Alfred Melotu. The Funeral of a Paramount Chief

Denmark, Norway
46′18″, 2002.
DIRECTED BY
Peter Ian Crawford, Rolf Scott, Trygve Tollefsen
PRODUCED BY
SOT Film, Intervention Press
CINEMATOGRAPHER
EDITED BY
Rolf Scott, Trygve Tollefsen, Peter Ian Crawford
CONTACT
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This film is a testament to the life of Alfred Melotu, the paramount chief of the Aiwoo-speaking people of Ngasinue/Fenualoa, an island belonging to the Reef Islands in Temotu Province of the Solomon Islands. In 1994, Danish anthropologist Jens Pinholt returned to the island and during this visit, he and the big men of the islands discussed future plans for documenting kastom, the revival of traditional cultural elements among the people. This discussion resulted in a plan to make a film about the life of the paramount chief and his constant endeavour to preserve cultural traditions. Melotu's untimely death, during the second visit of the film crew in 1996, changed these plans. What was to be an account of the life of a paramount chief became a film about his death and funeral.

Pileni paualala. Dried giant clams in the Reef Islands

Denmark, Norway
17′44″, 2022.
DIRECTED BY
Peter Ian Crawford
PRODUCED BY
Camera as Cultural Critique Project (Aarhus University), EA:RTH Research Group (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter Ian Crawford
EDITED BY
Ralph Veraart, Orsolya Veraart, Peter Ian Crawford
CONTACT
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The Reef Islands Ethnographic Film Project was started in 1994 by the two anthropologists, Jens Pinholt and Peter I. Crawford, and village communities in Bekapoa, Fenualoa and Vaiakau. Field and film visits took place in 1994, 1995-1998, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2017. This film is based on one such visit in June 2015, by Peter I. Crawford and Birgitte Hansen, a nutrition expert. The focus was on a diachronic study of nutrition, collecting information in three villages and comparing it with material from the 1970s and the 1990s. Pileni was one of the villages. Pileni is a so-called Polynesian outlier. Although the atoll is located outside the main reef lagoon, it forms part of the Reef Islands, Temotu Province, Solomon Islands. A clam shell is called paua and the dried meat called paualala. In this case it is the meat of huetea or giant clam (Tridacna gigas). An entrepreneurial young man, John Knoxson, helped by family and friends, has found an innovative way of earning some cash income from what nature provides.

Passage – Camera as cultural critique/Creative Archives #1

Denmark
9′46″, 2014.
DIRECTED BY
Arine Kirstein Høgel, Christian Vium
PRODUCED BY
Aarhus University, Moesgaard Museum
EDITED BY
Elisabeth Colding
CONTACT
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This work constructs a passage from life to death based on material from the ethnographic film archive at Moesgaard Museum. The work is an exploration of death and ritual in tribal societies as seen through the eyes of anthropologists in past and present. Text excerpts from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedyare used to structure this experimental film, or video installation.