Alison Griffiths, "Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Alison Griffiths about her book titled...

Nomadic Cinema, a cultural geography of the expedition film, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2025. And this book takes us into a whole bunch of different films, mostly from the early 20th century, that go to a lot of places and talk about the going to the lots of places and talk about what they found in very specific ways that give us a

a perspective on, for example, Indigenous histories, often seen at the time as kind of maybe the perspective. We thankfully have a more nuanced perspective now. And histories like this help us bring that nuance to understand these films and the people who made them and the impact that they had. So we've got a whole bunch of things to talk about here. Alison, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really delighted to be here. I'm delighted to have you. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

Absolutely. Yeah. So I teach film and media studies at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York and the graduate center attached to that institution. And this is my fourth monograph with Columbia University Press. And this book in many ways is a follow up or I guess a sequel to my first book entitled Wondrous Difference Cinema Anthropology and Turn of the Century Visual Culture. And that came out in

in 2002. And I'm a film historian, visual studies expert who really looks at cinema from a number of different vantage points. I've written a book about cinema and museums and ideas of immersion. I've written another book about cinema and carceral institutions of the earliest uses and earliest films made of prisons.

But with the Matic Cinema, I really wanted to pick up kind of where I left off with Wondrous Difference, which is a book that kind of asked the question,

Where did ethnographic films come from? What did people making films in the early cinema period, so before 1907, what did they think of anthropology in terms of how useful film might be to the field and how impressed were anthropologists by this new technology that could potentially kind of transform how they gathered data?

That film looked at a whole bunch of different horizons out of which ethnographic film emerged. So 19th century world's fairs and expositions, photography, photography.

popular films representing people from around the world, Indigenous people. And so with Nomadic Cinema, I wanted to be a little bit more precise in terms of drilling down into this thing called the expedition film, which is a very hybrid object. It's clearly kind of like an ethnographic film. It's like a documentary film. It's like a travelogue. It's like a whole movie, but it's also something quite distinct.

Yes, it is quite distinct. So I think we probably should spend a bit more time on what it actually is. So how do you conceptualize this thing, the expedition film?

Right. That's a great first question. So what I wanted to do with the expedition film was, first of all, kind of recognize its hybridity. Right. But I also wanted to question its authority because it sounds very official and it sounds kind of like the visual equivalent of sort of scientific data. But what I wanted to do was kind of really get in to the nitty gritty of the kinds of information it does include, but also those absences. Right.

So in many ways, I'm sort of approaching it in a very kind of dialectical way, looking at it in terms of how its aspirations were kind of met in the actual film, putting it into the larger context of the expedition, of course, of which it was part, and looking at very different examples of it in terms of location, in terms of scale,

in terms of sponsors and ambitions for the film, in terms of why was it made? Who was it going to be made for? I mean, I think in some ways it does resemble some of the other information that's collected, right? It is this kind of capsule of knowledge that's collected during an expedition. I mean, it's knowledge that's kind of visual knowledge that's extracted from...

the periphery, often these very remote places, back into the metropole, back into the urban center where it will be shown or sometimes not shown. These films, of course, are connected to colonialism and modernity. In many cases, they were funded by racial capitalism. These were folks who were Gilded Age industrialists who had made their money in terms of the legacies of chattel slavery and industrialization.

But in terms of conceptualizing them, I guess my largest goal is to kind of trouble their status as these kind of authority documents, really kind of think about using what we now call sort of decolonial research methods to say, to what extent do they tell the whole story? To what extent can we now see evidence of the role of indigenous intermediaries, right? Fixers, go-betweens, people that were absolutely essential to

in making the film happen without whose input these films could never have been made. And I see this as really crucial because simply looking at the films at face value and not sort of re-imagining them or sort of reframing them, I think sort of

doesn't do service to how rich and fascinating they are as these visual records, but also a way of kind of complicating the film archive, which of course is a place of possibility, but also a kind of a space of violence.

So the last thing I would say is that I then wanted to kind of look for these pockets of resistance in these films, right? To kind of think about these kind of counter historical meanings to sort of read them a little bit against the grain, recognizing that they are.

at some moments, very difficult. They're quite racist. They're obviously, you know, cut from that sort of colonial cloth of the time. But to also see them as these films that kind of spill over with possibility and the possibility of being reclaimed by their Indigenous communities and kind of re-signified and re-imagined and sort of taken back.

you know, a kind of making things right kind of initiative in terms of taking the films back to the community. And in one example, which I can maybe talk about later, I did that with a film. Okay, that's very helpful for giving us an understanding of the approach you're taking and sort of the goals of the project. And of course, in doing so in the book, you focus on a few films in particular, which

This always, of course, leads to the question of sort of how do we do comparative work, right? What are the factors that we can look at that allow us to make comparisons between obviously different things? The films are in different places about different things created by different people, but they do have some things in common. So what are they in this instance? Right. So they are quite divergent, but they're also kind of uncannily similar in some respects. And so I think to kind of help the reader get a handle on

or at least give them handles, I think, in making sense of these films. I came up with kind of four, what I call dispositives that really sort of help us make sense of these films, given that, as you say, they span several continents. They're made, I guess, across a sort of a 10 year period, roughly. But the first of these was this trope of kind of hailing the camera and this idea of performativity or performance. And,

These films are incredibly reflexive, which means that they're often quite self-conscious about their status as characters.

that are being filmed, right? There are lots of instances of people mugging for the camera, performing for the camera. And oftentimes there wasn't much to film, right? So this idea of, well, let's just reflexively kind of show us doing expeditionary kinds of things, right? That becomes sort of a moment of interest. There are also moments in some of these films where the anthropologists quite

quite subconsciously decides to go in front of the camera, which was something that was very rare at the time. For example, Carl Lammholtz, a Norwegian ethnographer who I write about in chapter four, he made a film called Headhunters Through Central Borneo. There's a moment in which he

goes on camera. It's a feast that he has in fact staged. He's paid for. None of this is evident from looking at the film or reading the intertitles. And he goes in front of the camera. So this trope of performance and reflexivity, I think is really quite powerful. The second one would be the environmental footprint and geopolitics of these films. Even though I wasn't

especially kind of concerned with looking at the spaces that are represented in terms of kind of geography and in terms of, say, you know, climate change, looking at kind of before and after images of spaces that don't quite look the same. I think it's kind of impossible to ignore, especially in a place like Nepal and Everest, how the environment has changed. So I wanted to kind of ask questions about this sort of,

political economy of the expeditions, but also their status as these material-heavy, footprint-heavy experiences, right? I mean, the huge amounts of stuff that was lugged into the field.

And of course, this would involve hiring sometimes large numbers of Indigenous porters, labourers, people who carry all this stuff in and often leaving huge amounts of garbage. And I think that we need to kind of call these expeditions to sort of count, I think, in some ways, to account for, I think, some of the kind of

impacts they had with regards to communities that they went through, some of the sort of geopolitical tensions, the kind of entitlement that some of these explorers felt in going into spaces that were very kind of politically charged.

So, yeah, I wanted to think about the landscape in terms it opens up questions that I think are still relevant today. Right. In terms of the kind of geopolitics around issuing permits to climb Everest, the kind of environmental impact of too many climbers on that space. I mean, it's constantly newsworthy every year. And obviously there are ongoing tragedies that start with the expeditions that I'm writing about. So trying to kind of make these sort of long historical connections between

The third one would be what I call this anxious optic.

And I argue that the camera is often quite restless in these expedition films. It's awkwardly kind of milling around. Literally, we feel that we, as the spectator embodied, as we're watching the film in the subject position of the camera, we move among these people. And I actually use the metaphor of small talk.

Because none of the expeditions that I'm really talking about did that really intense kind of participatory anthropology, that participatory observation method where they where they learned the language and spent many years living with the people.

Most of the folks I'm looking at were kind of in and out. I mean, some of them did spend quite a bit of time, but were reliant on translators and fixers and so weren't really immersing themselves. And so often you get this sense that they're looking for things to film, looking for things to film. They're trying to kind of on the fly make a calculation about whether this would work.

In other instances, they do have a sense of the kind of footage they would like to attain.

But I think given that in many instances they take the camera with them because they know that that's what they should be doing in the teens and 20s, right? I mean, it was completely de rigueur by then to take not just a still camera, but to take film with them to make a film of the expedition. They didn't always have an entirely clear sense of how that film would be used. Now, that's not the case in all of my examples.

But I think in some of the big museum sponsored expeditions where the camera is simply another data point in some ways or another or just another recording device, they're not entirely sure. And I think that does lead to this certain kind of level of anxiety around what what should we be looking at? And oftentimes it's monotonous, you know, endless uncertainty.

You know, trails of stuff being lugged, porters, pack animals. I mean, very, very similar shots or mountains or just landscape.

The last dispositif that I talk about is this idea of the fragment or the incomplete and the kind of partial quality of the expedition film. Of course, these films tell us only a fragment of what it was like to be in that space, to be on that expedition. I mean, all knowledge is situated, it's partial, it's fragmentary. We can't possibly really understand in the same way that our

you know, vacation home movie videos don't tell us about the entire experience, right? They're not going to tell us about the delayed flights or the awful food or the upset tummy, right? There's stuff that we edit out. I think that, you know, my goal here was to really think about these films as both fragments in terms of their construction, right? In other words, they're very modular. They're these little kind of moments and often you can reorganize them in any specific way.

Some of the films Camping Among the Indians from 1927, for example, which was shot in the American Southwest. I mean, that was very much constructed as a film that from the very get go was perceived to be fragments, fragments of things that would be used to illustrate lectures at the American Museum of Natural History.

So, and even my last example would be even with the Everest films, you know, they, they of course are films that are ultimately kind of partial because they're missing the money shot, which was the successful attempt on the summit. So, yeah. So those are some of the ideas I was kind of thinking through or thinking with in this, in this book. Yeah.

I mean, that certainly gives us a lot of things to talk about. And there's all sorts of things that kind of take us into that place and time as well. I mean, even just thinking about lugging the equipment and developing norms of what one should be looking at versus not and how to do it. But one thing you haven't mentioned in explaining all of that is the fact that we start this investigation of expedition films by looking at medieval maps. So why is that the starting point to everything you've just told us?

Right. My medieval maps. So I always joke and say that I am a wannabe medieval visual historian. And one of the areas of research that I do is on medieval visual studies.

But this was not simply just indulging a whim and a kind of a passion of mine. I really, I'm very interested in medieval cartography. These are maps that unlike modern maps, although Google Maps, of course, can be very visual. These were maps that contain these really dynamic sort of pictographs. I mean, they were hybrid objects because they included text, they included images, they included all kinds of sort of Christian images.

cosmology and both fact and kind of myth and lots of things are very inaccurate and clearly subject to kind of flights of fancy and the imaginary. But I start the book by looking at one of the most egregious examples of the expedition film, which is the exploitation expedition film. In particular, I'm looking at a film called Gow the Headhunter.

And what struck me by looking at this film, which has a really over-the-top narration when it's re-released in 1936 as Galatera, is that this film was almost kind of hysterical in terms of the soundtrack. But the visual images themselves seem to tell a different story. So there was this sort of fundamental incoherence in this film that if you watched it with a sound off,

This was incredible footage from Polynesia that, you know, showed ethnographic dance, that showed, you know, various different kind of methods for seafaring, etc. These beautiful crab claw sailed shipping vessels, etc.

And so what I wanted to do was to kind of say, OK, so where can we turn to in terms of a kind of a deep context of this contradictory, somewhat kind of ambivalent sense of representing encounters with the other? And I felt that these maps in some ways were...

really do kind of reveal these pockets of contradiction that I think can be found in the exploitation expedition film. I think they're also very kind of proto cinematic maps, right? I mean, they invite our eye to kind of move across space and time. And I'm not the first film scholar to kind of write about the sort of cartographic sort of

affiliations of cinema, or the sort of cartographic affordances of cinema. People like Tom Conley and Giuliano Bruno have written about it, that, you know, in terms of their kind of temporal and spatial organizations, we're invited into a film in many ways as we are into the spaces of a map in terms of kind of looking across space. And so I think that

Medieval maps were really helpful for me to kind of think with in relation to expedition films. They were both involved in constructing this kind of colonial imaginary of the other. There are kind of, you know, traces, I think, on so many different levels. So I wanted to produce a really deep intellectual context for expedition films to get us to think about them in

in relation to this very, very far away history, but to kind of argue that, you know, these medieval maps and expedition films were grappling with how to represent travel or imaginations of travel. And they invite us to kind of

sort of project ourselves imaginatively into either the space of the map to kind of look at these pictographs and kind of imagine what the people are like who live there. And that's precisely what these early expedition films are doing as well. So that chapter is heavily illustrated. I'm a very interdisciplinary scholar. And I know a lot of academics tend to say their work's very interdisciplinary, but I often make the case that I truly kind of immerse myself in these other films, sometimes

to a fault perhaps, but there's a lot of really interesting kind of medieval visual studies theory in that chapter. And yeah, I'm really hoping that it's generative and it's interesting. And I think it, I hope it starts some great conversations that looks at these connections from a very different kind of vantage point. Mm-hmm.

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She tracks her cash flow on a spreadsheet at night. Boring money moves make kind of lame songs, but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. BNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. Yeah, that's definitely worth highlighting then and makes sense as a starting point. I want to bring in some of the people that you are examining in the book to talk about kind of the influence they have on all of this more as a category rather than sort of just any one particular film. I'm talking specifically about the Explorers Club.

What was this and why was this so influential in terms of expedition films, but also in terms of practices and ideas of travel even more broadly? Right. Yeah. And the Explorers Club

which is the focus of an entire chapter, um, is an organization, um, that started in 1902 in Manhattan, in New York city. Um, it was one of the key founders is Carl Lumpholz, the Norwegian, um, anthropologist I just mentioned. And it was a hub or a news agency, um, for all things related to exploration in the United States. Um,

It is still around. It's in a very beautiful mansion on the Upper East Side. It was a cross between a kind of a gentleman's private club. They didn't admit women until the 1980s. It was a scientific society, but it was also something of like what we today call like a makerspace. And its goals definitely overlapped with a much older National Geographical Society that was formed in Washington, D.C. in 1888.

And its members were geographers, scientists, rich businessmen. Mr. Abercrombie and Mr. Fitch of Abercrombie and Fitch fame were both members. And they had a very kind of hierarchical membership structure. So you had to be a full card carrying, full legit explorer, which was often kind of quite difficult to do.

to sort of that. But you could also be a kind of a wannabe explorer member, but there were definitely different categories with different titles. I think it's important to my argument in this book, or at least to our understanding of expedition film in kind of three main ways.

One is that it does contribute to this dynamic visual culture of exploration. I think it really shaped ideas around who an adventurer, what an adventurer should do, what an adventurer is, and this kind of gray area between exploration and adventure, right? And I kind of sort of

disentangle and re-entangle those terms because I think that the discourse around exploration always kind of veered into an adventure. I mean, there's one quote, which is like, a good explorer should never have adventures, right? That adventures was just a signal that things have gone south. But at the same time, I think that, you know, adventure sold stories of exploration. And let's remember here that a lot of these explorers need funding and they get funding by

writing popular books, by going on lecture tours. I mean, they all complained to each other, we have to get out there and lecture, we need to fund the next expedition. Because even though some of them were sponsored by big institutions, they're always looking for additional funding. And the people who sat on the boards of these museums were also major capitalists who gave a lot of private money, but were also arguing that they should go out and seek funding. So I think it...

So to kind of develop that point more fully, I think that this visual culture also can be seen in some of the internal promotional materials of the club. So I looked up their annual dinner invitations, which are these kind of cartoons and sketches of people.

exploration, that really strikingly showed these Indigenous helpers, these folks that were absolutely critical. And I think that in some ways, this was a really great little kind of pocket of resistance, if you like, or kind of a moment that I could dig into with regards to complicating our understanding of the absolutely essential role

of go-betweens. So I read these images and I argue that this is also a kind of a really great place to start to think about exploration and expedition films in a much more kind of equitable, a much more kind of nuanced way. The second key way is that I think the Explorers Club, given that these explorers were coming back, sometimes showing fairly raw, unedited footage, this was

a space that offered up a kind of a playbook for how do you make an expedition film?

Um, they would, uh, they had, there was a dark room in the basement. You could borrow equipment. You could hire people. I mean, that's the kind of maker space atmosphere that I'm talking about. Um, they, uh, gave tips on how to lecture and don't show too many slides. Don't show too many boring slides. Don't talk too much. And I get this sense that from the lectures that this was a very kind of dynamic and interactive space. So I think, um,

the explorers club is vital because I think this is where some of the explorers and even those I'm not talking about really begin to conceptualize what it is an expedition film should look like, what it should do. Um, and I think this was a way for them to be in a very kind of jocular kind of space where there might've been a lot more open discussion of the role of indigenous helpers, um,

And then the sort of nuts and bolts of doing exploration because they were all private members. So it might have been a safe space for them to talk about things that maybe would not have been talked about in other institutions. And then the last way in which I think it's really vital is that, um,

It was this kind of who's who space of everybody who was kind of somebody in the world of exploration in the early 20th century. South Pole explorer Roald Amundsen, who went on a blockbuster tour with his films after successfully conquering the South Pole. He was there. Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, there are loads of people who went through there and it became a kind of an alternative space of cinema going.

There were lectures that were open to women. They kind of had a very forward-looking attitude towards film and films were shown frequently.

There are wonderful instances of some early women lectures. I mean, this is the chapter that I mostly talk about where I mostly talk about gender. But I want to emphasize that, again, it was this space that in some ways resembled the conditions of home movie footage. So this was not a giant auditorium. So I think it's a fascinating space that

really gives us some wonderful insight into the kind of visual culture of expedition films, but the sort of cultural milieu, but also opens up a way of kind of reconceptualing and re-imagining these films as collaborative efforts, as fundamentally collaborative efforts. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to talk a bit more about that collaboration and especially the idea of it being a private society so they could have discussions that were maybe not as compelling on the public lecture circuit. So can we talk a bit more about the extent to which these filmmakers might have been aware of or engaging with considerations around what their relations and interactions were?

were with with the people that they were filming I mean how are these things actually made in terms of like navigating physical terrain are these the sorts of things that they're talking about in those private rooms I think they are I think they are talking about logistics and

And there's actually, you know, remarkable records of logistics, everything from the equipment that they ordered, sometimes some of the bureaucratic documents such as their visas or passports. So the archive is incredibly kind of revealing in terms of names of people that they might have hired. We have information about payment that were made for people who were photographed. Obviously,

It's partial, it's fragmented. We don't know entirely how people went about planning, but there is a great deal of really helpful information. Look, I think in some ways, with regards to how these films were made, there is a sense that they were made in some ways not dissimilarly to how we make films of our vacations today, right? There's a sense of opportunism, of kind of shooting on the fly. I mean, in the case of the Everest films, I mean, John Knowles,

Captain John Knoll, who was the official photographer, cinematographer, I mean, he had a team of Sherpa peoples who were constantly helping him, who with a signal would rush to the camera boxes, get out the equipment, and be able to kind of record something very rapidly. So kind of like a rapid response team. In the case of Karl Lammholtz, you know, he is constantly complaining about his assistance. I mean, he's

complaining the whole time in diaries, which is a very common thing to do. So even though the diaries do tell us a little bit about the physical ailments of travel, I mean, the discomfort, the sickness, the regrets, you know, regrets over getting sick, regrets not having bought fancier cameras, more robust tripods. I mean, the diaries are also spaces of venting. And

I think the diaries in particular underscore the different kinds of layering of knowledge around an expedition, right? And all of these things have absences and are very partial, but I think they contribute to helping us at least complicate the film itself as seen as the kind of urtext or the thing that is perhaps the most revealing. I would argue against that. I think putting the films in conversation with the photographs and the diaries is

not only kind of triangulates knowledge, but helps us see some of these contradictions. You know, some of the kind of racist venting that goes on in the diaries that is completely invisible in the film. So there is definitely a lot of information about who they were hiring, right?

Some of the anxieties. I mean, Carl Lomholtz has a great line in one of his diaries, which is practicing Kino. And he's absolutely convinced the whole time that all of his films are just not going to work, that they're going to be fogged. He's ongoing problems with water, lack of water, too much water, water not cold enough for developing insects eating the film stock. Yeah.

So I think clues about the physical environment. And I mean, I shouldn't be flippant about how difficult and how challenging it was for some of these folks to get to where they needed to go. There's drama, there's stories, there are kidnappings, there are all kinds of rich stories.

anecdotes that I think in some ways add the kind of color play that's sometimes missing from just a very retursed description of the film. And then you have a film like Camping Among the Indians, which in some ways was like their American road trip. I mean, it's Edward Thompson Seton, um,

Clyde Fisher going to the American Southwest, they're gone for like a month. Very minimal resources, very low key. They were traveling in luxury. They were camping, but you know, that in many ways is a very different kind of experience than the Everest films. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a really interesting question and I hope that people who read the book will, will appreciate just the kind of, um,

and tenacity that was needed, but also all the rich kind of storytelling and, you know, kind of the sort of psychological labors and stresses of travel, right? I mean, that travel is always hard. We all can identify that. And I think that there are specific kind of encounters with aspects of travel that we fortunately won't have to deal with.

really kind of underscores the humanistic part of this story. This is a story about encounters. It's a story about bodies being stressed and pushed to the limits. And these bodies are part of larger structures of oppression, entitlement, and other things that are kind of circulating at the start of the 20th century, like modernity, etc.,

So now that we have a sense of kind of how these things are being made, the many things that are going into them being made, what happens once they're created? Particularly if we think about sort of what got the films made in the first place earlier talking about, you know, getting funding and some of these were backed, for example, by museums. So do we actually see the reasons that these films getting made? You know, you've promised to do X, Y, Z after the film.

After all of the schlepping up the mountains and all sorts of logistical challenges and the film is actually created, is that then what happens? Are the films used for the thing that they were designed for in the first place? That's an excellent question. I would say yes and no.

There's a lot of issues around this particular question. And I think in some ways, I mean, each film, I think, has a kind of a unique set of circumstances around it. As I mentioned earlier, I think for some films, there's a very clear sense of their use value, right? And that's there in some of the discourse prior to going on the expedition. Like we need films of...

Native American dance, Native American sign language, the intertribal Indian ceremonial from Gallup, New Mexico. We want this footage to illustrate

these lectures that we're doing lectures for members, lectures for children. Um, there are quite grandiose, uh, expectations in the case of the Everett Everest films, the 1922 climbing Mount Everest, which was unsuccessful. Um, that was sponsored by the Royal geographical society. I mean, they very much wanted records. They had a, um,

deal with the Times of London in terms of sending photographs. So the idea was that this was of huge national interest, right? I mean, the Brits saw Everest as the possibility of conquering a third pole, right? Having failed in the South Pole.

So there is a very clear sense that this would produce these wonderful records of possibly this momentous conquering of Everest, but that these films could also then, that this film could be edited and taken on a lecture tour in 1923 and would be met with great success financially, but also critically in terms of popular audiences. And of course,

That doesn't happen. And the problem with these films is that it's really hard to kind of sell a film about failure, right? And even though Noel had shot a huge amount of ethnographic footage on the way to the base camp, the challenges of filming at that altitude, I mean, these were the first films ever shot. I mean, they broke all records of high altitude filming.

There was a sense of him having to kind of scramble in terms of, well, what can I show? I mean, it's, it's an almost there kind of expedition film, right? Not quite getting to the, to the finish line. And then he sets up his own company, Explorers Film for the second film, The Epic of Everest, which nearly bankrupts him. I mean, it's,

an amazing film and it's been restored by the BFI and I encourage anyone to try and look at it. It's now been kind of restored and there's wonderful colorization. But again, it's a film that struggles with this kind of haunting of not reaching Mount Everest. But these films, neither film made money. Neither film really met a big audience. Certainly these films were very unsuccessful in the United States. In

In the case of Carl Lomholz, I mean, I think he obviously hired a professional intertitle writer because the titles of that film, and we have clues in the titles as to the intended audience. There's a reference to Prohibition in one of the titles. So he was planning on

doing a fairly wide scale release of these films in the United States. And he passed away a little unexpectedly within two years of the film being made. And the film absolutely vanishes. There's no sign of this film until it's discovered in an archive in the 1980s. And so with the exception of Gal the Headhunter, which was a commercial exploitation film that did make money, there is a sense that these films are

never quite kind of reach an audience. Camping Among the Indians I think is the most interesting because I haven't come across any evidence of this film ever being shown as a film. So it's almost a non-film film or a film that kind of struggles to be a film insofar as it has this kind of, it's left this legacy of being exhibited and being shown to audiences.

Morden's film, the Central Asiatic film that I talk about, I think in chapter six, I mean, that was a film again that I think was shown at the Explorers Club a couple of times. I found evidence of it being shown in Connecticut and it was shown in the homes of some of the board members of the American Museum of Natural History. But that's a film too that was never, never edited with inner titles, but was a film that in the late 1920s just couldn't really find an audience. Um,

People have asked me, so why are none of these films like the equivalent of the 1922 Nanook of the North that Robert Flaherty made? And I think that

I mean, there was a unique constellation of kind of factors in regards to The Nuke of the North that I'm not going to get deep into here. But I think having said all of this, this does not mean that these films are not incredibly generative and fascinating films that can tell us a great deal about what it is like

to struggle with this thing called the expedition film, how to make it, how to sort of, you know, find moments of absolute kind of poetic brilliance and how to kind of create this atmosphere, this atmosphere of the expedition that at the end of the day is as much about the kind of tangible knowledge as, as this kind of ephemeral intangible knowledge, this just sense of being there that we get, I think in, in really quite beautiful moments.

Thank you for taking us through that. Very interesting to see kind of what the films end up being used for or don't, you know, given what the initial goal was. But speaking of those initial goals, then it sounds like there's a difference in terms of what happens to them once they're made based on the institutional backer. Does the who the institutional backer is also lead to differences in the films themselves? Like what kinds of things get filmed and what the film actually looks like?

I would say that yes and no. I mean, I think in some ways there's no kind of neat formula in terms of, well, if it's a very large scale sponsored film by a major cultural institution, that it's going to follow, you know,

a predictive kind of script. I mean, what you do see in these films is obviously the scale of the sponsorship will often be just visually palpable in the scale of the labor force. But I would say that, you know,

There are differences in so far as there's a kind of a choir sort of an optics, I think, to a film like Through Central Borneo, which is very much kind of infused by the presence of the filmmaker. And Lampholz's film was...

kind of crowdsourced in terms of funding. I mean, he had a sort of hodgepodge of money from different institutions and private backers as well. I think it's, I would say it's quite tricky to kind of say that there is a neat kind of difference across the sort of aesthetics and sort of stylistic choices that these films or that these filmmakers make. We don't have professional filmmakers

cinematographers in any of these films save Gao the Headhunter. So these are people who are very competent, but they're not using particularly advanced special effects. I mean, I think Noel in the case of the Everest films was really kind of thinking about

how to capture, I mean, how to literally capture any evidence of the climbers. And there are these incredible sequences where we're looking at these tiny little specks of dirt on a massive white tablecloth, which is the screen. Um, and this challenge of like how to, how to show anything in this vast whiteness. Right. So I think, um,

Clearly, there are some instructions that were left or that we can see traces of in terms of try to get footage of this. But I think most of the time, the explorers are entering into sort of contracts with themselves in terms of what we should be filming in very kind of open ways. I mean, I think the idea is we need to find things to look at that are of interest. And often there are bits of information in the diaries that say,

I'm not filming today because nothing happened today that we didn't see yesterday. So there were days and days and days where there's nothing interesting to film. And then suddenly something happens. A baby donkey is born or there's amazing weather or they encounter something

at a particular community and then they can perhaps record some evidence of like material culture or some kind of cultural practice that then becomes something to look at so that's why I think these expedition films are these kind of strange schizophrenic objects in some ways and I think that I mean I wish it was a kind of a very clear formula of this type of backer creates this type of film and I would say not really

I mean, that makes it interesting, though. Certainly does. It certainly does. I mean, yeah, absolutely.

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Get started at Vanta.com. What about the reception of these? We've talked a bit about kind of what the goals were of the backers, the extent to which this sometimes influenced the films, what they were used for after. Were any of them popular, financially successful? I mean, I would expect, for example, Mount Everest to be a big draw, right? Well...

Unfortunately, not a huge draw. I mean, the two Mount Everest films, I mean, they make for a fascinating case study in the sort of political economy, the expedition film, right? It's funding, it's expedition, it's controversy, it's legacy. What's, you know, amazing about these films is that, you know,

They were caught up in quite messy disputes over copyright, over the rights that were given to other companies to distribute them. So these films tell us a lot about the nuts and bolts of just kind of releasing nonfiction travelogue type footage at this particular time. I mean, I think Everest is one of the most kind of tragic stories ever.

in many respects, not just because of the loss of life. I mean, the loss of George Mallory, whose body was found pretty intact in the ice, which is now, of course, melting in 1999, and even some partial remains of Andrew Irvine,

who with Mallory were the two climbers who attempted the final push on the summit in 1924. There was a huge controversy around the Epic of Everest when it was shown. It was,

was a film that, I mean, there were some wonderful kind of stories about the screening at the Scala Theatre in London, where because of the incredible fogs that would envelop London at this time, the actual screening took on this kind of 4D quality in terms of the audience being so...

enveloped by fog which filled the theatre that they couldn't even see the screen and so in some ways it kind of resembled some of the sort of deep mists that would envelop the slopes of the mountain and

you know, audiences, I think were deeply impressed by just the incredible kind of, you know, remarkable nature of the film itself in terms of it having been shot at that altitude. But of course, some of the footage at the end resembles photographs, right? I mean, there's, there's nothing's moving at that altitude. So it's very hard to kind of capture, you know, a sort of a, a sort of a very dynamic or, or that sense of anticipation and then,

delivery. In fact, the film at the end becomes something of a kind of a mourning document, right? M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, because there's the building of the Stone Cairn, which honors the loss of life of both Sherpas and Mallory and Irvine, the Sherpas from the 1922 expedition who passed away. So

The controversy I'm referring to relates to footage that was shot involving people who were shot in some of the streets of Lhasa. There was a scene involving nitpicking that is lost, but there was a huge amount of fallout around this scene that was seen as incredibly racist, which it was. And

this scene led to a big diplomatic fallout in terms of normal permits being issued until the 1930s. I mean, there was a sense that Noel, who brought over a small group of Lama priests to perform on stage before and after the film, and there was a huge amount of press coverage. So yeah, the film got sort of caught up, I think, in...

a diplomatic crisis that in some ways kind of overshadowed its status. And there's amazing kind of sort of secondary scholarship on this, if folks are interested in diving deeper into this particular controversy. But I think the somewhat disappointing kind of afterlives of these films in no way, I think, takes away from the fact that they are these

extraordinary filmmaking encounters that sort of show the challenge of people, I mean, explorers, institutions, Indigenous communities kind of coming into contact.

And just thinking just on a kind of a more abstract level about, you know, what could these films possibly show? How interested would audiences be? Because at this time, the travelogue film, which was huge in the teens, I think is beginning to wane a little bit. And there's a sense that audiences kind of

are getting a little bit tired of travel film that doesn't have, you know, some really extraordinary footage or that in some ways doesn't tell a really compelling story. But these films, except for the Everest films, you know, just didn't have the kind of channels of distribution that would have been needed to really promote them on a much wider scale. I mean, I think in some ways they were sort of doomed the moment that they were released.

Can we undo some of these ideas now? I mean, we obviously have way more new technology, like, for example, virtual reality that can do a lot more than they could then to get audiences sort of to be with them on these sorts of expeditions and explorations. Is it possible to achieve some of these goals with these kinds of new technology and without replicating the racist ways they were done in the past?

I think yes and no. I mean, I also just want to mention that I think one of the kind of ways in which these films can be recuperated, not necessarily through new technology per se, but just through sharing them as digital files is by returning them to their communities. And I just want to briefly mention that what I did with Camping and Merely Indians was I got in touch with a

community members in Gallup, New Mexico, where the intertribal ceremonial which began in 1922 is still going strong and found a way to introduce my project and then return those films to the Octavia Phelan Public Library there. And I did some oral histories with Native Americans and other stakeholders showing these films and just generating conversations about

their memories of Gallup and their sense of how important these films are as these kind of visual documents of Gallup

A history of a place, which is Gallup, but also the history of the intertribal as this amazing institution and an amazing organization. And I think that that kind of possibility for digital return, where we talk with new interlocutors and really think about these films as maybe being at the beginning of new journeys. And there was a very sweet little exhibit celebrating the centennial of

of the ceremonial, which I attended in August of 2022. And there was a screen in the little exhibit with the film's

being shown on a loop. And it was just amazing to kind of hover there and watch people looking at these films and thinking about the expedition film now kind of having come home in some ways, right? I mean, this making this full journey back to Gallup and the films are housed at the library. Anyone can come in and watch them. The transcripts of my little oral history interviews are housed there too, so people can, you

you know, listen to the conversations that we had. And while it's not feasible to replicate that, replicate that with all of my examples, I do think it's really important. So that's a little bit of a sideways answer to your question about new technologies, perhaps, um,

beyond just digital files. So yeah, the end of the book gave me an opportunity to kind of counter my deep dive into the middle ages with a kind of somewhat forward-looking question around what can new technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality offer explorers and want to be explorers with Rick or artists in terms of, you know,

possibilities for representing encounters, representing kind of spatial geographies and representing cultural practices. And also just asking the question, how useful might VR be for an explorer, right? What could it show or what could it make you feel that just being there with a camera and recording might not be able to capture? And so, I

I mean, full disclosure, I mean, I'm very skeptical of a lot of the hyperbole around VR. I mean, I think that it's still kind of struggling to sort of find audiences and kind of find a way of overcoming. I mean, some of the hyperbole around what it can claim to do. Chris Milk's description of VR as the ultimate empathy machine, I think is a very...

unfortunate and untrue characterization of the medium. I mean, I think some of the pieces that I look at, I think end up reinforcing some of the kind of sort of ontology of the colonial gaze. I mean, some of the ways of seeing that I think in many ways,

not just mimic cinema, but even sort of bypass cinema and take us back to the diorama exhibits in museums of natural history, right? The so-called life groups where you have mannequins inside glass cases. I mean, I think that, you know, this is not reciprocal looking. I think that there's this kind of fetishizing of this sense of an aura or a sense of presence. And so other than perhaps, you know,

you know, giving you access to one specific kind of aspect of the experience. I mean, there, these VR pieces might work.

But having said that, I do think that, you know, I would not want to dismiss VR and say, pack up, go home. There's no point in sticking around. I do think that there are possibilities that I think have happened with some Indigenous work, which has really kind of

complicated the idea of VR as just this kind of portal into another kind of space. You know, I think that there are some pieces which I talk about which juxtapose, for example, kind of

Hip hop with traditional Indigenous dance. A Tribe Called Red piece by a Canadian First Peoples group is a really nice example where the VR piece kind of juxtaposes a different kind of dance styles, different kind of music. So kind of moving away from this idea of VR as this technology of virtual transportation back to this kind of singular moment in time.

So I think, you know, I think it's a... I think the jury is still out in some ways. I mean, I think VR has certainly been picked up by a lot of humanitarian filmmakers and artists. And I think that...

those pieces which attempt to kind of take us into the spaces of refugee camps and humanitarian crisis. I mean, I think those pieces, however good intention they might be, are just very problematic in terms of supposedly, purportedly giving us access to the pain of others. I'm not sure that that kind of

encounter or that kind of experience is one that's kind of ethically justified. And I think that we should be very cautious about just giving the public access to these kinds of experiences and maybe hoping that this will be transformative or that this will somehow overcome a lot of those kind of deep, stereotypical and problematic experiences.

So, I mean, full disclosure, I mean, this was a kind of a start of a conversation about VR and nonfiction media and especially about exploration. I mean, there aren't that many examples of VR being used

in expedition filmmaking, I think for fairly obvious reasons. But it will be really interesting to visit this specific question, say, in like 10 years from now. Yeah, definitely. It's good to kind of start the conversation and sort of then see what happens. So speaking of seeing what happens, what are you working on now that this book is done? I'm working on two projects. So I'm indulging my medieval visual studies passion and I'm working on a book called something like Medieval Media Studies.

digital imaginaries and art and sculpture. So what I'm doing is looking at medieval artworks, a whole different range of artworks, such as stained glass windows and paintings, but also sculpture and kind of thinking about the ways in which they sort of uncannily seem to, you know,

suggest certain affordances with aspects of modern media, right? So I'm looking at the idea of special effects. I'm looking at representations of dreams and medieval artworks in relation to ideas of like projection into space, kind of how we sort of project images into a space that's kind of not our bodies, but a screen, for example. I'm interested in ideas around the hyperreal and sculpture. So I'm going to be looking at

films that I think are very generative in terms of perhaps evoking some of these ideas, but then tracing all the ways in which these concepts can be found in a whole bunch of different artworks. So that's a project that's about half done. And then I've got another book in a very early stages called

that actually takes me back to the very start of my academic career where I was working on Publicum, which for the Brits listening to this is the very, very famous, successful People of the Valley, Welsh language, S4C, continuous serial soap opera that's been on S4C for many, many, many decades. I wrote my master's dissertation on that. So I'm really interested in the kind of visual media worlds of cinema

extraction, specifically coal mining. And so I'm trying to kind of think about how we can understand extraction in very human terms and in very visual terms. So I'm looking at a bunch of different mining disasters in the early of 20th century. I'm looking at how kind of, you know, somewhat essentialized notions of Welsh identity, such as John Ford's

How Green Was My Valley and other nonfiction film help us understand South Wales as a place, as an imagined place, but also helps us understand the kind of legacies of extraction in that space. I grew up in South Wales, have coal mining on both sides of my family. And so it's, yeah, it's a kind of a full return for me in terms of that specific research. So.

Well, both of those sound like very cool projects. So best of luck with them. And I'm intrigued to hear how they turn out. But of course, while you are off pursuing them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Nomadic Cinema, A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film, published by Columbia University Press in 2025. Alison, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. This was a really fun conversation.