Three years after the controversy surrounding the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation, the “documentary” Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific purported to introduce to the world a tribe of man-eaters inhabiting an isolated islet off the coast of Australia. Benign-looking natives posed for the white interlopers and their camera, their quizzical gazes punctuated by images of human skulls and other contrived menaces.
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Martin and Osa Johnson, the husband-and-wife team behind Among the Cannibal Isles, were American explorers who mastered the possibilities of the early travelogue. Born in Rockford, Martin Johnson had sailed with Jack London on the Snark and later mounted slide shows of his travels abroad. Post-Victorian nickelodeon audiences were enthralled by Johnson’s record of the faraway jewels of Western colonialism, and the shows’ financial success further fueled his ambitions. In 1912 he and Osa began traveling to remote areas, explorations that resulted in Among the Cannibal Isles. A decade later Johnson released Simba: The King of the Beasts, a feature-length documentary of an east African safari that showed bare-breasted tribal women as well as Osa displaying her prowess with a gun on a lion hunt.
Indeed, the prejudices of the critical establishment consigned what Gunning terms the “early nonfiction films” to the dustbin of scholarship. Only in recent years have academics begun to focus on these materials not so much for their content as for what they reveal about the cultural and social environments that produced them. Three years ago Gunning and his American colleagues were given access to the archives of the Netherlands Film Museum, one of the most extensive repositories of such materials. This weekend examples culled from the collection, including the Johnsons’ two movies, will be shown at the U. of C., after which representatives from the museum and other experts in early cinema will participate in discussions.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Martin and Osa Johnson photo.
