KUKUKUKU
Beatrice Blackwood
Great Britain 1936-37 | 25 Min. | Video
Great Britain 1936-37 | 25 Min. | Video
The 1930s was the heyday of pre-War ethnographic film production, and Blackwood’s footage from New Guinea is typical, although distinguished by a higher standard of camera work. The footage (also known as ‘A stone age people in New Guinea’) largely focuses on domestic life and material culture – eating, looking after children, making net bags and a rather unsettling scene of cane swallowing (for curing illness). ‘Kukukuku’ is a broad term covering a number of groups in the New Guinea highlands, with whom Blackwood spent nine months while attached to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The final scenes of the film document the Arawe of New Britain.