Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film

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.

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.