Round the World and Back Again: Mapping the Cultural and Historic Significance of the Adelaide Pearson Film Collection

The film clip is less than ninety seconds in duration. A barren landscape, studded with thatched huts and surrounded by primitive wooden fences and palm trees, appears beneath billowy clouds stretched across the sky. In front of one hut, three women in bright orange and gold saris smile broadly as they stand beside a tall, thin man garbed in white. One of the women extends a gold-bangled hand to wave, so as to welcome the camera and its operator to this remote place. The welcome is disrupted as a calf runs into the frame and the shot is cut abruptly. In the following sequence, a group of young men with small white hats atop their heads journey down a path. An automobile arrives ceremoniously. With a woman at his side, a bald, bespectacled man emerges from the vehicle. Bare-chested, he is clad in white linen short pants; he smiles and moves purposefully through the small crowd of onlookers. A few of the men respectfully lean down to touch the ground, perhaps touching his feet, as he passes through. With equal fanfare, the man exits the hut in the following scene and makes his way back toward the automobile.

In the 16mm Kodachrome clip described, the man emerging from the automobile is the father of modern India, Mahatma Gandhi. I came upon this film while serving as a graduate student intern at Northeast Historic Film (NHF) in 2008.¹ Each week, I culled selections from NHF’s rich collection of moving images to produce the Archival Moment, a short film that precedes first-run features in their Alamo Theater. When I came across the film described earlier, David Weiss, NHF cofounder, indicated that it was perhaps the first known color footage of Gandhi. My curiosity piqued, I examined NHF catalog records and probed institutional memory, discovering that the 1938 film’s creator was a local legend—Adelaide Pearson of nearby Blue Hill, Maine.

Who was this woman, traveling to India during the period of Indian resistance? How was she able to capture this footage? Was this document opportunistic, in that she was in the right place when this entourage passed by, or did Pearson have some connection to Gandhi? It was this vibrant clip that initially arrested my interest, but thanks to NHF’s ties to the donor, I was able to continue my research over the course of subsequent years to examine journals, logbooks, photographs, correspondence, and the nearly nine thousand feet of film Pearson left behind. I discovered a film collection that significantly contributes to the annals of amateur travel-film history—at once enthralling and elusive, much like the woman who directed them.²

In an effort to “reclaim the travel home movie from its sometimes affectionate dismissal into obscurity,” as Heather Norris Nicholson has framed it, this article examines the largely unknown films of Adelaide Pearson (1875–1960), making a case for the collection’s substantial value and unique perspective.³ It assesses the exceptional uses to which she put her films; illuminates the impulses toward anthropological understanding and democratization of education that animate her filmmaking; and uncovers the lens through which an adventurous female filmmaker, with uncommon sensitivity to indigenous populations, perceived her far-flung travels. Providing close readings of Pearson’s films alongside two recurring approaches found in prevailing travel-film scholarship—the anticolonialist and the feminist—this essay demonstrates how her demographic designation (wealthy Western female tourist) belies the underlying complexity inherent to her work and her life.

Reels from the Adelaide Pearson/Blue Hill Public Library Collection at Northeast Historic Film. Photograph by the author.

A Privileged and Unconventional Life

During the interwar period of 1931–40, Pearson traveled throughout the world documenting local inhabitants’ quotidian activities, directing her keen eye to craft, ritual, and dress. Whether atop a donkey in the Italian countryside, with a camel caravan in the deserts of the Sahara, or across the barrens of Mexico in her automobile, Pearson’s travels—and filmmaking—consistently flouted...