neither/nor
suchlike heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men! Te fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death- dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” Melville was neither the first nor last to express similar sentiments, which would find echo in, for example, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), which opposes the systematic cruelty emanating from the “sepulchral city” of Brussels to the relatively naïve, innocuous brutality of the Congolese bushmen with their filed teeth.
As the 20th century came on, what Conrad’s Marlow
describes as the “many blank spaces” on the map became fewer and fewer, the public curiosity about them greater and greater. We may surmise that this was a contributing factor in the cycle of “uncharted island” films that appeared in the late silent/early sound period, including such diverse titles as Te Lost World (1925), Let’s Go Native (1930), Island of Lost Souls, Te Most Dangerous Game (both 1932), and King Kong (1933). Tis overlaps approximately with the appearance of the foundational ethnographic films, including Robert J. Flaherty’s extraordinary run from Nanook of the North (1922) to Man of Aran (1934) and pseudo-documentaries like J.C. Cook’s Inyaah (Jungle Goddess, 1934) and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), the work of future Kong collaborators Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.
Te Amazon basin was among the few remaining
mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
blank spaces to remain. Another was the Central Cordillera, a mountain chain running east to west on the enormous island of New Guinea. Tese highlands had long been thought uninhabited by the Europeans who had been a colonial presence in New Guinea since the 16th century, but the view from the first airplanes to fly over told another story, and an Australian expedition in 1933 made initial contact with the region’s native Chumbu, a people one million strong who had lived in isolation from the outside world for tens of thousands of years. New Guinea was already a magnet for ethnographers and anthropologists, and now more still flocked in hoping to study an intact Stone Age culture. Beginning in the mid ’30s, the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson shot field footage among the Iatmul people living along the Sepik River. In 1933, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker published the findings of the innovative field work that she conducted in Papua New Guinea under the title Life in Lesu: The Study of a Melanesian Society in New Ireland, leading to her appointment at the Rockefeller Foundation–funded Yale Institute of Human Relations. Under their auspices, she would apply the same research techniques that she had to the Lesu to the Southern California movie colony in her study Hollywood, the Dream Factory (1950), finding that the superstitious “magical thinking” of the moguls had a great deal in common with that which prevailed among the savage chiefs. Powdermaker’s practice of reversing the ethnographic gaze would be followed in time by the anthropologist and ethnographic documentarian Jean Rouch. First filming African rituals and ceremonies while working in Niger as a civil engineer in the 1940s, Rouch would eventually produce some of the most important documents of Africa under colonial control, including
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