Abstract
The previous chapter centered upon a rather esoteric cinematic document, the early ethnographic research film. This chapter shirts the focus to a group of films that could fall under various generic headings: the documentary, the travel film, the documentaire romancé, the big-game expedition film, and the colonialist propaganda film. While nascent forms of these hybrid genres emerged in the 1910s, a firmer union between documentary and the exotic was forged during the interwar period and blossomed in the Weimar era. These popular films share some of the same epistemological assumptions as those of the research film. A 1928 review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) and Karl Browns Stark Love (1927) praises the way the films present the “daily life of out-of-the-way minorities” through “natural pictures with a minimum of posed and directed action.”1 Like the research film, the central tenet of these popular films was to preserve the authenticity of the image, in particular the authentic image of the primitive body.
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Notes
See Guido Convents, “Film and German Colonial Propaganda for the Black African Territories to 1918,” in Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895–1920. eds. Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli (Venice: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1990), 58–77.
Solf’s unpublished diaries, quoted in Marlies Schünemann, Staatsekretär Solf besucht die deutsche Kolonie Togo, 1913. Filmdokumente zur Zeitgeschichte series, publication of the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film (Göttingen, 1975), 10.
See Russell A. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Cultur. (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1998), 171.
Quoted in Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer,” in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. ed. George W Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 81.
See Rudolf Pöch, Studien an Eingeborenen von Neu-Südwales und an australischen Schädel. (Vienna: Anthropologische Gesellschaft, 1915), 13. In his study of Australian aborigines, Pöch notes that the “Aboriginal Home,” a state-funded facility for educating aborigines, saw a great attrition rate among its population due to the refusal of many aborigines to submit to the Western sedentary work ethic.
Helmut Regel, “Der Schwarze und sein ‘Bwana’: Das Afrika-Bild im deutschen Film,” in Triviale Tropen: Exotische Reise- und Abenteuerfilme aus Deutschland, 1919–1939. ed. Jörg Schöning (Munich: edition text & kritik, 1997), 64.
Schomburgk noted that the project was a failure, above all because the film could not be developed in the existing heat and humidity. See Schomburgk, Zelte in Afrika: Eine autobiographische Erzählun. (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1930), 363–64.
Quoted in J. Zwernemann, Im Deutschen Sudan. Publikationen zu Wissenschaftlichen Filmen, series 8, no. 3, publication of the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film (Göttingen, 1978), 6.
Meg Gehrts, A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togolan. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1915), 46.
Tom Gunning, “Embarrassing Evidence: The Detective Camera and the Documentary Impulse,” in Collecting Visible Evidence. eds. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 61.
Hans Schomburgk, Geheimbund-Riten der Frauen in Liberia Bundu-Orde. (Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film, 1967), 3.
Kurt von Oerthal, “Schicksal des Großkulturfilms,” Der neue Film. July 5, 1948.
For an overview of different types of culture films, see Michael Töteberg, “Cultura guerra, commericio: Il reparto ‘Kulturfilm’ dell’Ufa,” in Schermi Germanici, Ufa 1917–1933. ed. Giovanni Spagnoletti (Venice: Marsilio Press, 1993), 69–74.
For a commentary on this film, see Hilmar Hoffmann, Mythos Olympia: Autonomie und Unterwerfung von Sport und Kultu. (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1993), especially 53–77.
Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacl. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 102.
Hans Schomburgk, Zelte in Africa: Eine autobiographische Erzählun. (Berlin: Reimer Hobbing, 1924).
Colin Ross, Mit dem Kurbelkasten um die Wel. (Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbildbühne, 1925), 5.
Hans Cürlis, Die Weltgeschichte als Kolonialgeschichte. 35mm, 94 min., Germany, 1926.
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© 2001 Assenka Oksiloff
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Oksiloff, A. (2001). Paradise Lost. In: Picturing the Primitive. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05687-0_4
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