Category: NORTH AMERICA AND ARCTIC

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Dances of the Kwakiutl (1951) – Robert Gardner and William Heick

Opening sequence of ‘Dances of the Kwakiutl’ (Framegrab from
black and white print).

9 min., shot in 16mm colour stock. Extra-diegetic sound of Native chanting and a brief passage of voice-over commentary in English.

Production: Produced by Orbit Films, Seattle, for distribution through Dimensions Inc.

Source : Now distributed through Documentary Educational Resources (DER), details here. A black-and-white print is viewable on YouTube here.

Background: For general background to the making of a series of films about the Kwakwaka’wakw by Orbit films and the involvement of Robert Gardner, see the entry for Blunden Harbour.

This film was also shot in Blunden Harbour, a small village on the coast of the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. Although Gardner was the producer and also performed the voice-over, he did not know how to operate a moving image camera at this stage of his career and was not present during the shooting.

As with Blunden Harbour, the cinematography is credited to William Heick. The sound-recording is credited to Morris Dowd but he was not present for the shoot either. The Native chanting on the soundtrack appears to have been recorded for Fort Rupert, an earlier film produced by Orbit Films at the eponymous village on Vancouver Island, on the other side of Queen Charlotte Strait from Blunden Harbour.

It is not credited, but there is also a brief passage of voice-over performed by Gardner.

This film was shot on the same occasion as the closing sequence of Blunden Harbour. This shows a number of winter ceremony (‘potlatch’) dances performed in the village’s Big House at the filmmakers’ request and paid for by them.  In Dances of the Kwakiutl, both the performers and the dances are mostly the same, though they are presented in a different order and at different lengths. The singers and even certain audience members are common to both.

The quality of the image is very different in the two films: the Blunden Harbour sequence was shot in black-and-white, probably 35mm, and the quality is superb while this film was shot on 16mm colour stock and the quality is less than perfect, probably on account of the lack of illumination.

Although shots of some dancers are unique to Dances of the Kwakiutl, most shots in the film seem to have been taken simultaneously with shots of the same dancers in the Blunden Harbour sequence, albeit from a different angle. But the cinematographic style of these duplicate shots is very different: it is more remote and much less confident.

This suggests that much of Dances of the Kwakiutl was shot by a second cameraman. If so, this would probably have been Heick’s assistant, Pierre Jacquemin. Though he is not named in this film’s credits, Jacquemin is named in the credits of Blunden Harbour, so he clearly knew how to shoot.

Content: The film opens with a sequence showing a woman dancer wearing a hamatsa or “cannibal bird” mask. The voice-over explains that these are winter ceremony dances, but they are now performed for personal rather than ceremonial reasons.

The shooting is intimate and confident. Significantly, this mask does not appear in Blunden Harbour, suggesting that this part of the performance was shot by Heick before handing the 16mm colour camera over to the less experienced Jacquemin, thereby leaving himself free to shoot other aspects of the performance on 35mm  black and white stock.

After a lengthy sequence of a dancer masked as bukwus, the wild man of the forest, which is shot from afar, there is a return to a more intimate style, first to show chief Willie Seaweed, making a short declaration, then to another hamatsa dance, featuring a larger and more elaborate mask, the “double cannibal bird” that faces both forwards and backwards and has a moveable lower beak.

Again, this mask is absent from Blunden Harbour suggesting that this sequence would have been shot by Heick.This mask hides the dancer’s face, but from his naked legs and energetic movement, it is clear that the dancer is male. In fact, he is Joe Seaward, son of Willie Seaward, who had carved the masked around 1915.

There is then a return to the more distant style for the dances featuring Owl and Hawk masks, both worn by Joe Seaward, who reveals himself and dances without a mask for a spell. The transitions from one dance to another are covered by cutaways to the audience, but again these are much more distant than in the equivalent cutaways in Blunden Harbour.

Finally, there is a sequence featuring dancers wearing a mask on their heads depicting the sun with a bird-like face and a cape covered in ermine skins: the first is again Joe Seaward but then, following a cutaway to the drums being struck, we see an older woman dancing in the same costume, but in a more sedate manner.

Following a close-up of her face, she leaves shot and the end title comes up.

Texts: Jacknis 2000: 113, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 318-319, MacDonald 2015: 52-54.

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Blunden Harbour (1951) – Robert Gardner and William Heick*

The leading Kwakwaka’wakw carver, chanter and chief Willie Seaweed, as he appears, anonymously, in ‘Blunden Harbour’ (1951) –  Robert Gardner and William Heick. Framegrab from the film. 

22 min. Most of the film was shot in 16mm b&w stock, but the final passage of masked dancing seems to be of superior quality, so may have been shot in 35mm. Most of the soundtrack consists of unsubtitled Native chanting. There is also an occasional voice-over spoken in English. 

Source:  NAFC, catalogue number NA-93.24.3; distributed by Documentary Educational Resources (DER). It is also available on Vimeo here.

Background: Blunden Harbour is located on the mainland side of Queen Charlotte Strait, which separates the mainland of British Columbia from the northern tip of Vancouver Island. In 1950, it was the site of a village of the Kwakwaka’wakw (historically known as the ‘Kwakiutl’).  

Around that time, Robert Gardner (1925-2014), then a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle set up the Orbit Films production company in conjunction with the avant-garde film-maker Sidney Peterson (1905-2000) who had recently moved up from California.

Both having been inspired by reading the works of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, they planned to make a fiction film about a white man who wants to marry a Kwakwaka’wakw princess.

As part of the research for this film, they arranged for the shooting of some 16mm colour footage of winter ceremony (‘potlatch’) dances, performed out of context, at Fort Rupert (Tsaxis) on Vancouver Island. This material would later become the film Fort Rupert.

But when the 35mm black and white footage shot for the fiction film was developed, it proved entirely unusable for technical reasons. The project was therefore abandoned and Gardner produced Blunden Harbour “to retrieve something from the wreckage” of this project. 

At this stage of his career, Gardner did not know how to operate a camera, so he sent William Heick (1916-2012), a cinematographer who had been a student of Peterson in California. Heick was assisted by his friend, Pierre Jacquemin, a French exchange student at the University of Seattle. 

Gardner was not actually present in Blunden Harbour when Heick did the shooting.  Nor was there a sound recordist: instead the chants recorded in Fort Rupert by Morris Dowd for the research film and/or the abandoned fiction film were used, along with a voice-over scripted by Gardner and recorded in a studio by an actor, Richard Selig. Both Gardner and Heick later claimed to have edited the film. 

The chief of the community was Willie Seaweed (c.1873-1967), widely regarded as a major Kwakwaka’wakw artist on account of his carving of totem poles, house fronts and ceremonial objects –  masks, rattles, screens – despite the ban on ‘potlatch’ ceremonies until 1951. Seaweed is not identified at any point, but he appears in various scenes in the film.

Heick pays Willie Seaweed for filming the masked dance sequence. Photograph by Pierre Jacquemin. As reproduced in Jacknis 2000, p.112.

Heick spent about ten days in the village, probably in June 1951, and mostly shot scenes of everyday life on 16mm black and white stock. He also paid for the performance of a series of masked dances.

The dances were mostly shot in black-and-white too, but the quality seems superior, suggesting that it may have been shot on 35mm. A small amount of 16mm colour film was shot  also. This colour footage was used to cut a separate film, nine minutes long, entitled Dances of the Kwakiutl. 

Although Blunden Harbour continues to fall within a Native reserve, it no longer exists as a village. In 1964, the community was obliged to move to Port Hardy, on Vancouver Island, when the Canadian government proposed to cut off support for housing, education and services. The village itself was burnt to the ground. 

 Content: The first part of the film records day-to-day life in the village in an observational manner but with a romantic, poetic voice-over performed in an actorly manner. 

As the camera approaches the waterside jetty of the village, a legend of how the killer whale became a man and established the village is told in the voice-over.

‘From the water, food’. Women and children go searching for clams.

There are then various scenes of everyday life and subsistence (clam-digging, fishing, woodcarving) which is mostly covered with chanting but occasionally punctuated by poetic comment. 

The village is shown to be  a world that combines old and new: there is industrial fishing with nets (though apparently not very successful), a family eats a meal in the modern manner, at a table, with canned milk and buttered bread. 

Willie Seaweed decorates an Eagle Mask. 

A man seen from afar is fishing for crabs in a skiff; this is Willie Seaweed. We also see him decorating a mask in his workshop. There is a brief shot of mortuary boxes placed in trees.

The last quarter of the film consists of a remarkable  series of shots of masked dancing, supported by drumming on the sound-track. This was filmed in the Big House and was orchestrated by Willie Seaweed (see image at the top of this entry).

‘A way of remembering’ – masked dancer in the last sequence of the film.

The dancers include a woman wearing a cape decorated with an extraordinary number of ermine skins. Other dancers wear masks depicting an owl, an eagle and a bukwus (wild man of the forest). There are shots of copper prestige objects and drumming, and cutaways to the audience of women and children.

The film ends with a montage recapitulating earlier scenes in the film.

Texts: Loizos 1993: 142-143, Jacknis 2000: 110-113, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 315-318, MacDonald 2015: 52-54.

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Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) footage (1930-1931) – Franz Boas

Mary Hunt Johnson performs the Women’s Cannibal Dance. In the background, a man beats time. Frame grab from the film viewable here.

Approx. 51 mins, b&w 16mm footage. Silent. Intertitles in English.

Source : In 1973, an edited version of this footage, prepared by the late art historian Bill Holm (1925-2020), of the Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle, was released in the from a 55 min. documentary entitledThe Kwakiutl of British Columbia. This was accompanied by an extensive explanatory text based on notes by the original film-maker, Franz Boas, and interviews with still-surviving participants. 

Some of this footage, approx. 15 mins,  is held by the NAFC (formerly HSFA) under catalogue entry NA-87.17.4: Northwest Coast Indian Dance.

Since 2018, the Bill Holm Center at the Burke Museum, University of Washington, has been developing a project in collaboration with  the Kwakwaka’wakw community to bring all Boas’s films and audio recordings together into a digital book to be published by Washington University Press. This is now nearing completion. For further details see here.

Background: This footage was shot by Franz Boas, a foundational figure in the history of US anthropology who spent many years researching the social and cultural life of the group whom he called the Kwakiutl but who are now more generally referred to as the Kwakwaka’wakw.

It was shot at Fort Rupert (Tsaxis), on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, on Boas’s last field trip to the Kwakwaka’wakw in the winter of 1930-1931. He also made recordings on a wax cylinder phonograph. 

Boas’s intention was not to produce a documentary with a narrative, but rather raw documentation footage that would allow him to explore the relationship between ‘motor behaviour’ (i.e. bodily movement) and dancing and singing among the Kwakwaka’wakw, one of his long-standing research interests.

All the material was performed at Boas’s request, out of its normal context, sometimes in the yard of a European-style house, at other times in open countryside with a palisade or iconic totem pole in the background.

Although the subjects often wear traditional dress, other figures in modern Euro-American dress are also sometimes plainly in shot (as in the case of the man beating time in the frame grab at the head of this entry). The phonograph is also visible  in some shots, as is Julia Averkieva, Boas’s field assistant, when she moves into one shot to wind it up.

As Boas’s  film-making skills were very limited – understandably since he appears to have had no prior training – the technical quality of the material is very poor: there are frequent jump cuts and the exposure level is often incorrect.

Both conceptually and technologically, this use of the moving image camera for ethnographic purposes was very old-fashioned by 1930 and not dissimilar to the “chronophotographic” project of Regnault and Comte when they filmed African locomotion in Paris in 1895.

In the event, Boas never used this footage to write up any conclusions, in part because he believed, erroneously, that it had been stolen.  What had been stolen, however, were the wax cylinder sound recordings.

Content: A substantial part of the footage consists of shots of dances – seventeen in total. The Hamatsa Cannibal Dance is demonstrated by men while women demonstrate a number of dances, including the Summer, Salmon, Paddle, Bird, and the Woman’s Cannibal dances.

The Salmon dance is demonstrated by Agnes Hunt, the daughter of Boas’s principal informant, George Hunt, while the Woman’s Cannibal Dance is demonstrated by his daughter Mary and is viewable here (see also the image at the head of this entry).

Also demonstrated were examples of chiefly competitive oratory, a healing ceremony,  some craft processes (including wood carving, basket weaving as well as fishing and gathering practices) and children’s games.

Texts: Ruby 1980, Jacknis 1987, Morris 1994: 55-66, Jacknis 2000: 103, Griffiths 2002: 304-309, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 311-315, Henley 2020:66-67.

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Ghost Dance (1894) – dir. W.K-L. Dickson and William Heise*

20 seconds, b&w, silent.

Production : Edison Manufacturing Co.

Source : Viewable on the Library of Congress website here

Along with Buffalo Dance, this is one of two films of Sioux dancers that were shot in the Edison ‘Black Maria’ studio in New Jersey on 24 September 1894. These two films are generally regarded as offering the first moving images of the Native peoples of America. The producer-director was W. K-L. Dickson while the cameraman was William Heise.

The Sioux subjects were members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show – a sign to this effect is just visible on the bottom right hand corner of the image. The  show was about to depart on a European tour and it has been suggested that these films might therefore have been made for promotional purposes.

The Edison catalogue comments “One of the most peculiar customs of the Sioux Tribe is here shown, the dancers being genuine Sioux Indians, in full war paint and war costumes”.

However, the authenticity of the performance is questionable. It is highly unlikely that it had any meaningful connection to the millenarian Ghost Dance that developed among the Sioux after the killing of Chief Sitting Bull and 200 of his warriors in December 1890.

Text : Jordan 1992, pp. 26-29, 78-79.

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Buffalo Dance (1894) – W. K-L. Dickson and William Heise *

14 seconds, b&w, silent.

Production : Edison Manufacturing Co.

Source :  Viewable on the Library of Congress website here

Along with Ghost Dance, this is one of two films of Sioux performers that were shot in the Edison ‘Black Maria’ studio in East Orange, New Jersey on 24 September 1894. These two films are generally considered to constitute the very first moving images of North American First Nations people.

The producer-director was W. K-L. Dickson while the cameraman was William Heise. In some sources, this film is erroneously referred to as Indian War Council.

The names of the dancers were Last Horse, Parts-His-Hair and Hair-Coat : the name of the musician accompanying them is unknown. All of them were members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and they seem to be quite accustomed to performing for a public since one of them very pointedly looks at the camera.

The show was about to depart on a European tour, so it has been suggested that these films might therefore have been made for promotional purposes.

Text : Jordan 1992, pp. 25-28, 80-81.

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In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) – Edward S. Curtis

 

The Thunderbird dances in the prow of one of three canoes arriving for the wedding party. Frame grab from the film.

The original film, now lost, was probably around 90 minutes in duration. It was shot in b&w 35mm stock, tinted at postproduction and carried an extra-diegetic musical score. It featured a large number of melodramatic intertitles, in English, many of which supposedly reported the characters’ speech.

Production/ Background: This film concerns the Kwakwaka’wakw people of northeastern Vancouver Island, Canada, and adjacent parts of the British Columbia mainland, who were known for many years as the Kwakiutl, following the example of the leading US anthropologist, Franz Boas (1858-1942), who studied them for many years,

As originally conceived by its director, Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), this film was a commercial melodrama through which he hoped to raise money, in the form of box-office receipts, to finance The North American Indian, his celebrated twenty-volume encyclopaedic endeavour to assemble a photographic record of the traditional ways of life of the Native peoples of the subcontinent.

Curtis’s production base was Fort Rupert (Tsaxis), a village on the northeastern coast of Vancouver Island, and then the largest Kwakwaka’wakw settlement. However, most of the film was shot in a specially constructed set on a small island, Deer Island, a few hundred metres offshore from Fort Rupert.

On the left, Deer Island, with the adjacent smaller Eagle Island, in May 2019. The outskirts of Fort Rupert are visible on the right.

Here Curtis erected house fronts and totem poles to evoke a Kwakwaka’wakw village as it would have been before they had extensive contact with Europeans. 

But despite great expenditure in both effort and money, the film was a commercial failure and after a short run was withdrawn from circulation. It was then lost for many years, until a much deteriorated copy was rediscovered in a skip and donated to the Field Museum in Chicago in 1947. To save this copy from further decay, it was transferred to 16mm film.

In the 1960s, this material was re-edited by Bill Holm (1925-2020) and George Quimby (1913-2003) of the Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle. This version was released in 1973 as In the Land of the War Canoes, with a running time of 47 minutes.

Holm and Quimby changed the title of the film as they believed it overemphasised the importance of head-hunting among the Kwakwaka’wakw, and replaced the many melodramatic intertitles with fewer and more soberly ethnographic texts.

They also recorded a new soundtrack based on the chanting that Kwakwaka’wakw audiences had spontaneously produced when shown rushes of the material during the research phase of the reconstruction.

However, this version was subsequently criticised for treating the film as if it were an imperfectly realised ethnographic documentary rather than the ‘motion picture drama’ that Curtis had intended it to be.

In 2014, a second reconstruction was released under the original title. This was put together by Brad Evans, an English literature scholar of the University of Chicago, and Aaron Glass, an anthropologist and film-maker who was working with the Kwakwaka’wakw. It also involved close collaboration with U’mista, a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural organisation.

The aim was to make this version as close as possible to Curtis’s original conception. Additional elements of the original film, discovered in the interim since the 1973 version, afforded a clearer idea of the original structure of the film as well as prolonging the length of the reconstruction.  

Each scene was independently tinted, just as they were in many early fictional feature films.

The melodramatic intertitles were restored and a soundtrack was added, based on a new recording of the score originally composed for the film.

The scenes were tinted one by one, just as they would have been for a film made for theatrical release in 1914.

But though undoubtedly closer to the original, even with the additions, this new version runs to 66 minutes, only about 2/3rds of the original length. It is distributed by Milestone Films and a trailer is available here 

Content:  This film is often claimed as part of` the history of ethnographic film, but its production involved so many fictional elements and so much reconstruction that by present-day criteria, its status as ethnography or any form of non-fiction film would be seriously contested.

Although Curtis claimed that the story of the film was based on ‘tribal lore’, it was structured around a melodramatic plot of the kind that was common at this time in the emergent cinema industry. As this was played out in a Native setting by Native actors, it could be classified as an ethnodrama.

George Hunt in 1898. Photograph by Harlan I. Smith. [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

The actors were mostly Kwakwaka’wakw, many of them related to George Hunt (1854-1933), a part British, part Tlingit man who was married to a Kwakwaka’wakw woman of noble rank. He had been the primary informant of Franz Boas for many years, and Curtis took him on as a general consultant. He appears to have played a major role both in casting and in the general organisation of the production. 

By the early twentieth century, the Kwakwaka’wakw had adopted many Euro-american social and cultural norms, and had largely abandoned traditional modes of dress and architecture. Their magnificent winter ceremonies, often referred to as ‘potlatches’, had been banned by the Canadian government

Winter ceremonies (‘potlatches’) had been banned since 1884 but were sumptuously recreated for the film.

As Curtis wanted to place his story in a pre-contact period, with Hunt’s assistance, he commissioned the making of many traditional costumes and artefacts, including particularly the masks worn in their winter ceremonies which form an important part of the story.  A number of war canoes, by then abandoned, were recuperated and redecorated. Other items were taken on loan from museums. Most of the actors wore wigs. 

Motana watches Naida depart after they have exchanged tokens of their love.

The plot revolves around a love story between Motana, a young warrior and Naida, a princess who has been betrothed to an ‘Evil Sorcerer’ against her will. When Motana and his family kill the sorcerer and offer his head to Naida’s father, the latter agrees that they may marry and a wedding ceremony ensues.

But when Motana returns home, his village is raided by Yaklus, the ferocious brother of the sorcerer, who leaves Motana for dead and takes Naida off to his village where he holds a magnificent ceremony in celebration.

Motana and Naida flee from Yaklus’s settlement

Motana is not dead however, and having been revivified by a ‘Medicine Man’, he sneaks into Yaklus’s house at night and carries Naida off in his canoe.  Their flight is soon discovered by Yaklus who pursues them through a surging gorge, only for his canoe to capsize and he is drowned. The film ends abruptly with the young couple safe in their canoe followed by a sunset.

Grizzly Bear dances in an approaching canoe.

Although Curtis was a magnificent photographer, his experience as a film-maker was limited. There are many remarkable individual sequences in the film, none more so than the scene in which three war canoes arrive for the wedding party, with masked figures impersonating the  Thunderbird (see image at head of this entry), Grizzly Bear (see left) and the Wasp dancing ecstatically in the prow, arms outstretched. 

Naida was played by three different actresses. The actress in this scene wears nose ornaments borrowed from a museum.

But the narrative of the film is confused, not helped by the fact that some roles were played by several actors while some actors played several roles. 

A great deal of care was lavished on the performance of the winter ceremonies, but they are shot as a series of wide-angle tableaux, with few shots of detail.

They also do  not make a great deal of sense narratively. The ‘wedding’ ceremony is in fact a winter ceremony and there is no sign of either bride or groom. It is also rather less grand than the subsequent ceremony held by Yaklus, the principal ‘baddie’.

A visiting chief takes a drink of candlefish oil, a high prestige item. But shots of detail of this kind are rare in the ceremonial footage.

Curtis had sought to make a film that was commercially successful while at the same time being culturally authentic. Sadly, he failed substantially on both counts; while some of the reconstruction is authentic, there is much that is completely inauthentic. And while the film was much appreciated by cinema critics when it was first released, the public voted with their feet and stayed away. 

By the time that Curtis came to make the film, the Kwakwaka’wakw were already accustomed to performing their ‘tradition’ for outside visitors. This film may not be an ethnographically trustworthy document of what their life was like before contact, but it serves nevertheless to show how the Kwakwaka’wakw chose to present themselves at a particular moment of their history. 

`Texts: Holm and Quimby 1980, Gidley 1982, Bunn-Marcuse 2005: 306-311, Evans and Glass 2014, Henley 2020: 90-99.

© 2018 Paul Henley