This film was made by Paul Spindler, curator of the anthropological collection at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Originally released in 16mm, it describes the work of Rudolf Pöch in New Guinea during his expedition in 1904-1906, incorporating some of the 35mm film footage that Pöch shot during this expedition, as well as some of his photographs.
The film footage consists mainly of short descriptive sequences of day-to-day life in the Motu and Koita village cluster of Hanuabada, close to Port Moresby. Although it is clear from Pöch’s own 1907 account of the expedition that he shot more footage in New Guinea than is shown in this film, these appear to be the only sequences to have survived.
56 secs., b&w, originally silent, but approximately post-synchronised in 1984 with a recording made simultaneously on an Archiv-Phonograph
Source: Filmarchiv Austria, also available in several different forms on the web, for example, here.
This film was shot by Rudolf Pöch in 1908 in what is now northern Botswana whilst he was simultaneously making an audio recording on a phonograph of Kubi, a sixty-year old San man, telling a story about the behaviour of elephants at a nearby waterhole. Much later, in 1984, the image and the audio recording were approximately synchronised by Dietrich Schüller of the Austrian Sound Archive, Vienna.
In its original silent form, this sequence forms part of a 30-minute body of rushes that Pöch shot in southern Africa, mostly otherwise consisting of sequences of dancing and technical processes.
Rudolf Pöch in heroic fieldworker mode during his expedition to New Guinea, 1904-06.
As an ethnographic film-maker, the Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Pöch is best known for the series of short research films that he made during two separate expeditions: to New Guinea in 1904-06, and to southern Africa in 1907-09. However, in 1915, he took his camera to various First World War prison camps and made a series of short films of Russian prisoners-of-war making artefacts and performing dances.
Pöch is celebrated as a pioneer in many standard accounts of ethnographic film history. Although his films are neither very skilled, nor numerous, his work became particularly well-known after 1984, when a short film that he shot in Botswana in 1908 of a San “Bushman” telling a story into the horn of a phonograph was approximately synchronised with the audio recording made simultaneously by the phonograph This version, which was produced by Dietrich Schüller of the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is now widely available on the web.
However, in recent years, Pöch’s reputation has darkened considerably. He held strongly raciological views, believing that culture was determined by physiology, and along with his substantial field collections of artefacts, photographs, sound-recordings and films, he also collected human body parts in the hope of being able to prove his theories. This reached a peak during his expedition to southern Africa in 1907-09, after which he shipped back to Vienna some 80 San skeletons, 150 skulls and even the preserved corpses of a San couple. This has led to a more general denunciation of Pöch and all his work, while the southern African human remains have been the subject of a still on-going process of repatriation.
The central Austrian film archive is located at Laxenburg, about a 30-minute bus ride from Vienna central train station. However, DVD copies of films held in the archive can be viewed at the study centre in central Vienna at: Obere Augartenstrasse 1, 1020 Wien/Austria, Tel: 012161300245.
Archive films, including certain works of the early ethnographic film-maker, Rudolf Pöch, are also available on the site of the Österreichische Mediatek here.
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