Cinema on the Move: Museum-Sponsored Expedition Film in the Silent Era (2024)

Alison Griffiths

The 1920s is considered the era of “great expeditions,” the last gasp of exploration, when museums and institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, the Royal Geographical Society in London, and the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, enlisted cinema within an arsenal of recording devices.1 By the early 1920s, expedition films were de rigueur in museums of natural history, seen as an important part of their institutional mission (the AMNH established a committee in 1923 to support the “preparation, use and the preservation of motion picture films for scientific purposes”), accomplished either by equipping staff to shoot film or hiring professional cinematographers.2 However, the fate of expedition film footage once the expedition party returned to the sponsoring institution was far from certain, making expedition filmmaking an unusually complex, enigmatic, and not surprisingly neglected genre of non-fiction filmmaking. Nevertheless, in a manner distinct from written accounts, photographs, and phonographic recordings, expedition films provide compelling glimpses of the interactions between Indigenous peoples and scientists, members of the expedition party and Indigenous laborers, and the impact of the expedition on the global landscape, real and imaginary.

The complicated organizational and personal determinants of expedition cinema emerge from two broad production contexts. The first is the institutionally sponsored expedition, financed by private and public funds, designed to serve several masters and exigencies, and inevitably revealing fissures and tensions among stakeholders.3 The second is the lone-wolf expedition, shaped less by institutional constraints than by the psycho-social motives of wanderlust, the ego document, and the need to establish scientific credibility.4 This chapter focuses on one example of the institutionally sponsored expedition film, a neglected, orphan title made as part of the AMNH’s 1926 Morden–Clark Central Asiatic expedition, part of a series of expeditions sponsored by the AMNH to Central Asia between 1921 and 1930.5 The untitled eighteen-thousand-foot film (it is simply known as the Morden–Clark Expedition, shortened here to MCE), with animated maps and no intertitles, hews closely to some of the characteristic tropes of the expedition genre, including extreme long shots of the traveling party winding its way through a variegated landscape, sequences of ethnographic interest, footage of transportation animals and supplies, and a couple of scenes featuring the expedition leaders.6 Anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s idea of exploration as a series of “events” oscillating between travel as movement and travel as stillness, corresponds quite nicely to the modular sequences of the MCE.7

But what exactly differentiates expedition filmmaking from early cinema’s ubiquitous ethnographic actualities, the genteel travelogues of showmen-travelers such as E. Burton Holmes, Lyman H. Howe, and Frederick Monsen, or safari films made by Paul J. Rainey (African Hunt, 1910) and Teddy Roosevelt (Teddy Roosevelt in Africa, 1910)?8 Furthermore, how does expedition filmmaking differ from the 1920s adventure, safari, or romantic ethnographic films made by Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, 1922), Martin and Osa Johnson (Simba, 1928), and Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (Chang, 1927), or the sound-era exploitation films Ingagi (William Campbell, 1930) and Forbidden Adventure (Norman Taurog, 1931)? Chronologically situated roughly between the early travelogue and the safari-style adventure features, expedition films share many discursive and aesthetic qualities with both genres, but their institutional raison d’être, credibility leveraged from scientific authorities, and limited public audience distinguish them as a different kind of cinematic undertaking.9

The Morden–Clark expedition film serves as a generative case study, helping us engage not only with the wider universe of expedition filmmaking throughout the silent era but also with several still-urgent geopolitical questions relevant to cross-cultural image-making, including the clash of colonial and scientific agendas with hostile landscapes and communities, claims for the camera’s objectivity challenged by footage replete with evidence of subjective biases, and the tension between institutional support for expedition footage and the paltry record of public exhibition. The following questions shape my investigation: In what ways is MCE typical of an expedition film, and what habits of seeing does it privilege? In what ways does the expedition’s extant footage, along with its four thousand field photographs, Morden’s four-volume fieldwork diary, letters written by the men to their wives (some of which were published in Natural History magazine), dozens of popular articles, and public and professional reception, construct knowledge?10 How do these informational texts parse and document what Mark Hobart calls the “welter of activities going on around them”? And how do they isolate the pertinent facts from the background noise of the expedition as a massive collecting enterprise?11 Which elements of the expedition are sublimated into discourses for either public or private use (such as a personal diary or letters)?12 What kinds of authority does expedition film embody, distinct from other textual and visual media?13 And what larger lesson about the use-value and patterns of exhibition of silent non-fiction filmmaking can we take from MCE, given its scant record of exhibition and relative obscurity?

Institutionally Sponsored Expedition Film: Funding, Logistics, and Informing Optics

By the mid-1920s, the AMNH was going through a severe financial crisis. In the “Financial and Administrative Report” for 1926, President Henry Fairfield Osborn described the situation as “very grave,” a result of a 120 percent rise in operating and administrative costs over the previous decade, with no corresponding increase in either the AMNH’s endowment or city appropriations.15 In response, the Museum cut $43,500 from its scientific and educational budget that year, which meant the “practical suspension of all the exploration and field work, except that provided by special gifts.”16 Even during less lean budgetary times, it was customary for Museum scientists to fundraise for their research expeditions. AMNH’s acclaimed naturalist and explorer (and real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones) Roy Chapman Andrews shared the following strategy in his book Beyond Adventure: “My best chance is to make it a ‘society expedition’ with a big ‘S.’ You know how New York society follows a leader. If they have the example of someone like Mr. J. P. Morgan, for instance, they’ll think it is a ‘Must’ for the current season.”17 It was therefore imperative to secure a wealthy patron, preferably an individual who straddled the amateur and professional worlds of expeditionary travel.

The Morden–Clark expedition adhered to this model of patronage, with the $26,000 budget (the equivalent of $373,258 in 2020) covered by William J. Morden, (1886–1958), the son of a railroad industrialist and Honorary Fellow and Field Associate in mammology at the AMNH, not a salaried position at the museum. Morden was the ideal benefactor: given his significant personal wealth and passion for hunting and adventure, he could forge close ties to several elite scientific organizations. In 1921, Morden led an expedition to the head of the Donjeck River in northwest Canada’s Yukon Territory looking for the area’s white sheep (a dry run for the ovis poli search in the 1926 Morden–Clark expedition), and in 1922 he funded the Morden African Expedition to Kenya, Uganda, and the Sudan. For the 1922 African expedition, Morden hired professional cinematographer Herford Tynes Cowling to shoot footage, testimony to cinema’s established place in the arsenal of scientific recording devices expected of a major expedition. Morden made a pitch for the Central Asian expedition to James L. Clark (1883–1969), Head of the Department of Preparation at the AMNH and Director of the New York Explorers Club, in a 1925 letter, where Morden spoke openly and in an unfiltered fashion about needing a companion, since “I don’t want to spend another five to six months with just a bunch of savages,” and offered to cover what he called all “safari expense.”18 Morden did pay for everything, except for Clark’s outbound travel from New York to Bombay and return from Beijing to New York.

The Central Asiatic expedition’s primary focus was zoological, tasked with collecting examples of the ovis poli sheep (with their long curly horns and white fluffy winter coats), Tien Shan ibex, gazelles, and other smaller mammals for installation as groups in the proposed North Asiatic Hall at the AMNH. Not wanting to be outdone by the Field Museum in Chicago, which boasted an impressive habitat group of ovis poli collected by Theodore Roosevelt, the AMNH hoped to install a diorama featuring the sheep in its planned hall.19 Morden and Clark were aiming to bring home ten polis, although they were encouraged by the locals to hunt at least a hundred.

Morden and Clark had planned to meet up with the Third Asiatic Expedition to Hami, Eastern Chinese Turkestan, led by Roy Chapman Andrews (one of five AMNH expeditions to the region between 1921 and 1930), but the plan was abandoned due to political instability in the region. The idea of traveling as a larger group was in order to “insure greater safety in travel and larger collections of fauna and flora from this almost impossible country.”20 The expedition also carried the flag of the Explorers Club in New York City, a mark of prestige and legitimacy, since to this day, the Club only grants flag-carrying privileges to respected scientific exploration undertaken by active members.21

With a few exceptions, Clark himself shot the expedition’s film, along with taking a significant number of the photographs and documenting his experiences in several popular-press articles and the book Good Hunting.22 Given his expertise in taxidermy and habitat group preparation, Clark would have been at ease reconciling the needs of zoology with that of popular science/culture, recognizing that both were essential to the creation of illusionistic museum habitat groups. Similarly, he had no difficulty turning scientific field reports into commercial adventure tales for public consumption.23 Clark used a Bell and Howell Edema, a compact 35mm camera introduced in 1925, and acquired Eastman Kodak film stock along the route.

In January 1926, Morden and Clark sailed from New York to India, traveling via London and Paris to outfit and obtain official travel credentials. Sixty porters were hired in the northern Kashmir city of Srinigar, permitted by law to carry no more than sixty pounds of equipment each, although the weight fluctuated depending on the topography. Paid a government-set rate of one cent per mile, the men worked on as few as one or up to three fifteen-mile legs of the journey, replaced by recruits requisitioned from nearby villages.24 The expedition party departed Srinigar on March 31, 1926, heading toward the Russian Pamirs by way of the Gilgit-Hunza route, an eight-thousand-mile, eight-month trek along the Silk Road. For the 2,600-mile journey, Morden and Clark relied on modes of transportation virtually unchanged from the time of Marco Polo, including ponies, donkeys, and yaks, either ridden or used to haul wagons, carts, and sleighs (see figure 16.1). For the eight-hundred-mile journey across the Gobi Desert, the men rode Bactrian camels, animals that Clark described as “the railroad trains of Central Asia.”25 Their endeavor hews closely to Peter N. Miller’s characterization of an expedition as a “logistical crossword puzzle, in which groups of disparate individuals and their gear are moved along distances for long times in order to tame the unknown.”26Still, we shouldn’t ignore the mix of animal and human labor involved, what Fabian describes as “different kinds of bodies and things, each of them with different abilities or requirements [as] regards motion.”27

Marco Polo also does duty in Clark’s book about the expedition, Good Hunting, where his mythic quality and stature serve to geographically orient the reader and reinforce the idea of an allochronic landscape and people.28 The historical resonance of famous travelers and warriors whose paths Morden and Clark followed was not lost on Clark, who described “becoming philosophical as he gazed down at the land of Attila, Marco Polo, and Genghis Khan.”29 Ironically, it may have been easier for Marco Polo to navigate this region in 1271 with his father and uncle than it was for Morden and Clark, since much of Asia in the thirteenth century was under the rule of a unitary Mongol government, a fact that Polo scholar Peter Jackson tells us “greatly facilitated the opportunities for both merchants and missionaries to travel from western Europe across the continent.”30 Moreover, the kidnapping and torture of Morden and Clark by Mongolians during the penultimate leg of the expedition in November 1926 forced them to abandon their route through Mongolia and instead head to Peking by way of Kobdo and the Trans-Siberian Railroad at Biisk in Siberia.31 The account of their experience mobilized cultural stereotypes, going back to the mid-thirteenth century, of the Mongols as fierce warriors, and even though Morden initially underestimated the danger of the situation—“probably a bit of the ‘dominant white man’ feeling still remained,” he later confessed—the entire event made for excellent copy upon return to New York. Morden defended the Mongols’ response, noting that the “outburst of savagery was the natural consequence of suspicion and fear, engendered by our unheralded arrival.”32 The Central Asiatic peoples that Morden and Clark photographed, filmed, and described in their notebooks were no strangers to foreigners, and although the two men may very well have been the first Americans to travel in the region, they followed in a long line of outsiders.

The Morden–Clark Expedition Film: In Search of Ovis Poli

The expedition’s geographical ambition is presented via a map at the start of the film with an animated black line to mark the route. This is followed by a title card and medium close-ups of Morden and Clark running their fingers through their unkempt hair and wooly beards, authenticating their status as rugged explorers. The camera is restless from the outset, alternately assuming the point of view of an observer standing on the shore in Srinigar looking at the boat, a reverse angle of this shot, and a shot of a crew member seated directly behind an Indian man paddling. Images of Indigenous laborers carrying trunks on their shoulders through the ancient streets offer the first visual clues that we are watching an expedition film—Morden and Clark assembled nothing less than a small army—since footage of the transportation of vast amounts of equipment was a privileged visual trope in expedition films. But a medium-long shot of Indian men being hired as laborers also conveys a sense of the political economy of the enterprise.

Footage of the expedition party negotiating the ancient camel path between Srinigar and Gilgit in Pakistan along the Burzil Pass occupies most of the screen time, and Clark’s long shots of the snaking expedition from different camera angles make us feel strangely detached, an omniscient mountain presence immune from the exhaustion, cold, and blizzard conditions affecting humans and animals. A quick succession of shots takes us deep into the mountain and onto the Tragbak rest house on the Burzil Pass. The scale of the human and animal effort involved is powerfully on display in a later sequence in the film showing ponies and donkeys getting stuck on the Murzat Pass across the Tien Shan mountains, an ordeal Clark captured on camera from several angles:

These images assume an analeptic quality, evoking earlier moments in the expedition’s narrative while paradoxically signaling its forward progression. Clark frequently filmed the expedition party marching toward and past the camera, a compositional tactic going back to early cinema when cameramen showcased cinema’s kineticism by filming marches, parades, trains, and buses. Clark also elevates the camera to obtain a high angle view of the porters and animals on the move and at other times stations himself at the rear of the group, gazing at the backs of the expedition party disappearing into the distance. The repeated image of an isolated strand of laborers that serves as a visual refrain in the film is mentioned in one of Morden’s Natural History articles, when he writes that among his “most vivid recollections of Himalayan travel is of a long file of gray-clad figures toiling upward through the deep drifts of the Burzil Pass in the dim half-light of early dawn, with snow-clad peaks showing ghostlike against the gray sky.”35

A poetics of distracted looking comes to define the MCE, as the onward march of travel brings new visual treats and oddities, from Morden’s and Clark’s pith helmets, sunglasses, and nose coverings, a local version of sun protection entailing wrapping one’s beard around the face, to the loading of a thirty-foot-long ferry called a scrow with two mapas (carts), eight horses, and forty people to cross the Aksu river near the Tarim Basin in China. The “look at this, now look at that” quality of Clark’s sequences resonates with the elliptical narrative structure of travel literature around the world, including early Islamic travel writing that typically jumps from one thing to the next with no warning, as illustrated in thirteenth-century traveler Ibn Fadlan’s discussion of “The Chinese and Some of Their Customs” when he hopscotches from talking about carpets, to marriage, to the use of rice as a staple food in a single paragraph. Indeed, as Islamic literature scholar Tim Mackintosh-Smith reminds us, the Qur’an repeatedly tell its listeners to “go about the earth and look,” an impulse validating the pleasure of feasting one’s eyes on the world’s wonders, and one shared by the expedition film and, before that, the travelogue.

Film scholar Ravi Vasudevan argues that these kinds of structural discontinuities, common in amateur colonial films of the period, not only lend an “autonomous status to the different segments” but shore up the camera’s indexicality, its ability to capture the “physicality of people and objects and material life in the world.”36 However, beyond providing information about the particular mode of transportation and the logistics of securing the gear to the animals for each leg of the journey (whether pony, yak, or camel), shots of the expedition party merely walking offer scant scientific testimony about local flora and fauna or substantial ethnographic evidence. Instead, they work to imbue the film with a visual poetics and a reminder of what kind of film the viewer is watching, one governed by a reflexive desire to document its coming into being.

Guiding Clark’s selection of film subjects was the picture-book aesthetic of habitat groups that he was responsible for constructing back at the AMNH.37 His footage is also replete with images of posed family groups (a staple of life groups, museum dioramas featuring mannequins), river- or mountain-pass crossings, examples of material culture, and visually arresting cultural practices. For example, perhaps inspired by Robert Flaherty’s famous igloo-building sequence from Nanook of the North, Clark filmed a yurt being constructed by Kyrgyz people and, to demonstrate its portability, carried by men scurrying across the landscape. The footage of the Kazaks is the most ethnographically rich, presumably because the more hospitable weather at this stage of the expedition made it easier for Clark to be out and about with his lightweight and relatively inconspicuous Eyemo camera. The pattern of brief shots of a new locale is occasionally interrupted by more structured sequences in which a process is demonstrated, such as Kazak bread-making or Kalmuch women shearing sheep and preparing felt.

The MCE gives scant indication of the passage of time, and save changes in the topography, modes of animals transportation, and sparse use of the map insert, there’s little way to gauge how far the entourage has traveled. As the expedition group advances, Morden turns his attention to its major mission, hunting Ovis poli and other rare mammals. He and Clark were pleasantly surprised at the robust poli population in the region, reporting that they saw five hundred males and a thousand females over the course of the journey.38 Morden was delighted with the “excellent pictures” Clark took of the sheep, the first footage of this particular breed. Morden, likely aware that members of the Explorers Club in New York were especially interested in the poli, ensured that the expedition captured ample footage of them alive and dead.39 A long shot of a group of poli cuts suddenly to a close-up of one of their heads, the tips of the huge curly horns extending beyond the edges of the frame as Morden rotates it for the camera.40 This macabre image of the dead sheep’s head may have been the limit of what was appropriate for a general museum audience, and yet, for Morden, likely represented the long-awaited money shot.41 There’s also a depiction of an animal being measured in preparation for taxidermy; according to Clark, this was a vital part of the process, since it is “the skeleton that decides the species of an animal, not the skin.”42 There’s only a single brief shot of a poli being skinned by a Kirghiz hunter—with most of the action partly obscured by something else going on in the foreground—and only one image of the scale of the hunting, a medium shot of a mound of severed poli heads about to be loaded onto the pack animals. The largest head Morden obtained measured 57 ½ inches in circumference, significantly shy of the then-world record of seventy-four inches, although Morden was quick to point out that the larger head had not been honorably hunted but was instead a “pick-up” head, one that had been found.43 After being measured and separated from the bodies, the poli heads were recorded being tied to the sides of the pack animals, a surreal image of living beasts of burden transformed into animal hearses (see figure 16.2). Morden offers us clues for understanding the use value of the poli footage by describing it, along with still photography, as part of a “series which supplemented the specimens and added to their scientific value.”44 This is a rare explicit justification for expedition film as a form of scientific collection among other artifacts and data points, and the reference to seriality suggests that film was a key component of a triangulated method of knowledge accumulation.

Expedition Film Footage as Visual Small Talk

Since the goals of the expedition were primarily zoological rather than ethnographic, and neither man had any training in anthropological fieldwork, Morden and Clark were engaged in the metaphorical equivalent of small talk in terms of their interactions with Indigenous communities. Small talk is a useful hermeneutic for thinking about the negotiations involved in ethnographic filmmaking: oftentimes, Bronislaw Malinowski’s methodological gold standard of extensive fieldwork and linguistic competency was eschewed in favor of a rapid tour of diverse countries and Indigenous groups. (For example, Morden and Clark stayed in no place long enough to learn much about the culture, had very limited linguistic competences, and were preoccupied with obtaining mammalian specimens.) Small talk, then, opens up a discursive space for examining the kinds of cultural interactions and negotiations involved in cross-cultural image making.45

As a “discourse of limits,” small talk is by definition circ*mscribed by superficiality and brevity, captured in the ephemeral and often awkward interactions seen in the MCE. And yet the incidental and transitory offered advantages over in-depth participatory observation-style research, since it gave Clark the artistic freedom to simply film what caught his eye.46 If, as literary theorist Sheldon Lu argues, small talk as a mode of storytelling disengages from official historical discourse, operating in the form of whispers and gossip, then it serves as a fitting metaphor for expedition film as an equally marginalized yet insightful source of knowledge.47 Worrying about how he and Morden would be received by locals throughout the journey, Clark initiated small talk with the help of a phrasebook, using it as a social lubricant, a means of getting what he needed from a situation, or staying out of trouble.

Furtive glances or staring that might precede small talk are conveyed in the film’s many close-ups of Indigenous men, women, and children, shots that mobilize discourses of orientalism, self-other negotiations, and seeing the familiar in the unfamiliar. While people’s rank, occupation, and gender in part determine the behavior they might feel obliged to display in front of the camera, there are moments when small talk is displaced by a more carnivalesque letting-go, as in a sequence at Kizil Rabat near the Chinese border that begins with shots of Russian soldiers dancing, playing instruments, and saluting the camera. The men are clearly putting on a show for Clark and enjoying every minute of it. A quick cut reveals the same group at twelve thousand feet bathing in a hot spring, protected from the elements and perhaps a display of immodesty by a yurt that has been strategically placed around them (the opening is tied back to give the men and the camera access).48

Close-ups of local people staring and smiling at the camera suggest a letting down of one’s guard, and a remarkable shot of an old man’s wizened face and half-smile reminds us of the long history of travel and cross-cultural encounters in this region (see figure 16.3). The old man might very well have seen it all before, since, as film historian Oksana Sarkisova argues, between 1920 and 1940, Soviet authorities commissioned a large number of films depicting the territories and nationalities representing the “motherland” of the Soviet Union, films that helped codify a visual formula for depicting Indigenous peoples. According to Sarkisova, these films served a didactic function under the broad label of kulturfilm, motivated by the twin missions of salvage ethnography and the structuring of space through the establishment of borders.49 Writing in 1925, Konstantin Oganezov made a compelling case for archiving cultural difference and regional material cultures: “We have to send cameramen to all corners of the USSR, and their footage will be of enormous importance. Many of the poorly studied people are dying out…. It is all the more important to preserve them on film.”50 Dziga Vertov’s ethnographic documentary A Sixth Part of the World was made the same year Morden and Clark traveled through the region, and along with Salt for Svanetia, shot in Georgia in 1930 by Mikhail Kalatozov, is a key example of the kulturfilm’s textual practices and ideologies.51

Clark’s choice of what to shoot seems motivated as much by an attempt to capture the sensory contours of what he witnessed as to construct a scientific record, an experience that infuses his writing about traveling by camel at night: “I can close my eyes and see the dim shapes of our thirty camels looking huge and weird against the background of snow that lay gray in the faint starlight. I can hear the camel bells clanging […] in the darkness, their sounds punctuated, now and then, by the shouts of the caravan men—shouts that end eerily in high falsetto notes.”52 Clark appears to “see” the experience cinematically, even as a multimedia event, with sound as striking as the visuals. Camel riding had a soporific effect on Morden, who confessed to falling asleep atop the animal, although both he and Clark hated riding inside the johs (felt-covered wooden constructions slung on either side of the camel), since it gave them terrible motion sickness.53 (Draping oneself artfully over a donkey’s neck during a long night-time trek was the technique favored by porters.)54 Morden seem to channel Andalusian Sufi poet Abu al-Hasan al-Shustari’s sensual experience of camel riding under the cloak of darkness across the Central Asian desert in his thirteenth-century poem:

Clark uses the visual power of shots of the long camel march, as well as the rhythmic abstraction of the camel’s feet, to evoke the timeless quality of this mode of transportation; there’s a quasi-mystical quality to the visual aesthetics of this sequence, something that cinema, like Sufi poetry, is preternaturally disposed to capture. The desert’s representation as a place of wonder and bewilderment in Arab poetry finds expression not only in the iconography of narrative feature films set in desert locations but also in Morden’s description of the surreal silhouettes of the camels and Clark’s medium close-up of their feet. There’s an uncanny symmetry in Clark’s decision to film the camels walking, echoing the close-up of oxen and human feet commingled at the beginning of the film.

The final fifteen minutes of the film contain some of its most visually striking and eclectic footage, including shots of a day laborer smoking opium, medium-close-up swish pans of children dashing about before the camera, and a man on horseback holding a bird of prey. Gutchenztse is the last re-outfitting post before crossing Mongolia to Urga, where Morden and Clark hired a camel train, a Turkestan guide, and a Mongolian interpreter. It is also the last location before the fateful encounter with the Mongolian police. Information about the thirty-six-hour kidnapping is conveyed via five map inserts with animated pop-up captions: “Captured and tortured by Mongols”; “Preventing carrying out our proposed trip across Mongolia”; “Taken back to Kobdo under armed guard”; “By weapon and sleigh to R.R. [railroad]”; “Christmas Day took train east”; and “Arrived Pekin New Year’s Day.” Absent from the cinematic record of the expedition, although a dramatic highlight in all other accounts, the kidnapping transformed the two men into national heroes for showing American manliness in the face of adversity.

The film concludes with a return to the opening visual polemic of “man versus nature.” The incongruity of an image of Morden riding a tiny donkey at the front of a long line of camels across the Dzungarian plains, the line broken up only by another small donkey, could be straight out of a Buster Keaton film, although as Ira Jacknis reminds us, the image of the explorer riding ahead of his caravan, “while the rest blend into a file that gets smaller and smaller until it disappears into the landscape,” is a familiar trope of expedition photography and film.56 One cannot help but think of the closing shots of Nanook during this sequence, when the snowstorm transforms the husky sled dogs into abstract sculptures and a shot of Nanook’s sleeping face filling the frame foreshadows his death. In the closing moments of the MCE, close-ups of the camel’s feet trudging through the snow are intercut with repeated extreme long shots of the camel train reduced to dots on the landscape; the heavy snow plays perceptual games, as resting camels begin to resemble the mounds of supplies. By engendering pathos and ennobling the expedition, elevating it into a quasi-spiritual quest, the sequence is among the most memorable of the film, coming closest to imprinting deep impressions of the environment on the spectator’s mind. The word “impression,” with its nod to indexicality as well as a more ethereal intuition, seems especially appropriate in the context of expedition cinema. At its height, the genre deploys cinema’s ability both to capture what Siegfried Kracauer called “life at its least controllable” as well as evoke life at its least inscribable, what Jennifer Fay in Inhospitable Worlds calls a “contingent and fragmented reality that film reflects back to us.”57

Safely Home in New York: The Morden and Clark Expedition in the Media and Museum

Morden’s and Clark’s return to the United States became a media event, as their kidnapping mobilized discourses of American grit, racial superiority, and imperialist expansion in the national press. The New York Times called their expedition “one of the most dangerous and adventuresome trips in modern times,” anointing the explorers “the only pure-blooded white men in the wilds of central Asia at the time.”58 Portrayals of marauding Mongolians lying in wait for unsuspecting Americans dominated the headlines: “Explorers Back with Marks of Torture,” “Museum Scientists Narrowly Escape Being Shot by Mongols,” and “Mongol Savages Torture Museum Hunt Director” all dramatized the human ordeal over the scientific aims of the project.59 The figure of the fearless globe-trotting scientist was well established in the nineteenth century, supporting claims of credibility, since it is precisely “because [explorers] act heroically that their testimonials can be believed.”60 As Justin Marozzi reminds us in The Way of Herodotus, drama and tall stories are exactly what audiences expect in a lecture:

However, if equipping expeditions with the tools of filmmaking became commonplace for large museums of science and natural history by the early 1920s, there was less certainty about what to do with the resulting footage. MCE was included among a long list of zoological specimens—the 1927 Annual Report noted that in addition to a “fine series of skins, complete skeletons, and full scientific measurements,” Morden and Clark had amassed a “complete record of the trip in motion pictures, still photographs, and field notes.”62 However, unlike the taxidermy specimens that found a prominent home in the Northern Asiatic Hall, the associated film seemed to have no guaranteed audience. Possessing limited resources to explore how motion pictures might be integrated into gallery exhibits, the AMNH fell back on the familiar model of screening brief extracts in public lectures at the Museum, while granting the filmmaker freedom to screen excerpts or the entire film in private and public talks elsewhere. While the AMNH seemed determined not to be left behind in an era of visually centered mass media, the expedition footage they sponsored was turned over to the institution’s education department, often with little attention to the content and production circ*mstances of the footage, and was used primarily to illustrate popular auditorium lectures rather than for research.63

The Morden–Clark footage was also used in the manner of home movies, when in April 1927, AMNH president Henry Fairfield Osborn invited Mr. and Mrs. Morden and “some of the younger trustees” to a special dinner and screening at the Osborns’ Fifth Avenue home.64 As expedition sponsor and director, Morden owned the rights to the film, although for tax purposes, he donated it to the AMNH, asking in return that he be allowed to have an ovis poli ram for his personal collection.65 Morden also oversaw arrangements for processing and editing the negative, telling George Sherwood in a series of letters that the negative should be turned over to a Mr. Holland and that the five-hundred-foot containers of “positive cutouts” would be delivered to a Miss Holland.66 So while the general public had ample access to the expedition photographs that were published in popular magazines, there is little evidence of extensive public exposure of the expedition’s filmmaking efforts; based on extant archival material, the film never found an audience beyond a limited public lecture circuit, trustees’ homes, the Explorers Club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and within the AMNH itself.

The limited clues we have about the film’s exhibition history include an undated flier (see figure 16.4) for an illustrated Morden lecture with “motion pictures and lantern slides” that was most likely part of a 1935 book tour, since it shared the book’s title, Across Asia’s Snows and Deserts; a talk given by Clark to a packed house of women at the Explorers Club as part of the “ ‘No-Smoking’ Smokers Ladies Night” lecture series on April 8, 1927, in which his “vivid account of the travel” offered sensational details about their “fearful adventures experienced when crossing the interior of Mongolia at the hands of the robbers who ached to become murderers”;67 and a men-only version of the same lecture at an “Explorers Club Outing” to Bayside, Queens, on June 2, 1927, which purportedly made the “hair of his hearers [stand] on end and the blood [run] cold in their veins.”68 Clark lectured with the film into the 1930s, including a talk as part of a new lecture series at the Horace Bushnell Memorial Hall (now the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts) in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932.69 All of this points to the film’s circ*mscribed past in the professional lecture circuit, what Gregg Mitman sees as expedition film’s vitality as a material object and cultural artifact, “created for one purpose, archived for another, and resurrected again for quite another reason.”70

Shaping a Legacy: Making Sense of Expedition Cinema

What sense we ultimately make of the MCE must take into consideration its tonal complexity; in this respect the film negotiates discrete contradictions, including juxtapositions between military-style marching or salutes to the camera; more ludic moments, such as images of Russian soldiers from the military post dancing and splashing around in their makeshift sunken bath; and affectionate close-ups of locals smiling at the camera. The film’s position as an empirical record of transportation logistics and cross-cultural exchange stands in uncertain relation to its status as a work of imagination composed of “sense impressions” of people’s faces, material culture, and responses to the visual spectacle of the expedition. The expedition film was steeped in the exhibition culture of the late nineteenth-century naturalist tradition of collecting undertaken by “explorer types,” a tradition Bell and Hasinoff describe as comprising a spectrum of “ ‘amateur’ and ‘serious’ naturalists—tied together through naturalist unions, explorers clubs, and natural history museums.”71 Lacking the visibility of expedition films such as Grass and Chang, the MCE’s authority and credibility derived from its affiliation with the five Asiatic expeditions led by Roy Chapman Andrews and the personae of Morden and Clark, rather than its ability to succeed as a stand-alone cinematic experience.

Despite the relatively limited circulation of the MCE beyond the AMNH itself, the film nevertheless offers some striking lessons. The film testifies to the unavoidably meta and recursive quality of expedition cinema generally, evoked in the repeated shots of the porters and pack animals, the campsite, and expedition leaders. These images shore up the evidentiary power of the film, providing seemingly incontrovertible evidence about the difficulty of traversing great distances by means of primitive modes of transportation. Through Clark’s choice of what to film and what to exclude, the experience of the expedition has been submitted to a “regime of censorship, abstention, and discipline” that Johannes Fabian argues transforms the authority of fieldwork’s “been there” into institutionalized, disembodied knowledge.72 And yet this putative objectivity underestimates the film’s affective power, its negotiation of ways of seeing that, while influenced by the picturesque optics of the commercial travelogue, is never reducible to a monolithic Western gaze. In some respects, Clark’s footage shares some of the behavioral norms of the Arabic concept of adab, a way of presenting oneself in public that conforms to high standards of etiquette, good manners, morals, decency, and decorum. The footage rarely offends or shows anything abject (save the hunted animals), and explicit racist attitudes can hardly be gleaned from the footage alone.

Nevertheless, while depicting the arresting landscapes, wildlife, and human populations of Marco Polo’s trade routes, the film fails to address the uncomfortable tensions in Morden’s and Clark’s status as Western observers, although their wealth and privilege are metaphorically inscribed in the scale of the enterprise. Their assumption that their white skin, American passports, permits, and letters of introduction would guarantee them safe passage across politically unstable Outer Mongolia suggests a misplaced confidence in their own position as travelers. Morden’s and Clark’s small talk, cinematic and otherwise, may have served to lubricate the implicit social contract that permitted their passage and their filmmaking, but it failed to fully obscure the underlying relations of power and privilege fundamental to the encounter. And while Clark’s cinematic images of the expedition conjure up a benign and open-minded global adventurer, Morden’s diaries tell a different story, revealing his disgust at the Indigenous customs and peoples he encounters and grumblings about the physical and mental ordeal of travel.

MCE also reveals the disposition of expedition filmmakers more generally to display a restless, slightly anxious aesthetic seemingly never quite knowing what to look at or for how long. In Clark’s case, he seems to have followed his instincts as a photographer, since 80 percent of the photographs illustrating Morden’s 1927 “By Coolie and Caravan” Natural History article are also the subjects of motion pictures, taken at the same time and place (we often see the same bystanders and stray dogs in the frames of each). Travel is never simply about pure physical movement but is freighted with cultural significance and inconveniences large and small, everything from the climate to food to standards of personal hygiene. That a film like the MCE oscillates between a poetics of amazement and a poetics of the mundane reflects to a large extent the undulating flow of travel, the visual highlights along with moments of monotony. Jane Gaines’s characterization of history in the context of polar exploration as “both authoritative and mysterious,” is an apt description of the ineffable quality of expeditions as well as their significance as geopolitical acts.73 In this respect, the film negotiates discordant elements, evidence of its status as an empirical record of transportation logistics and cross-cultural exchange as well as a work of the imagination and self-representation that represses as much as it reveals.

Finally, while similar in some respects to the ethnographic travelogue, expedition cinema’s economic value as public entertainment, while important, was not its primary reason for existence. For the AMNH and other institutions, expeditions played a key role in collection building, exhibit preparation, professionalizing and popularizing anthropology, and public promotion. As Ira Jacknis observes, expeditions did not simply amass material culture and shape the understanding of the variety of cultural forms but literally spurred the growth of institutions, as new wings were built to house large collections.74 And while we learn something of the expedition’s external landscapes, challenges, and obsessions, and catch glimpses into Morden’s and Clark’s interiorities from multiple written and visual sources, the expedition film affords some latitude in making sense of the entire endeavor. In fact, given the preponderance of wide shots in their footage, the film evokes the qualities of contemporary VR explorations of exotic landscapes, promising spectators’ greater agency in deciding what to look at. As storytelling, the MCE has a bare narrative at best, and were it not for the map inserts, the film would read as an assemblage of shots of different modes of travel in different climates with different people helping out or getting caught up in the melee. The expedition was the equivalent of the circus coming to town, a comparison not lost on Lieutenant Jérôme Becker, a member of the 1887 Belgian International African Association Third Expedition to Africa, who Fabian says compared “an expedition’s equipment to the props needed for a theatrical performance,” a spectacle as well for the local population that came out to see what all the fuss was about.75 James Clifford’s definition of an expedition as a “sensorium moving through space” provides a provocative invitation for us to think more expansively about the visual output of expeditions and to place this material on equal footing with the “amalgams of human, material, technical, and intellectual objects comprising an expedition.”76 As small villages moving through unfamiliar and challenging landscapes, expeditions required and represented enormous institutional power and human ambition, and their scattered filmic record, often buried in the archive for almost a century, now invites the attention and audience it never attained.

Notes

Metrics

View Metrics

More from Oxford Academic