15 min. b&w.
Source: Pennsylvania State University.
Character Formation in Different Cultures series.
Text: Henley2013a
By Aeroplane to Pygmyland footage (1926-27/1960s) – dir. Matthew Stirling
approx. 250 min., b&w, original silent, English voice-over added later.
Production : Smithsonian Institution.
Source : HSFA, Smithsonian (OC-87.4.1) Approx. 120 mins. available on-line here.
Footage shot by cinematographer Richard Peck and/or anthropologist Matthew Stirling, leader of a large multidisciplinary Dutch and American scientific expedition in 1926-27 to what was then Netherlands New Guinea (and is now Papua or West Papua).
This footage was used to cut a free-standing film with the title By Aeroplane to Pygmyland (or some slight variation, e.g. Airplane, Pigmy Land etc.), which Stirling used to support his lecture tours in the years following the expedition. Unfortunately, this was irreparably damaged in a flood.
A copy of the Dutch version of the film with the title Wonderen Uit Pygmyland( Marvels from Pygmyland) is held by the Netherlands Film Archive in Amsterdam and an interpositive copy of that surviving film has also been deposited in the HSFA. An abridged version, entitled Expeditie door Nieuw-Guinea 1926 (80 mins.) was released by the Netherlands Film Museum in 1995.
Although this footage is readily accessible on-line, with excellent additional material, including a commentary by Stirling himself recorded in the 1960s, the sequences of ethnographic interest are clearly based on no more than superficial acquaintance with the indigenous Papuan subjects, the supposed ‘pygmies’ of the title.
Text: Taylor 2006
Blackwood, Beatrice (1889-1975)*
She was an academic member of staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, from 1935 to 1959, and during this time, made a number of expeditions to collect materials for the museum.
It was in 1936-37 that she made her principal contribution to ethnographic film history when she took an amateur 16mm camera with her on an expedition to Morobe Province in Highland New Guinea to make a collection for the museum of the artefacts produced by the Anga people.
The principal motivation for taking the camera was to shoot footage showing how the Anga made and used stone tools, though she also shot a number of sequences on other aspects of their life. Although limited in scope and duration, and not intended to work as a free-standing film, this footage, which can be viewed here, remains of considerable ethnographic and historical interest.
More general details about Beatrice Blackwood’s career are available here
Haddon, Alfred C. (1855-1940)*
Alfred Haddon was a University of Cambridge zoologist and the leader of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits of 1898. He had first visited the Torres Strait ten years before, but this time he returned with a multidisciplinary team which was equipped with the latest fieldwork technology, including two Edison wax-cylinder phonographs and a hand-cranked 35mm N&G Kinematograph, manufactured by the prestigious Newman and Guardia company of London.
The main base of the Expedition was on the island of Mer, then known as Murray Island, which lies off the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea, one of the most easterly in the archipelago of islands between Papua New Guinea and northern tip of Queensland, Australia.
It was here in September 1898, only a few days before the Expedition was due to move on from Mer that Haddon shot a few sequences of dancing and fire-making, mostly by the culturally Melanesian inhabitants of the island, but also by a group of Aboriginal men visiting from mainland Australia.
To Haddon’s intense frustration, as he was shooting, the mechanism of the kinematograph kept jamming. Nevertheless, he did manage to get some four minutes of material. This appears to be the very first time that a moving image camera was used for explicit ethnographic research purposes in the course of a fieldwork expedition. See here for a more detailed description.
Haddon did not return to the Torres Strait, nor did he ever employ a moving image camera in ethnographic field research again. In the six volume report on the Expedition, his filming is not mentioned, though there are few stills from the film in one of the plates. However, the filming is mentioned in a more popular account, even if briefly, and Haddon did show the film on a number of public occasions.
Haddon also encouraged both Baldwin Spencer and Rudolf Pöch to take a moving image camera with them on their respective field trips, to Central Australia in 1901 in Spencer’s case, and to mainland Papua New Guinea in 1904-1906 in case of Pöch. But both of them took Bioscope cameras with them, suggesting that Haddon did not recommend the Newman and Guardia model!
Text : Henley 2013b
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