The Haddon Project

Made by Rudolf Poech (Aus­tria) in the Kala­hari desert in the first decade of the cen­tu­ry, this film is remark­able as an early attempt to bring sound and image togeth­er. … read more

IN THE LAND OF THE WAR CANOES is an edited ver­sion of Curtis’s fea­ture film THE LAND OF THE HEADHUNTERS, a dra­ma­tized doc­u­men­tary about the Kwak­i­utl Indi­ans of British Colum­bia … read more

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 … read more

There are sev­er­al com­pi­la­tions of the Lumiere broth­ers’ famous first films in film archives around the world. This ver­sion comes from the film archive of the Hun­gar­i­an Film Insti­tute and … read more

© Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

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.