Playing primitive: “In the land of the headhunters” and/or “war canoes”

Abstract

Edward Curtis's 1914 film of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia is analyzed from the perspective of early ("primitive") cinema and the avant‐garde. The original film, In the Land of the Headhunters, is recontextualized and compared both to Nanook of the North and fiction filmmaking of the silent period; the restored film, In the Land of the War Canoes, is considered from the perspective of ethnographic spectatorship and native reappropriation of colonialist texts. As an allegory of the “salvage paradigm,” Curtis's ethnography is positioned within a postmodernist discourse on cultural representation.

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