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THROUGHOUT MOST OF THE SILENT ERA, ACTUALITIES WAS THE TERM used for films that would later become more commonly known as “documentaries .” During the first decade of American commercial cinema, actualities were more widely produced than narratives.1 They were easier and cheaper to make than narrative films, which required a storyline, actors, props, and usually purpose-built sets. Alison Griffiths has stated that the first twenty years of commercial cinema were “ethnographic film’s ‘golden years’ in terms of the sheer number of films produced and innovations in style and content.” It was also during this period that William Selig’s boyhood friend Burton Holmes popularized the term travelogue to describe his travel lectures, which were accompanied by motion pictures.2 Selig helped finance several anthropological expeditions, beginning with Professor Frederick Starr’s 1905–1906 journey to the Congo Free State. His camera operator’s attempt to take “moving pictures” in the Congo on behalf of Selig failed due to the heat and humidity, which wreaked havoc on the camera and film; however, a limited edition book of Starr’s stunningly beautiful photographs, Congo Natives, was dedicated to Selig as one of the sponsors.3 Starr’s academic credentials—he held a PhD in geology and was a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago—lent credibility to the fledgling medium he endorsed. In both lecture tours and in articles for the Atlantic Monthly, Chicago Tribune, and Ladies’ Home Journal, Starr enthusiastically sang the praises of motion pictures for skeptical and more educated audiences. Selig’s association with Starr also lent credibility to Selig, who like his competitors yearned for acceptance into the upper classes.4 Selig’s interest in funding Starr’s return to Africa in 1912 appears to have been primarily motivated by a desire to collect stock footage of authentic landscapes, people, and animals that could be interpolated into narrative scenes staged at the pre-zoo Selig C H A P T E R 7 Actualities, Expeditions, and Newsreels COL . WILLIAM N. SELIG ∙ 148 ∙ Wild Animal Farm, a strategy that would later be misidentified as an MGM innovation for Trader Horn (1930).5 Selig also sponsored Starr’s tours of Japan, which yielded a five-minute travelogue, In Japan (1911), and a short ethnographic subject, The Ainus of Japan (1913), concerning the aboriginal people residing on the island of Razu.6 On at least one of the Asian trips, Starr also shot copious documentary footage of Korea and the Philippines.7 In addition to bankrolling Starr’s travels, Colonel Selig financed an Amazon River expedition led by Emmett O’Neill, hired Victor Milner and Frank T. Farrell to film the Belgian Congo for second-unit footage in 1915, and funded two extensive around-the-world photographic trips made by Dr. Edward Burton McDowell, a popular lecturer.8 McDowell, who later changed the spelling of his name to “MacDowell,” was a “doctor” in name only, according to Rick Altman, having appropriated the title to give himself a veneer of legitimacy on the lecture circuit—much as Selig was a self-named “colonel.”9 Their relationship began during the fallow years, when Selig was spending most of his resources fighting Edison lawsuits; among his few releases in 1906 were motion pictures purchased from McDowell of Samoa and Fiji made during 1903 and 1904, respectively. These were purportedly the first films ever made in those South Sea islands.10 McDowell’s first major expedition sponsored by Selig resulted in eighteen films of China, thirty-three of India, and an unknown number of African scenes; the imagery was so compelling that it directly influenced the mise-en-scène of exotic jungle narratives such as The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913–1914).11 McDowell’s second worldwide expedition for Selig lasted more than a year; he left New York on December 1, 1913, and didn’t return to Chicago until early 1915. In Egypt he photographed Cairo, the Great Pyramid, and the Sphinx; as he traveled the Nile, he documented the ancient temples of Karnak and Luxor. McDowell filmed a nomadic tribe of Sudanese, as well as biblical landmarks such as Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. Sailing from Port Said to Singapore , Java, Bangkok, and Siam, he then traveled to Hong Kong; because war had already broken out, McDowell was forced to travel to Japan on a small rice steamer. He spent two and a half months there taking ten thousand feet of film that included scenes of Geisha girls...

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