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On the evening of Dec. 7, 1914, Seattle's Moore Theatre was the setting for the world premiere of famed photographer Edward Curtis' epic movie melodrama of the Northwest Indian past, "In the Land of the Head Hunters," which the Seattle P-I critic at the time called "a powerful, gripping story ... a genuine sensation."
On Tuesday night at 7 -- 93 1/2 years later -- a newly restored version of the film returns to the Moore as a key event of the 34th Seattle International Film Festival, with its original orchestral score performed live and a dance recital by descendants of the film's Native American cast.
In the near century between its two Moore dates, much has happened to the film:
Regardless of how one may feel about the artistic merit or political correctness of Curtis' sensationally titled silent spectacle, it's easily the most influential Northwest film ever made, and its gala Moore Theatre return after so much time, drama and controversy has no rival as Seattle movie history's great comeback story.
In case you walked in late, Edward Curtis was the most famous photographer of the American West and its native inhabitants. He moved to Seattle at age 19, opened a studio near Pioneer Square and spent 23 years producing a 20-volume book series documenting America's "vanishing" aboriginal world in word and photos.
As early as 1910, Curtis had spent time with the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) community of northern Vancouver Island (Volume 10 of "The North American Indian" is devoted to the Kwakiutl Nation). He also had shot motion-picture film to accompany his "musicales" or slide shows, with which he often toured the vaudeville circuit.
So when his primary patron -- financier J.P. Morgan -- died in 1913, the hard-pressed Curtis decided to try a feature film. He raised the funding ($75,000, according to the P-I), took his cameras to Alert Bay on Vancouver Island and spent most of a year directing an all-Kwakwaka'wakw cast through a story line that included a love triangle, several blazing action sequences and much ceremonial dancing and ritual.
Unfortunately, the film's initial runs at the Moore and at New York's Casino Theatre grossed a pathetic $3,269.18, and it soon vanished from circulation. In 1923 Curtis sold for $1,000 all rights to the film to the Museum of Natural History (which either lost or destroyed its copy), and he apparently gave it little thought during the rest of a fading career that included a stint as cameraman for Cecil B. DeMille. Curtis died in 1952.
Riding the wave
In 1947, four reels of the film turned up in the hands of a Chicago film collector, who donated them to the Field Museum. Twenty years later, beginning in 1967 and working mainly in Seattle, art historian Bill Holm and Burke Museum anthropologist George Quimby restored the find, restructuring the narrative, deleting many awkward or lurid intertitles and adding an authentic Kwakwaka'wakw score.
This version, retitled "In the Land of the War Canoes," was re-released in 1974 (through the UW Press), and the forgotten Curtis film suddenly was proclaimed by film historians to be a landmark production: the movies' "first documentary" and the first film with an all-Native American cast -- eight years before the existing holder of these titles, Robert Flaherty's 1922 "Nanook of the North."
However, in 1983, these claims -- and Curtis' vaulting posthumous reputation -- were challenged by an article in the Western Historical Quarterly charging that Curtis manipulated his images, included inaccurate details and "stereotyped" his subjects. In the tidal wave of reassessment that followed, Curtis' movie was widely denounced as a "phony" documentary full of concocted Kwakwaka'wakw ceremonies and customs.
Today, 25 years later, this controversy -- and an air of political incorrectness -- still hang over the film. But several recent discoveries -- its promotional artwork, its original orchestral score and a new (and longer) print that turned up in the UCLA Film & Television Archive -- have inspired a new generation of scholars to take another look at the original "Head Hunters" with a more reverent eye.
The UCLA archive has restored the film as closely as possible to Curtis' original cut, reinstating his narrative structure and more than 60 intertitles (removed by Holm and Quimby to make the film resemble a respectable ethnodocumentary), adding several minutes of missing footage, some of the original color tinting and frame representations of missing scenes.
This is the version that returns to the Moore Tuesday in a program that includes the accompaniment of John J. Braham's original score (unheard since 1915), an introduction by Kwakwaka'wakw representatives -- who will speak on the film's relevancy to their history and culture -- and a 45-minute program of ceremonial music and dance following the screening.
That's entertainment
Aaron Glass, a University of British Columbia scholar who rediscovered the long-lost Braham score while researching his dissertation and is one of the executive producers of this deluxe revival, says the idea is to "contextualize" the film, to take it away from the '70s notion "that it's some kind of documentary -- which Curtis never intended it to be -- and back to the idea that it's an entertainment."
"At the same time," Glass said, "we don't want to completely (negate) its value as a cultural documentary."
Glass says Curtis took "considerable artistic license" but he "got most things right," and he showed "considerable bravery" in filming Kwakwaka'wakw ceremonies at a time when any display of them was illegal under the Potlatch Prohibition, a notorious Canadian law (1884-1951) aimed at forcing Indian assimilation.
Glass and his colleagues see the making of the film as a historic event in and of itself, an "intercultural co-production" negotiated between, on one side, Curtis, the fledgling film industry and its colonial stereotyping, and, on the other, the Kwakwaka'wakw, who profited economically from the enterprise and "contributed their significant artist talents as well as their editorial input."
The touring Curtis Film Project debuted last week in two showings at the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, with the L.A. Philharmonic performing the score. On June 22, it plays the Chan Center in Vancouver, B.C., and autumn dates have been set for Chicago's Field Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and New York's American Museum of Natural History.
But no one is denying that Tuesday's Moore Theatre date is the most special of the tour -- and a feather in the cap of SIFF. As artistic director Carl Spence said, "To be able to showcase what may be the most historically significant Northwest film ever made, in Seattle's oldest theater -- the very theater where we (the festival) started in 1976 -- well, you don't get any more special than that."