Here’s a remarkable presentation at the NYU Orphan Film Symposium on Counter-Archives, recorded June 16, 2022, at Concordia University. It centers on a rediscovered and restored nonfiction film (a sponsored film, a travelogue, a newsreel production, an ethnographic film), fraught with colonialist rhetoric and ideological baggage — yet redeemed, or at least re-contextualized and informed, by a First Nation perspective. “Making it right.”
The film Totem Land (1927) runs 10 minutes; the session 51. Aiding in the contextualization is a sound newsfilm fragment recorded a year later, in which famed anthropologist Franz Boas speaks plainly against “scientific” racism.
Kester Dyer (Carleton U) introduces
Tom Child, N̓a̱msg̱a̱mk̓ala (Kwagu’ł First Nation) & Joseph Clark (Simon Fraser U) The Ethnographic Films of George Hunt
Click to enlarge or go to vimeo.com/737216451.
• Totem Land (J. B. Scott, Associated Screen News, 1927) 10 min. restoration by Canadian Educational, Sponsored & Industrial Film Project; live piano accompaniment by José María Serralde Ruiz (Mexico City) with drum and vocals by Tom Child
• Boas on Human Capabilities–outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1928) 2 min.; new scan by Moving Image Research Collections (U of South Carolina)
• Kwagu’ł film and audio recordings (Franz Boas with George Hunt, 1930): Weaving Mats (Tsukwani Francine Hunt); Kwakwaka’wakw games: Kicking; Paddle Dance; + wax cylinders: Women’s Winter Dance; Baby Songs
Abstract by Joseph Clark
In 1927 the Associated Screen News released Totem Land – a film sponsored by the Canadian Pacific Railroad describing “a visit to the Indians of Vancouver Island, where remnants of their culture survive.” The film features George and Francine Hunt, demonstrating carving, dances, the harvesting of clams, and several elaborate masks. Although the film presents him as just a “distinguished old Indian,” this wasn’t George Hunt’s first film project. Hunt had worked closely with Edward Curtis in the making of the quasi-ethnographic film, In the Land of the Headhunters (1914) and made several films with the famed ethnographer Franz Boas, with whom he had a long professional collaboration. Hunt was Tinglit and English and grew up in Tsaxis (Fort Rupert) in Kwakwaka’wakw territory. Speaking both Kwakwaka’wakw and English fluently, Hunt acted as a guide and interpreter for white ethnographers who came to study (and film) the Kwakwaka’wakw. Since the 1990s anthropologists have begun to acknowledge the key role Hunt played in Boas’ research and Hunt is now described as an ethnographer in his own right. But what if we described him as a filmmaker?
By examining the ethnographic films made by Boas and Hunt, along with In the Land of the Headhunters and Totem Land, this presentation asks: what changes when we shift our understanding of these films and look at them as the films of George Hunt? Drawing on the films themselves, correspondence between Hunt and Boas, as well as the oral histories provided by Hunt’s family, the presentation centers Hunt’s role in shaping these cinematic portrayals. By shifting away from Curtis and Boas, we can look beyond the myth of the “vanishing race” rehearsed by these works, to see how Hunt and the Kwakwaka’wakw used film for their own purposes.
While the films of Edward Curtis, Franz Boas, and the Canadian Pacific Railroad offer an archive of indigenous people through a lens of white supremacy – whether it is the salvage ethnography of Boas and Curtis or the extraction logic of the CPR – there is another way to understand these films. When read as the films of George Hunt, these works can be understood as a form of indigenous cinema and as a counterarchive of visual sovereignty.
The Boas 16mm films are held at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington, where they are being digitized and synched with accompanying wax cylinder recordings.
Bios
Joseph Clark is a lecturer in film studies at Simon Fraser University. His research and teaching focus on archival and non-theatrical media, including newsreels, home movies, and sponsored film. He is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (U of Minnesota Press, 2020).
For more about the project with the Burke Museum in Seattle, led by Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse (Curator of Native Art), see “Ka̱ns Hiłile (Making it Right): A Collaborative Reframing of Kwakiutl Film and Audio Recordings with Franz Boas, 1930,” (also the title of a forthcoming digital publication).
The museum posts this short silent video.
“Mary Hunt Johnson performing a women’s Winter dance, Fort Rupert, 1930, filmed by Franz Boas.” (0:53) silent. “Boas labeled this ‘Hamshamtses film.'” Head title on film: “Woman’s Cannibal Dance.” Boas and his collaborators shot 16mm films on this 1930 visit, of which some 51 minutes survive.
CESIF hosts this silent version of the film, with on-screen introductory text not seen in the above presentation.
“Travelogue tourné sur l’île de Vancouver par J. Booth Scott au cours de l’été 1927, puis monté à Montréal par Terry Ramsaye. Avec la soprano canadienne Juliette Gaultier de la Vérendrye et l’ethnologue d’origine anglo-tlingit George Hunt et sa conjointe Francine Hunt.”
For more about the Canadian Educational, Sponsored, and Industrial Film project, see screenculture.org/cesif.