Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema

Description

The first silent feature film with an “all Indian” cast and a surviving original orchestral score, Edward Curtis’s 1914 “In the Land of the Head Hunters” was a landmark of early cinema.Influential but often neglected in historical accounts, this spectacular melodrama was an intercultural product of Curtis’s encounter and collaboration with the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia.In recognition of the film’s centennial, and alongside the release of a restored version, “Return to the Land of the Head Hunters” brings together leading anthropologists, Native American authorities, artists, musicians, literary scholars, and film historians to reassess the film and its legacy.
The volume offers unique Kwakwaka’wakw perspectives on the film, accounts of its production and subsequent circulation, and evaluations of its depictions of cultural practice.Like his photographs, Curtis’s motion picture was meant to document a supposedly vanishing race.
But as this collection shows, the film is not simply an artifact of colonialist nostalgia.Resituated within film history and informed by a legacy of Kwakwaka’wakw participation and response, the movie offers dynamic evidence of ongoing cultural survival and transformation under shared conditions of modernity.Brad Evans is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University.
Aaron Glass is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the Bard Graduate Center.
“Lively and inspiring …
a comprehensive and completely original cross-disciplinary collection that offers a model of how new work on older cultural materials can take place.” – Faye Ginsburg, director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History, New York University
“A highly original collection of essays that offers a theoretically sophisticated understanding ….
Exemplifies collaboration between indigenous communities, scholars, and artists.” – Pauline Turner Strong, author of “American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries”
“Curtis’s epic melodrama of the precontact Kwakwaka’wakw world has been given a new life, with the advantages of the discovery of a surviving bit of original film, the revival of the orchestral score originally composed for the motion picture, the expertise of film historians and musicians, the use of advanced film-reconstruction technology and modern concepts of restoration.
It is a new chapter in the story of Edward S.
Curtis in the land of the head hunters.” – From the foreword by Bill Holm