TORRES STRAIT
Alfred C. Haddon
Great Britain 1898 | 4 Min. | Video
Great Britain 1898 | 4 Min. | Video
This is the earliest location-shot ethnographic film, and indeed one of the earliest films ever made. The four brief scenes were shot during the anthropologist A.C. Haddon’s famous 1898 expedition to the Torres Strait Islands and show a dance sequence from the Malu-Bomai ceremony, a dance sequence on a beach, fire making, and a group of visiting Australian Aboriginals dancing. The quality of the film is not high, and without the context provided by the expedition’s reports and Haddon’s other writings it is hard to make much sense of the content. The historical importance of the material, however, is as great to anthropology as the Lumiere brothers’ work is to cinema more generally.