Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive

374 Pages·2019·10.39 MB·English

by  Katherine Groo

BAD FILM HISTORIES
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BAD
FILM
HISTORIES
Ethnography and the Early Archive
KATHERINE GROO
University of Minnesota Press| Minneapolis | London
Portions of chapter 1 were published in a different form in “The Maison and
Its Minor: Lumière(s), Film History, and the Early Archive,” Cinema Journal
52, no. 4 (2013): 25– 48; copyright 2013 by the University of Texas Press;
all rights reserved. A portion of chapter 1 was published in a different form
in “The Human Zoo and Its Double,” in The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of
Exhibition and Encounter, ed. Michael Lawrence and Karen Lury (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 43–64; reprinted with permission of Palgrave
Macmillan. A portion of chapter 5 was published in a different form in “Alice in
the Archives,” in New Silent Cinema, ed. Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo (New
York: AFI/Routledge, 2016), 17–37.
Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Groo, Katherine, author.
Title: Bad film histories : ethnography and the early archive / Katherine Groo.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028406 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0032-8 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0033-5 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnographic films—History. | Motion pictures in ethnology—
History. | Visual anthropology.
Classification: LCC G347 .G76 2019 (print) | DDC 301—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028406
UMP BmB 2019
For Nathaniel, Alma, and Nicola
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Untimely Historiographies, 1
Ethnographic Particularities
1 Of Other Archives: The Excursive Minors 43
of La Maison Lumière and Les Archives
de la Planète
2 Historical Figures: Dance and the Unlettered Line 105
3 Following Derrida: Ethnocinematic Animals, 157
Death Effects, and the Supplement of
Expedition Cinema
4 Language Games, or The World Intertitled 211
5 Ethnography Won’t Wait: New Media and 255
Material Histories
Acknowledgments 291
Notes 295
Index 339
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INTRODUCTION
Untimely Historiographies,
Ethnographic Particularities
This project began by accident, or by way of an accident that posed
a set of critical questions about the practice of film history and our
understanding of moving image archives and artifacts. At the time, I
was a graduate student in the early stages of research with broad inter-
ests in early ethnographic cinema, film history, and the avant- garde.
I had contacted the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
and ordered, among other titles, Martin and Osa Johnson’s Simba:
King of the Beasts (1928). When the film arrived— a DVD copied from
a Betamax tape— it carried with it an unexpected surplus. Another
film preceded the Johnsons’ dreamscape of African adventure. This
second film was not mentioned in any of the loan documents. It had
no title, no intertitles, no credits, no identifying paratexts of any kind.
The anonymous bit of film lasts just over four minutes. It begins, as
so many ethnographic films often do, with a map. The camera zooms
in upon a silhouette of the African continent, eventually landing on
the portion labeled “Belgian Congo.” The map dissolves, and the film
cycles through a series of landscapes— the rushing waters of (one
presumes) the Congo River and elephants meandering through the
grass— before shifting its attention to the bodies of (again, one pre-
sumes) Congolese people: a hunter tracks and kills a deer, women
prepare food, and a crowd of dancers run and leap in circles, lift-
ing their arms high as they pass by the camera, their skin seemingly
pressed against the lens.
Shortly after my first viewing of the film, I contacted an archivist
1