The Haddon Project

© Österreichisches Bundesinstitut für den wiss. Film

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. The film shows a ‘Bush­man’ named Kubi speak­ing into a wax cylin­der phono­graph about the behav­iour of ele­phants at water­holes. In 1984 the sound and image were brought as close­ly into syn­chro­niza­tion as pos­si­ble. The lan­guage is Ts-aukhoe. 

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

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 … read more