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.

© 2018 Paul Henley