This was first introduced as an amateur format in 1923. Whereas 35mm film had only sixteen frames per foot of film, 16 mm had forty. Although the quality was inferior, it had the great advantage of being very much cheaper.
This gauge was used for ethnographic purposes as early as 1930 by the Board of Anthropological Research, which produced a series of films about Aboriginal people in South and Central Australia over the course of the decade. It was also used by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson during their research in Bali and New Guinea in 1936-39, and by Beatrice Blackwood, also in New Guinea, around the same period. Ursula Graham Bower used 16 mm, some of it even in colour, when shooting among the Naga and other peoples of northeast India in the 1940s, during the Second World War.
After the Second World War, Jean Rouch, working in West Africa, was a strong advocate of 16 mm colour film. It was also used in the 1950s by John Marshall in southern Africa, by Harald Schultz in Brazil and in the mid-1960s by the National Film Board of Canada to make the Netsilik series in the far north of Canada.
However, even as late as 1965, 16 mm film was not regarded by some film-makers as being of sufficient quality for professional purposes. It was on these grounds that Ian Dunlop chose to shoot his celebrated of films about the Aboriginal people of the Western Desert series in black-and-white 35 mm film, even though this meant doing without on-location sound recording.
Thereafter, however, 16 mm became the gauge most used by ethnographic film-makers until it was replaced by video and later digital formats from the late 1970s onwards.
