Until now, the only version of the film available to scholars or the general public, was one produced at the University of Washington in 1973 from this fragmented copy. The museum preserved it as a record of aboriginal life on the Northwest Coast, with no thought of its historical significance to the development of modern cinema.
It was thus a great stroke of luck that in the 1960s a badly damaged copy of the film was discovered at The Field Museum in Chicago-likely rescued from a movie house dumpster. Original advertising card depicting “The Bridal Party” from In the Land of the Head Hunters, ca. A critical success but a financial failure, Curtis’s film was soon lost and largely forgotten, as so many early silent films were. This score-claimed by Curtis to be based on Native source music-is now thought to be the earliest surviving score for a silent feature film. For gala openings in New York and Seattle, Head Hunters was accompanied by an original orchestral score composed for the film by John Braham, best known at the time for arranging Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.
An epic story of love and war set before Europeans arrived on the North Pacific Coast, it featured non-professional actors from Kwakwaka’wakw communities in British Columbia, a people already famous then for spectacular visual art and dance, as well as resistance to assimilation. This was the first feature-length film to exclusively star Native North Americans, released eight years before Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. In 1914, the American photographer Edward Curtis produced a melodramatic, silent feature film entitled In the Land of the Head Hunters. In today’s guest post, Evans and Glass discuss the process of restoring the film and place it within the broader context of American film history. Working with a team of collaborators-including members of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe and group of interdisciplinary scholars- Brad Evans and Aaron Glass have meticulously reassembled the film and its original orchestral score so that it closely resembles the movie as it would have been seen by audiences in 1914. Scraps of the film would resurface decades later but, until now, it was never fully restored. Despite its historical significance, the film was a commercial failure and the film was lost soon after its debut.
Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, was a landmark of early cinema and provided a rare glimpse into Curtis’s encounter and collaboration with indigenous peoples, in this case the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia.