Nomadic Cinema - by Alison Griffiths

About the Book

Nomadic Cinema is a groundbreaking history of early-twentieth-century exhibition films, analyzing them as visual records of colonialism that also offer new possibilities for recognizing Indigenous histories.

Book Synopsis

From In Borneo, the Land of the Head-Hunters to The Epic of Everest to Camping Among the Indians, the early twentieth century was the heyday of expedition filmmaking. As new technologies transformed global transportation and opened new avenues for documentation, and as imperialism and capitalism expanded their reach, Western filmmakers embarked on journeys to places they saw as exotic, seeking to capture both the monumental and the mundane. Their films portrayed far-flung locales, the hardships of travel, and the day-to-day lives of Indigenous people through a deeply colonial lens.

Nomadic Cinema is a groundbreaking history of these films, analyzing them as visual records of colonialism that also offer new possibilities for recognizing Indigenous histories. Alison Griffiths examines expedition films made in Borneo, Central Asia, Tibet, Polynesia, and the American Southwest, reinterpreting them from decolonial perspectives to provide alternative accounts of exploration. She considers the individuals and institutions--including the American Museum of Natural History--responsible for creating the films, the spectators who sought them out, and the Indigenous intermediaries whose roles white explorers minimized. Ambitious and interdisciplinary, Nomadic Cinema ranges widely, from the roots of expedition films in medieval cartography and travel writing to still-emerging technologies of virtual and augmented reality. Highlighting the material conditions of filmmaking and the environmental footprint left by exploration, this book recovers Indigenous memory and sovereignty from within long-buried sources.

Review Quotes

Scintillating, written with grace and elegance, Nomadic Cinema tells us how the seventh art takes us, as Baudelaire had put it, anywhere out of this world. Reaching into medieval and early modern cartography, focusing on a welter of early travel films and those we now affiliate with virtual reality, Alison Griffiths reflects on how the structure and process of travel and expedition films inform us of the fragility and depredation of the world in which we find ourselves. A masterpiece in analysis, erudition, and social commitment, Nomadic Cinema is the first, the finest, and most telling work of its kind, a compass and an enduring point of reference for us all.--Tom Conley, author of Cartographic Cinema

In Nomadic Cinema, Alison Griffiths takes us on an epic tour of expedition filmmaking from the silent era to virtual reality, with her usual great rigor and insight. Her expansive approach keeps close eye on the role of the Indigenous peoples who populate early films on the sidelines, and the adventure proves that the archive of colonial cinema remains a rich vein of cultural encounter and reinvention.--Catherine Russell, author of Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices

In this broad-ranging study, readers will journey across the globe with one of the premier interpreters of ethnographic images and rediscover the institutions and people who made them. Griffiths unpacks fascinating archival materials and successfully offers a rich visual archaeology of expedition films made a century ago about places such as Mount Everest, Borneo, and the Silk Road while also relocating images of distant places in our own time. Part study of images born as salvage anthropology, Griffiths creatively salvages the images themselves, returning them to the descendants of the Indigenous communities depicted, breathing new life into them through current decolonial perspectives. A history of the production and reception of the anthropological image and a thoughtful consideration of the structures of the expedition film genre, under Griffiths's bold revisionist take, Nomadic Cinema also surprises by morphing into a work of ethnography.--Vanessa R. Schwartz, director of the Visual Studies Research Institute, University of Southern California

About the Author

Alison Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (2002), Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (2008), and Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (2016), all published by Columbia University Press. Griffiths received a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research for this book.