Captured by Women- connecting to the Pitt Rivers Museum Film
Archives is a collaboration project between The Oxford Academy of
Documentary Film and The Pitt Rivers Film Archive, enabled by Screen South
with funding from the National Digital Archive Fund. Dr. Alison Kahn will be
discussing this digitisation project and screening extracts from her
documentary, which is an attempt to contextualise some extracts of film
footage captured by two British women in the 1930s, who travelled overseas,
each to a remote corner of the world;
Beatrice Blackwood went to the highlands of New Guinea and Ursula Graham
Bower went to the hills of Nagaland, Northeast India. Once they entered these
‘un-controlled regions’, they met and lived with the local tribal group for
extended periods of time, learning and observing the day-to-day life. Along
with tales and diaries about the Angas of New Guinea and the Nagas from the
Naga Hills, they brought back with them fragments of filmed footage that they
had managed to capture on a relatively new recording device: the cinecamera.
The documentary uses D-SLR film technology and includes discussions on
the decisions made during the filmmaking and editing of the footage, as the
filmmaker attempts to connect the archival footage to some of the objects
from the film that can be found in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.