In memory of Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf. Himalaya 17(2).
Available here
Macfarlane, Alan (2010)
Early ethnographic film in Britain: a reflection on the work of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Visual Anthropology 23: 1-23.
Holi Festival near Mathura (c.1924) – Ananda Coomaraswamy (?)
5:30 mins, b&w, silent
Source : NAFC, film no. AS-89.2.3.
This film forms part of the Ananda Coomaraswamy Film Collection at the NAFC. However, although there is an opening title, there is no specific preliminary title indicating that Coomaraswamy was responsible for the cinematography, as there is in a number of his other films.
This film documents the gathering of large crowds of Muslim pilgrims for a holi spring festival near the city of Mathura, in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. It includes a range of shots of people arriving, of ferris wheels operated manually, of a man playing a large drum, of dancing.
In contrast to the performances in Coomaraswamy’s formal dance films, this is an event that was clearly happening under its own impetus and the filmmaker was not able to control it. Perhaps for this reason, the camerawork is even less accomplished than in these other films.
Indian Dramatic Dances (c.1920) – dir. Ananda Coomaraswamy
14 mins, b&w, silent (English intertitles)
Source : NAFC, Film no. AS-89.2.2 (first part)
Preliminary titles explain that the film will concern the training of young girls as dancers. It then offers some examples of dancing from Mathura in northern India and from Conjeevaran in southern India. The final example, which is very brief, is of Muslim Kashmiri girls dancing in a garden framed by a beautiful arch. The performances appear to have been put on specifically for the purposes of the film.
The film was ‘photographed’ by Ananda Coomaraswamy himself and the technical quality is uneven. However, some of the dance performances themselves are very impressive.
Delhi: Great Capital of India {Delhi: Die Grosse Stadt in Vorderindien} (1909) – Anon
Production : Pathé Frères
Source : can be viewed here
A beautifully shot film, that has been stencil-coloured, though some of the brightness of the original colours has been lost. Within a clear temporal narrative structure, it presents a series of moments during the celebration of Muharram, a major Muslim festival. This is in origin a Shiite festival at which, as seen in the film, models of the tombs of Hassan and Husayn, the martyred grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad, are carried through the streets.
After a brief initial establishment shot, probably taken from the minaret of the Jamia Masjid, or Great Mosque of Delhi, there are some preliminary shots of street performers before we see the parading of the models of the tombs. The second half of the film consists of a sequence inside the mosque, first showing worshippers in an intimate sequence as they wash their feet, then showing them from afar as they kneel in prayer within the mosque courtyard. The film concludes with a beautiful framing shot of the worshippers leaving the mosque (see above).
Although Muharram was ostensibly a Shiite festival, at the time that this film was made, many different groups – local neighbourhoods, craft guilds, castes, even associations of prostitutes – would have participated, which would explain why many of the models being carried in the film look more like Hindu temples than Islamic tombs.
In fact, it is unlikely that there were any Shiites present at all, since Delhi is overwhelmingly Sunni, and the Jamia Masjid is the principal Sunni mosque of the city. Certainly, Shiites would have been exasperated by the joyful carnival-like atmosphere of the procession shown in the film, as indicated by the presence of the acrobats and jugglers in the opening sequence.
In Indian cities in colonial times, there were often rival Muharram processions, with the Shiite processions being more sombre, as befitting what they considered to be, in effect, a funeral procession. Today, Muharram is no longer celebrated in Delhi since it has come to be seen as an exclusively Shiite festival.
[Many thanks to Faisal Devji, Reader in Indian History at the University of Oxford, for advising on these notes about the film]
Haupt, Robert (active 1933-37)*
Robert Haupt was an American teacher based at the Woodstock School for Missionaries’ Children in Landour, a hill-station close to Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Between 1933 and 1937, he travelled extensively around the India and what would become Pakistan, shooting some sequences of ethnographic interest in the process. Further details here.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda (1877-1947)*
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.
Song of Ceylon, The (1934) – dir. Basil Wright
39 min., b&w, English voice-over, music and other extra-diegetic effects
Production : GPO Film Unit for the Empire Marketing Board and the Ceylon Tea Marketing Board.
Source : BFI Player
Background : This is one of the very few major films of ethnographic interest to emerge from the British colonial period in South Asia. It was released in 1934 by the General Post Office film unit, then headed by John Grierson. He was also the producer and on the opening credits, his name comes first and is larger than that of the director, Basil Wright, who at that time was a relative newcomer to film-maker. Originally commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board as a four-part travelogue intended to promote the Ceylon Tea Marketing Board, in the course of post-production, it became instead a poetic meditation on the religious qualities that permeate traditional life on what is now the island of Sri Lanka.
Content: The film is subdivided into four parts, presented as if they were four movements in a symphonic composition: the first part follows Sinhalese pilgrims to the sacred mountain of Sri Pada (known to Europeans as Adam’s Peak), the second presents everyday subsistence activity on the island – fishing, pottery, house-building, rice cultivation – and a children’s dance class, contrasting the calm and measured nature of this traditional mode of life with that of the ‘voices of commerce’, shown in the third part. This consists of scenes of colonial economic activity, including the harvesting of tea, the laborious processing of copra and the dispatch of goods on international freighters, overlain with clipped telephone voices referring to stock prices and logistics. The final part returns to religious themes, juxtaposing some magnificently costumed dancers with images of the giant statues of Buddha carved in granite at Gal Vihara and a peasant farmer leaving an offering of flowers to them.
The film was mostly shot by Wright himself and in a manner that he would later explain had been very much influenced by the advice that he received from Robert Flaherty when the latter was briefly attached to the film unit of the Empire Marketing Board for a few months in 1931. However, notwithstanding the excellence of the cinematography and the often-daring visual transitions, arguably the most distinctive and impressive aspect of the film is the highly elaborate soundtrack entirely developed at post-production in London. In developing this soundtrack, Wright benefitted greatly from the influence of Alberto Calvacanti, the Franco-Brazilan film-maker then working with the GPO Unit, and also the avant-garde composer Walter Leigh.
Inspired by the contrapuntal theories of Sergei Eisenstein, this soundtrack combined a broad panoply of sounds, including Sinhalese music performed by musicians brought to London specifically for the purpose, Leigh’s own avant-garde compositions, a range of special effects as well as disembodied voices speaking both English and Sinhalese. In addition, it featured a series of texts offering ethnographic observations about Sinhalese life originally published by the sea captain Robert Knox in 1681 and based on his knowledge of the island having spent twenty-three years in captivity there. This text was read in a most entrancing manner by Lionel Wendt, who was a Burgher, that is, a person of mixed European and Sinhalese descent and by profession a photographer. Wendt had collaborated with Basil Wright and his assistant, John Taylor, throughout their lengthy shoot of several months, advising them on all aspects of traditional Sinhalese life.
Although The Song of Ceylon is widely acclaimed as one of the finest works of documentary cinema of the interwar years, the film has also been criticized, among other things, for presenting an idealised Orientalist vision of Sinhalese life in the 1930s (there is very little in the film about urban life) and for glossing over the exploitation of Sinhalese workers on the tea plantations and elsewhere. It has also been questioned on more specifically ethnographic grounds, including for implying that the dancers juxtaposed in the final section with the statue of the Buddha are engaged in a religious performance of some kind when in reality, they are secular performers who hire themselves out to provide entertainment at weddings and similar festivities.
But whatever the validity or otherwise of these criticisms – and there are certainly counterarguments that might be made against them – The Song of Ceylon remains a work of uncontestable ethnographicness in that it was based on extensive prior research and a relatively lengthy shoot, as well as being informed by the insights gleaned from Wendt and Knox. Above all, in this film, the poetic power of cinema is used in a virtuoso manner to communicate the experience of everyday customary Sinhalese life in a direct manner. It was surely for this reason that it would later be a source of inspiration to two of the leading ethnographic film-makers of the second half of the twentieth century, Robert Gardner and David MacDougall.
Texts : Seton 1935/1971, Starr 1996, Guynn 1998, Gitlin 2012. See also the notes by Jon Hoare on the Colonial Film website here.
Trading Societies of Western Nepal (1976) – dir. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf
55 mins, colour, voice-over in English with some post-synchronised sounds. Production: School of Oriental and African Studies in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Source: viewable on-line in a poor copy here.
The last major film made by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, based on footage that he shot during an expedition made in 1972 to the then-remote Humla District, northwest Nepal. The film, which is structured by a continuous commentary by Haimendorf, proceeds up the valley of the Karmali river connecting this part of Nepal with the Tibetan market town of Taklakot. Traditionally, and still at the time that this film was made, despite the Chinese presence in Tibet, this served as an important local trade route, through which salt produced in Tibet was traded against cereals and rice cultivated lower down in the valley. However, at the end of the film, it is suggested that even then, the viability of this exchange was threatened by the importation of cheap rice from India.
Although trading serves as its general narrative focus, the film is also about a great deal more than this. Through Haimendorf’s commentary, we learn about the history of the region, still present in the form of stone monuments, the significance of which is unknown to the present inhabitants of the Karmali valley, as well as about the relations between the upper caste Hindu communities living in the lower part of the valley, and the Buddhist Bhotiya communities, of Tibetan cultural origin, who live in the upper part.
In passing, there is a great deal of commentary on subsistence practices, crafts, house-building and kinship organisation. A particularly memorable sequence concerns a ceremony in which Untouchables living in the Hindu community become possessed by spirits and while in this condition, diagnose the cause of illnesses. Another striking sequence concerns the ritual restitution of an abandoned Bhuddist temple by a Bhotiya community.
Text: Macfarlane 2010
Hill Tribes of the Deccan (1960) – Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf
29 mins, b&w, voice-over in English, some post-synchronised sounds. Production: BBC Television
Source : this film may be viewed on-line here
This is a television programme based on footage shot by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, “presented” by Brian Branston – that is, organised editorially – and fronted, as well as voiced-over by a youthful David Attenborough. The programme begins with a sequence in which Attenborough interviews Haimendorf and his wife, Betty, in a studio and, in general, this film emphasises the Haimendorfs’ expedition much more than both Land of the Gurkhas (broadcast earlier in 1960), and also the later film Land of Dolpo (broadcast 1965), even though all three films were screened as part of the the same BBC television series, Travellers’ Tales. An archival version of the BBC television schedule for 1960, available here, indicates that Hill Tribes of the Deccan was broadcast in August of that year.
This film chronicles what appears to be a series of very brief visits to the Chenchu, the Reddi and ‘the following year’ to the Koya, the Bondo and Gadaba. Haimendorf carried out extensive fieldwork in the Deccan over the period 1940-48, but it is not made clear exactly when these visits shown in the film took place. Although the voice-over commentary suggests at some points that the visits were recent, at other points, it is said that material being presented was shot ‘twenty years ago’.
There are quite a number of clearly posed shots of both Christoph and Betty conducting the expedition, indicating that at some point, there was certainly a cameraperson with them. This raises the possibility that the film may consist of footage shot in the 1940s by Haimendorf combined with more recent footage shot specifically for the television programme in which old and new material are presented together as if they were recorded around the same time.
The voice-over is very dated, emphasising the primitiveness of the various groups, at one point even comparing the Chenchu to monkeys. But the film also contains some interesting sequences of cultural traditions that are no longer practiced.
Some of the rushes on which this film is based are available in the playlist of Haimendorf’s films on Alan Macfarlane’s ayabaya website accessible here. See particularly nos. 3-5, 15, 22.
Text : Macfarlane 2010.
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