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The Moving Image 2.2 (2005) 50-78



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Popular Ethnography and Public Consumption

Sites of Contestation in Museum-Sponsored Expeditionary Film


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It was an unusual scene at the Shady Oak Theater in suburban Clayton, Missouri, one midsummer afternoon in 1951. Crowds gathered and lines formed around the block, not for the latest Hollywood comedy starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis but for the world premiere of Latuko: We Saw Primitive Man, an expeditionary film made in the Sudan (see Figure 1). Sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, the film was directed and produced by Edgar Monsanto Queeny, president of the Monsanto Chemical Company in St. Louis. Latuko promised to thrill audiences with never-before-seen (or -heard) images of a little-known African tribe in "gorgeous color and for the first time on-the-spot authentic native sound."1 Originally scheduled for a one-week engagement, Latuko was held over for eight weeks and played to packed houses at two St. Louis theaters. For an educational [End Page 51] documentary, the film enjoyed unprecedented commercial success based largely on its appeal to popular audiences. As one film reviewer noted, "It had enough nudity to attract the curious and enough authenticity to attract the studious."2


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Figure 1
The world premiere of Latuko at the Shady Oak Theater in Clayton, Missouri, May 1951. Courtesy Washington University Archives, Monsanto Historic Archive Collection.

Despite being granted a purity seal by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the film was ripe for Hollywood exploitation.3 During its first week at the Paramount Theater in Los Angeles, it grossed an extraordinary (for its time) $20,000 and was outdrawing attendance at Hollywood films, including, surprisingly, The African Queen (1951).4 Film reviewers praised Latuko for its authentic, color footage and synchronous sound, claiming it represented "a novel African document"5 and a "dizzying antidote to most ordinary film fare."6 AMNH officials were optimistic and hoped profits from Latuko would help offset their annual budget deficit.7 However, full frontal male nudity in the film led to a commercial ban of the film in several East Coast states (New York, Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts) and contributed to a nationwide debate over film censorship during the early 1950s. [End Page 52]

As a museum-sponsored expeditionary film, Latuko could be classified as a subgenre of ethnographic documentary. The film, however, is not easily categorized, as it shares features with melodrama, natural-history, and educational films. More recently it has been labeled an "exotic exploitation" film.8 As a hybrid genre, then, Queeny's film is significant because it characterizes an experimental phase in the development of postwar ethnographic cinema. Positioned between what are recognized today as ethnographic classics (e.g., Nanook of the North, 1922; Grass, 1925) and the establishment of a more academic ethnographic cinema during the late 1950s–1960s (e.g., The Hunters, 1956; Dead Birds, 1963), Queeny's films capitalized on new cinematic technologies, particularly color film and synchronous sound, in their representations of other cultures. All of his African films have a strong identification with the general tradition of ethnographic humanism developed by Robert Flaherty and others during the early decades of the twentieth century. This style of filmmaking relied in large part on cultural immersion and focused on a representative male figure or family with which mass audiences could identify. Although Queeny drew upon this basic narrative structure, he innovated on the Flaherty tradition by relying on cultural brokers to gain access to his subjects and experimenting with new technologies in his attempts to construct indigenous subjectivities.

Of all Queeny's African films, Latuko provides what is perhaps the best case study to examine the complex relationships between anthropology, cinema, and popular culture in postwar America. Latuko is a prime example of how the expeditionary genre drew upon the scientific authority and institutional support of natural history museums while generating popular appeal and revenues through distribution and exhibition in...

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