From: tina.stoecklin@anthropology.oxford.ac.uk (Tina Stoecklin)
Subject: HADDON Project
Hello fans of African Cinema!
I have been subscribing to this list for a couple of months, and have found
it full of interesting material and discussions. I thought I would
introduce myself quickly. I am a social anthropologist at the University
of Oxford, and I am working on a project, called HADDON, to create an
online catalogue of early ethnographic film. The project is funded by the
UK Economic and Social Research Council and by the University of Oxford.
My colleague Marcus Banks and I have been collecting catalogue records from
film archives throughout the world and are compiling them into a database.
The database focuses on films of ethnographic interest from the period
1896-1945, and includes not only 'anthropological' films, but home movies
by missionaries, soldiers, travel films, government propaganda films, and
so on. The geographic base is worldwide. We have so far collected over
1,000 film records, and Africa is well-represented.
We are scheduled to go 'live' with the database in October of 1996; in the
meantime, the HADDON web pages describe the project in further detail, and
provides links to other interesting visual web sites. Please pay a visit
to the site and let me know what you think of it. We are also always on
the lookout for sources of early film footage. One of our goals is to
advertise (in the non-commercial sense) small or little-known archive
sources. If anyone out there has any suggestions, I will be delighted to
hear from him or her.
I am also specifically looking for information about an amateur (I think)
filmmaker named Cherry Kearton, who made several films in and about Africa
during the 1920's. He made a semi-fictional film called Tembi in 1929, an
incomplete copy of which is held in the UK National Film and Television
Archives. If anyone has any more knowledge about this, I would be glad to
hear it.
Yours sincerely,
Tina Stoecklin
HADDON Project
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Oxford University
51 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6PF
England
tel. (01865) 274688
fax (01865) 274630
The HADDON Project: http://www.rsl.ox.ac.uk/isca/haddon/HADD_home.html
In-Reply-To: 199606251357.JAA10968@dag.XC.Org