ABSTRACT
The representations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently combined these two contradictory qualities—savagery and nobility—in a single construct that popularized and perverted Rousseau's original vision. Indeed, the unity of extremes is among the predominant tropes of ethnographic representation. In the Land of the Head Hunters initiated a tradition of historical reconstruction that was to become central to all ethnographic filmmaking of the era. The (melo)dramatic value of the film is privileged in the extreme, and there is virtually no effort to provide an ethnographic context for the events that unfold on screen. The inclusion of Associated Screen News productions in the realm of ethnographic film may be questionable if the institutional funding and personal biographies of filmmakers are considered to be adequate or exclusive criteria for the classification of films. The ethnography of the Northwest Coast relied heavily on an incipient structural-functionalist paradigm in which unity and a corresponding assumption of completely shared ideational systems was the rule.
