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
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