ABSTRACT
I propose in this chapter to examine two British travel films which are housed as non-fiction films in the National Film and Television Archive: Nionga (1925), made by missionaries in an unidentified part of Central Africa, possibly Zaire, and Stampede (1929) made by adventurers Major and Stella Court Treatt in southern Sudan. Both films were shot on location on the African continent using indigenous performers and they claim to show native life in Africa. My purpose in resurrecting these films is to assess them in relation to other British ethnographic display practices of the period rather than in terms of whether they are authentic representations of African life which is the way in which Rachael Low and other film historians have considered them. The way in which I will approach the task of recontextualising the films is to first set them within the framework in which traditional film histories have discussed them and then discuss them in the light of more recent approaches to film historiography and spectatorship in silent cinema. 1 In the second part I will talk about the films within the broader cultural practices of their period, drawing on studies of museology to examine the relationship between the films and traditions of ethnographic performance and modes of exhibition during the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century. Before embarking on this analysis, let me introduce the two films.
