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

© Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

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.

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