religious practices shown in the films, emphasising that modern medicine was the only way to cure illness. Much of the action was evidently staged, and most films were covered with execrable music.
Even so, notwithstanding these features, these films offer a remarkable ethnographic account of life as it was lived in ethnic minority communities in the decade or so after the Communist Party had come to power but before the Cultural Revolution.
Jenny Chio’s film available on Vimeo contains extracts from the following original films –
five views, total duration, approx 5 mins, b&w, silent
Production : Lumière catalogue, nos. 981-985. NB these should not be confused with no. 738, a Tokyo street view shot by François-Constant Girel the previous year, 1897, and available on the web here
Source : ?
In April 1898, Tsunekichi Shibata was commissioned by the Lumière company to shoot five street views in Tokyo.
Tsunekichi Shibata was one the pioneers of Japanese cinema. He was working at the Konishi Photographic Store, the first Japanese company to import a moving image camera, when he was commissioned by the Lumière company to shoot five Tokyo street views in April 1898.
The following year, he was commissioned by Komada Koyo, an early film producer, to make a series of three films on geisha dances. These were first shown in June 1899. Later that same year, Komada commissioned Tsunekich to make two short story films, said to be the first Japanese fiction films, and then, in November, Momiji-gari (Maple Leaf Hunters) the film for which Tsunekichi is best known.
This is a short film, possibly 3 mins. long, which presents scenes from a well-known kabuki play, performed by two very famous actors. Notwithstanding Tsunekichi’s own work the previous year for Lumière, this film is often said to be the earliest surviving film by a Japanese film-maker and in 2009 was officially declared an Important Cultural Property.
The following year, 1900, Tsunekichi, by now the most experienced cinematographer in Japan, left for China with the Japanese army to film the Boxer Rebellion. Little is known of his later life, but he said to have filmed further kabuki plays.
Further details available here
44 secs. and 47 secs., b&w, silent
Production : Lumière, catalogue nos. 1275 (741) and 1276 (742). These were only 2 out of a total of 13 films shot by the operator François-Constant Girel between January and December 1897. Further details of the others are given here.
Source : CNC at the BnF. The first of the two films may be viewed here
These two films were shot near Muroran, on the island of Yeso (today Hokkaidô) in northern Japan in October 1897. The first film shows a men’s dance, and the second, a woman’s dance.
In the first film, four bearded men, of various ages (one wearing glasses), in long cloaks, with swords at their waist, dance in circle, in what is more of a step than a dance, clapping as they do so. Shot from a single static camera position in front of dancers, at a distance of about 3 metres. Children watch from behind. It ends in midshot.
The second film concerns a women’s dance. It is set in the same location as the men’s dance but it is shot from a slightly different angle. The women wear much less elaborate cloaks than the men, and scarfs around their heads. They bend over clapping, first towards camera, then away from it. Men walk through shot in foreground. Children, women, men watch from behind.
Text: Aubert and Seguin 1996, p.353.
31 mins., b&w, silent
Source : NAFC, catalogue no: AS-89.2.9
This film forms part of the Ananda Coomaraswamy Film Collection held at the NAFC. The maker of the film is not indicated in the film credits, but certain stylistic features – notably the introduction of a series of characters at the beginning of the film and the typewriter-based credits – are similar to those of a number of other films that Ananda Coomaraswamy himself made. This suggests that this may have been one of the films that he shot on his second trip to Asia accompanied by his wife, Stella, a professional dancer with a particular interest in Asian dance.
The film is very simple from a stylistic point of view. It begins with an introductory title explaining the origins of the Noh drama form in the fourteenth century as well as the origins of the Hagoromo legend. (Long preliminary explanatory titles are another typical feature of Coomaraswamy’s films). Thereafter the film merely records the play itself, shot from a distant position in front of the stage. The camerawork is no more than serviceable.
The theatrical performance is accompanied by music played by musicians who are also seen on the stage. The story of the play concerns a fisherman who finds an angel’s wings. After some initial reluctance, he restores them to her so that she may return to heaven. Before she departs, the angel – who appears to be a male dancer with whitened face – dances a very slow dance for the fisherman.
Ananda Coomaraswamy’s contribution to the history of ethnographic film consists of a series of films about Asian dance that he shot himself in the 1920s. These films now form part of the Ananda Coomaraswamy Film Collection housed by the NAFC in Washington.
Of mixed Anglo-Tamil descent and brought up in England, Ananda Coomaraswamy trained initially as a geologist at University College, London. But while carrying out doctoral fieldwork in Sri Lanka in 1902-06, he became interested in Sinhalese art and returned to London committed to the idea of educating Western audiences about the art of the Indian sub-continent. This led eventually to his appointment to a curatorial position as Keeper of Indian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA, in 1917. Thereafter he would become an internationally renowned writer, not only on Indian art, but more generally on the philosophy of art, metaphysics and religion.
Shortly after he arrived in the US, Coomaraswamy came to know Stella Bloch, a dancer of Jewish-Polish ancestry, who was associated with Isadora Duncan’s dance troupe in New York, and who also had a particular interest in Asian dance. They married in 1922.
Even before then, in the autumn of 1920, Coomaraswamy and Bloch travelled extensively through Asia, studying local dance traditions in India, Sri Lanka, Java, Bali, Cambodia, China and Japan. It was probably during this trip that Coomaraswamy began to make his films about Asian dance. They travelled through Asia again in 1924 and it seems that Coomaraswamy shot further films during this second trip.
42 mins, b&w, silent
Source : A version of this film, without introductory titles, is held by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and is available via its website here. A similar version is also held by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is available here.
Short assemblies of this and other footage clearly shot at the same time can also be found – without authorial attribution – on the website of the Gaumont-Pathé Archives (by entering ‘Chine’ and ‘<1910’ into the search engine).
This film is based on a compilation of footage shot by the French Consul, Auguste François, in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, southwest China, in the years 1901-1904. This footage appears to be the first moving images to be shot in China. Although this compilation was released in 1905, some parts of it may have been released earlier.
This film offers a rich account of everyday life in and around Kunming in the last years of the Qing dynasty that is remarkable both for its technical quality and ethnographic variety. In effect, it is a sort of miniature precursor to the ‘city symphonies’ of the 1920s.
Auguste François was the French consul in southern China, first in Guangxi province, then in Yunnan, from 1896 to 1904. He travelled widely in China, and also Vietnam, and was an accomplished photographer and filmmaker. While he was resident in Kunming, capital of Yunnan, from 1901 to 1904, he shot a series of film sequences in and around the city. These seem to be the very first moving images shot in China.
François was in direct contact with the cinema industry pioneer Léon Gaumont who supplied him with stock for his still cameras, and presumably for his moving image camera as well. This seems likely because a number of his Kunming sequences are preserved – without attribution – in the Gaumont-Pathé Archives. Also, in 1905, Gaumont released a compilation of some this footage under the title, Au pays des mandarins. The quality and variety of the material in this film are remarkable, providing a rich account of everyday urban life in the final years of the Qing dynasty.
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