“Ethnology as an Epic”: The Modern Cinema of Edward S. Curtis and the Kwakwa̲ka̲’wakw

Abstract

In 1914, the American photographer Edward S. Curtis released the first feature-length silent film to star an entirely Indigenous cast. In the Land of the Head Hunters—an epic melodrama of love, war, and ritual—was made with Kwakwa̲ka̲’wakw (Kwakiutl) people on location in British Columbia. Curtis then worked with artists and musicians in New York to frame it as commercial entertainment. This interdisciplinary essay explores an inherent tension in Curtis’s landmark film between his reliance on Western aesthetic references (classical literature, orchestral music, fine and popular art), and his efforts to be taken seriously as an ethnographer. Neither pure artistic fiction nor anthropological “documentary,” Head Hunters emerged in an intermediate zone of popular culture during the early twentieth century. Curtis and his Kwakwa̲ka̲’wakw partners mobilized both European and Indigenous mythologies, aesthetics, and theatrical traditions to make a shared contribution to that quintessentially modern art form—the motion picture.