This material was probably shot on 5 and 6 September 1898 on Murray Island, today known as Mer, one of the most easterly islands in the archipelago lying between Papua New Guinea and the tip of Queensland, Australia.
The filmmaker was Alfred C. Haddon, a zoologist and leader of a multidisciplinary University of Cambridge scientific expedition to the archipelago. He used a hand-cranked 35mm N&G Kinematograph, which, to his great frustration, kept jamming. Even so, he managed to film around four minutes of material.
This appears to represent the first footage ever shot in the course of academic field research with explicit ethnographic objectives. However, as an example of ethnographic film more broadly defined as the filmic representation of customary practises in their original setting, it is preceded in time by the many Lumière films shot both in France and elsewhere from 1895 onwards and also by footage shot in Arizona in August 1898 by Burton Holmes and Oscar Depue of the Hopi Snake Dance as well as of a Navajo “tournament”.
Content
The footage can be subdivided into four different types:
(a) a brief shot of three men engaged in traditional fire making. This is 50 seconds long. Unfortunately the fire did not ignite before the shot ran out.
(b) three consecutive shots of Mer Islanders dancing at a beach-side location. The first shot is 45 seconds long, but the others are much shorter, suggesting the camera jammed for these two shots.
(c) four shots of a group of four Aboriginal men dancing in the same location as the Mer Islanders, accompanied by a fifth man beating out time on a pole. These four shots total some 65 seconds
(d) a single shot of three men wearing masks and skirts, and dancing in a circle before the camera. This dance represents the culminating moment of a male initiation ceremony traditionally dedicated to the Mer Island culture hero Malo-Bomai. This footage is viewable here.
Of all these dances, it is the last that is by far the most interesting. As explained in the text cited below, the dance shown in this sequence had long been abandoned under missionary influence and the masks that the dancers are wearing were made of cardboard since the original masks had been destroyed.
The precise significance of the dance was not determined by Haddon himself, but for reasons expounded in the text below, on the basis of the local legends reproduced in the Expedition reports, there is good reason to believe that the dancers are re-enacting the progress of Malo-Bomai as he proceeded around the islands of the archipelago for the first time.
A particularly interesting further feature, given that this sequence reproduces the dance traditionally performed at the culmination of the male initiation ceremony, is that the dancers appear to be wearing skirts of the kind normally worn only by women. In the text below, it is suggested that this may linked to a theme that recurs frequently in the ethnographic literature on Melanesia, whereby the boundaries between gender identities are considered highly malleable, particularly under the special ritual conditions of an initiation ceremony.
Text : Long and Laughren 1993, Henley 2013b