Who Owns the Films? Who shows the films?

93 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? A Film of String Figures in a Web of Relationships In the film, a young woman sits on the floor and performs string figures—ta in her language (fig. 1). Her name is Ailima and when she was filmed she was living on the oceanic island of Niutao, then part of the British colony of the Ellice Islands, now Tuvalu. The film is silent, but during the string trick te noti o Kulu (the knot of Kulu) we see that she speaks words. According to the German ethnologist Gerd Koch, who made the recordings, she says: Fig. 1: Ailima at the string trick te noti o Kulu (the knot of Kulu), depending on tradition the goddess or ruler of Niutao. - 94 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? O marnai, o marnai [Come together, come together] te vaivai aitu! [Gods in great numbers!] O tatala te noti o Kulu, [To open the knot of the Kulu,] se matala. [did not succeed.] Kae sau Kevekeve [But Kevekeve came] o tatala te noti o Kulu. [to untie the knot of the Kulu.] Kae matala! [But he succeeded!]1 The story is that Kulu—sometimes goddess of Niutao, sometimes regent, sometimes “half spirit and half human”2—posed a puzzle with a coconut leaf that was almost impossible to solve. According to Niutao-born Pulekai Alofa Sogivalu, “a puzzle to be solved not only by the knowledge but also by the hands of a person.”3 The gods or spirits Kulu summons cannot untie the knot, but Kevekeve, a young man from Samoa, can. As a reward, he is given either the island of Niutao or Kulu as his wife, depending on tradition. Ailima, who presents Kulu’s story in the film as a string trick, skillfully untangles the knot. What did Ailima get in return for solving the knot? The (Digital) Presence of Historical Ethnological Films Made in the 1960s, the film was included in the large-scale film project Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC). The EC was a project of the Institute for the Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen, Germany, founded by the engineer Gotthard Wolf in the 1950s. It was arguably the most ambitious endeavor ever undertaken to manage the distribution, production, and archiving of research films. The EC was set up as a world-spanning project to compile 1 Gerd Koch in Honor Maude, “E 885/1965 Polynesier (Ellice-Inseln, Niutao) Fadenspiele,” with general remarks by Gerd Koch, in Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (Göttingen: Institut für den wissenschaftlichen Film, 1969), p. 16. (All translations from German sources are by Sarine Waltenspül). 2 Nalu Nia, “Niutao,” in TUVALU: A History, ed. Hugh Laracy (Vaiaku: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1983), pp. 58–65, here p. 58; for Koch’s description, see Gerd Koch, “Kulu Göttin von Niutao, Tuvalu, West-Polynesien,” Baessler Archiv. Beiträge zur Völkerkunde Berlin 33 (1985), pp. 221–237. 3 Pulekai Alofa Sogivalu, A Brief History of Niutao (Vaiaku: Institute of Pacific Studies and the Tuvalu Centre, University of the South Pacific, 1992), pp. 6–7. 95 “the scientifically significant movement processes and behaviors of animals, plants, materials, and ultimately also of human beings.”4 The EC holds a number of string figure films that were archived in Göttingen and other full and partial archives around the world at the time. They were filmed in Basel, Switzerland; near São Paulo, Brazil; in Qaanaaq, Kalaallit Nunaat/Thule, Greenland, and on the islands of Onotoa, Tabiteuea and Niutao, then part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (GEIC), now Kiribati and Tuvalu. The list of places already reveals differences: some place names have a “then” and a “now.” Others are constant and exist (seemingly) independently of colonialism. This applies to Basel, the city in Switzerland where I was born and grew up; the city in which the 2024–2025 exhibition String Figures / Fadenspiele: A Research Exhibition, which this publication accompanies, took place.5 Differences are also evident in the historical titles of the films: the film from Niutao is entitled Polynesians (Ellice Islands, Niutao)—String Figures, whereas the title of the film from Basel dispenses with (apparently) ethnic or ethnolinguistic classifications.6 In contrast, the geographical designation alone serves as the title of Central Europe, Basel-Land—String Figures. Under the title “Polynesians,” I can access the catalogue entries for the films on the AV portal of the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) in Hanover—but not the films themselves, even though the TIB digitized them in high resolution after it took over the collection following the dissolution of the IWF. The distinction between “European” and “non-European” is not only reproduced in the digital archive, but also has an effect at the level of access: as a user, I can view the films from European ethnology 4 Gotthard Wolf, Der Wissenschaftliche Dokumentationsfilm und die Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (Berlin and Heidelberg, Springer Verlag, 1967), p. 23. 5 This text is based in part on research carried out in collaboration with Mario Schulze for this exhibition. 6 The classification of the people living in Oceania into “Melanesians,” “Micronesians” and “Polynesians” goes back to the eighteenth century, to the naval officer and naturalist Jules Dumont d’Urville, and is still used to some extent today. The classification as well as the terms have been criticized in various ways, sometimes because of the racism implicit in the term Melanesian, which refers to skin color, or because of the arbitrariness of the classification. See Götz Aly, Das Prachtboot. Wie Deutsche die Kunstschätze der Südsee raubten (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2021), pp. 149–150. 96 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? (formerly “Volkskunde”) online (fig. 2.1), while those from nonEuropean ethnology (formerly “Völkerkunde”) are subject to undefined “licensing restrictions” (fig. 2.2). Fig. 2.1 and 2.2: Screenshots of the films Mitteleuropa, Basel-Land— Fadenspiele and Polynesier (ElliceInseln, Niutao)—Fadenspiele on the AV portal. Differences can be found both in the title structure and the access (“This film is subject to licensing restrictions”). 97 The questions of access and of showing or not showing ethnological films—and therefore also thousands of films from the EC— is complex. The TIB avoids a differentiated debate by restricting access according to blanket criteria. As curators, Mario Schulze and I were also preoccupied with the question of screening during the preparations for the exhibition. Can we show these films in public? And if so, what would that require—a disclaimer, contextualization, contact with the source community or communities of origin? And what do these terms often used in these contexts actually mean? Who belongs to these communities? Who can speak for them? In any case, the people filmed had no way of knowing what was going to happen to their recordings. What is it like for them to have them shown as part of an art exhibition in wealthy Switzerland? What is it like for their descendants, for their community? Are they proud? Is it alienating for them? What is the gaze of the camera in the film and to what extent is it colonial? What about other power relations on set, in general? And above all, we also asked ourselves: What responsibility do we bear as researchers and curators when we show these films? Who else decides whether they may be shown—and above all, according to what criteria, according to what law? Who Owns the Films? Demands for social and ethical justice, which have occupied museums in relation to objects from colonial contexts not only— but very prominently—since the 2018 report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy,7 have also recently occupied film archives and archival studies. In addition to the questions of rightful ownership and restitution, in the case of images and films created in colonial and non-colonial contexts, there is also the question of use and re-use—and thus also of visual justice.8 The question posed by Sylvie Lindeperg and Ania Szczepanska, “Who owns 7 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Zurückgeben. Über die Restitution afrikanischer Kulturgüter, trans. Daniel Fastner (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019 [2018]). 8 See Christopher A. Nixon, ed., “Visuelle Gerechtigkeit,” kritische berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunstund Kulturwissenschaften 52, no. 2 (2024), pp. 2–6. 98 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? the images?,”9 is relevant not least because ownership structures define the use of images and films, and these in turn influence the financial return. This use of images and films is negotiated through licenses, which in turn are deeply rooted in Western concepts of ownership. The ethical aspects did not play a significant role in the legal clarification of the use of the string figure films within the exhibition. In a contract with the owner, TIB, we received confirmation that no third-party rights such as copyrights,10 the rights of performers or personal rights would be infringed. For a fee of 450 euros (75 euros per film), we received a so-called sub-license and thus the right to show the films for the duration of the exhibition.11 The fact that a Swiss museum pays remuneration to a German library, but the people filmed do not receive any money for their work, not only highlights the link between the legal and the economic, but above all reproduces existing imbalances in this world, regardless of whether one compares “the West and the rest,” Global North and South or highand low-income countries. Even if the clarified rights of use certainly made things easier for us (and took away our fear of being sued), this did not make the ethical questions any less important for us—on the contrary. Our unease was heightened by the fact that the legal process seemed to take little or no account of social, historical and ethical justice. In the following text, I will trace the history of the Niutao string figure film and embed it in a local-global framework, focusing on the central actors and institutions. In doing so, I will also be following the proposal of two archival scholars, Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, who suggest a shift from a Western model based on individual rights to a model based on a feminist “ethics of care” 9 Sylvie Lindeperg and Ania Szczepanska, eds., Who Owns the Images? The Paradox of Archives, between Commercialization, Free Circulation and Respect (Lüneburg: meson press, 2021). 10 The author of the film is Gerd Koch. Licenses (as part of the copyright) were granted by the IWF, and then by the TIB after the dissolution. Koch obtained a 50% share of the IWF’s license income and also insisted on this agreement during the 1996 negotiations regarding digital re-use. See German National Library for Science and Technology IWF 12053 V 983. 11 On the condition that the authors of the films are named and reference is made to the provision of the film by the TIB, see “Lizenzvertrag über die öffentliche Vorführung von Filmen der TIB,” April 2024. 99 in the face of existing injustices in the use of archival images: “[A] feminist ethics of care approach places the archivist in a web of relationships with each of the concerned parties [record subjects, record creators, users und communities]12 and posits that the archivist has an affective responsibility to responsibly empathize with each of the stakeholders.”13 Even though Mario Schulze and I are not archivists, but rather users of the archival material, in the context of the exhibition we not only transfer the material from one or two GLAM areas (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) to another—from the archive or library to the museum—but also make it available to the public. We have a responsibility towards the actors involved, since in our work we are not simply individual, isolated actors within a Western legal system, but are integrated into a larger, ethically and historically informed, global network of relationships. The following explanations serve to reconstruct these relationships as densely as possible in order to be able to (differently) answer the question of whether the film can be shown in the exhibition. It is an attempt, an approximation. A first challenge in the case of the string figure films was to identify the actors, as not all actors were named in the texts accompanying the films. The authors of the films and texts are known, as is the collection, but the people shown often, if not always, remain unnamed, which Fatimah Tobing Rony calls “The Language of Racialization.”14 The names never appear in the films themselves, but in some of the accompanying publications—short texts about the content and production of the films, which were published together with them—the names of some of the performers can be found, as in the case of the recordings from Basel, Qaanaaq/Thule 12 Communities are, according to Caswell and Cifor, “those who are not direct users of records, but for whom the use of records has lasting consequences.” Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (2016), pp. 23–43, pp. 38–39. 13 Ibid., p. 41. For more on the question of an ethics of care, see also Temi Odumosu, “The Crying Child. On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons,” Current Anthropology 61, no. 22 (2020), pp. 289–302. 14 The lack of names and stories reinforces a racialization of bodies: “Individuals are read as metonyms for an entire category of people, whether it be ethnic group, race or Savage/Primitive/Third World.” Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 71. 100 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? and São Paulo. They are called, respectively, Ruth and Gertrud, Kajutak, Aleratsiaq and Ukujaq, and Valério, Kakrò and Pòkròk.15 In contrast, no names are given in the publications accompanying the string figure films from Kiribati and Tuvalu. Ailima Saipele, Niutao, Ellice Islands, now Tuvalu We were able to identify Ailima, daughter of the house builder Saipele, in the genealogical name called Ailima Saipele, on the basis of further texts and archive material from the film author Gerd Koch.16 As far as we know, there are no texts written by Ailima herself, only what Koch wrote about her. The most direct source we have of Ailima is the film of her performing string figures and a few photos in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. Ailima Saipele was filmed on Niutao, an atoll with a diameter of 2.6 by 1.2 kilometers and a height of just a few meters, located in the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Hawaii. When the film was made, Niutao was part of the British colony of the Ellice Islands. Upon independence in 1978, the Ellice Islands became Tuvalu or Tuuvalu. Ailima Saipele was twenty years old when she was filmed by Gerd Koch making string figures. Before that, she had already seen 16mm footage of Niutao’s culture and people—including footage of herself. She appears in a fifty-minute film that Koch had made two years earlier and which entered the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica as E 409. In this film, about 15 Vilma Chiara Schulz lists the names in the publication accompanying the film E 2213 Krahô (Brazil, Tocantins Region)—String Figures by her and Harald Schulz (film: 1975, text: 1977); Christian Adler in the publication accompanying E 2314 PolarEskimo (Nordgrönland, Thule-Distrikt)—Fadenspiele (1979); Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Barbara Senft and Gunter Senft (whose film we are not showing in the exhibition) in E 2958 Trobriander (Ost-Neuguinea, Trobriand-Inseln, Kaile’una) Fadenspiele “ninikula” (1987), as well as Hans-Rudolf Haefelfinger. Giving names did not necessarily make it easier to identify or contact the people. For example, the two girls in the string figure film from Basel were mentioned by name in the accompanying publication, but could no longer be traced due to marriage and other name changes. It took several phone calls before we were finally able to contact them personally. 16 In the following I will choose a compromise and write “Ailima Saipele,” which on the one hand follows her name (Ailima), but on the other hand adapts it to the context of its use in this article, written according to Western standards, by which, after a name’s first appearance, usually only the surname is mentioned. 101 the construction of a sleeping house under the direction of her father Saipele, the section “On the first day of work” shows Ailima Saipele making the traditional flower decorations and putting them on the men (fig. 3.1 and 3.2). She is mentioned by name in Fig. 3.1: In the film Polynesians (Ellice Islands, Niutao)—Building a Sleeping House, which Koch made during his first visit to Niutao, Ailima Saipele stands to the left of the men and looks into the camera. Fig. 3.2: She decorates the men with flowers and oils them. 108 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? The project of salvaging is also of considerable importance with regard to the films. Koch has published fifteen films about life on Niutao via the IWF, fourteen of them in the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica.34 With the exception of one film, he recorded all the others during his first expedition to Niutao in 1960/1961.35 However, he only published one film from his second six-week stay in 1963: the one showing Ailima Saipele making the string figures. He then traveled on to the Gilbert Islands, now Kiribati, and created various recordings for the EC, many of which were oriented towards the films from Niutao. Why was the string figure film not shot until 1963, released in 1965 and accompanied by a publication in 1969?36 Koch had already written about string figures on Niutao, Nanumanga and Nukufetau in his book Die materielle Kultur der Ellice-Inseln, published in 1961. In it, he describes string figures as an activity for girls aged ten to seventeen, but adds that boys would also appreciate making string figures. Shortly afterwards, he mentions the competitive aspect of the string figures, which is about knowledge of figures.37 Even though Koch did not film Ailima Saipele playing the string figures on his first visit, he photographed her doing so (fig. 5.1). From these photographs, he had drawings made for the publication (fig. 5.2). The reason why Koch only made the string figure film on his second expedition can be found in another protagonist, Honor Maude. 34 One film was not released in the EC because it contained secret fighting techniques that Koch did not want to publish out of respect for the people of Niutao and their trust in him. The film entered the IWF as D 841 Secret Methods of SelfDefence [failima] in Niutao, Ellice Islands. The D-films received less attention than the E-films in the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica. In his texts, Koch also refers to not revealing clan secrets that were given to him personally in confidence. See Koch, “Kulu Göttin von Niutao,” p. 237. 35 According to Barabara Lüem, he had filmed exclusively on Niutao on his first expedition. See Lüem, “Zeugen der Erinnerung,” p. 103. For more on Koch’s film work, see Gerd Koch, Probleme und Erfahrungen. expeditionen in die südsee (self-published Edition failima, 2005), esp. pp. 109–127. 36 Goldsmith also points this out without going into it in detail. See Michael Goldsmith, “Historicising Gerd Koch’s Ethnographic Films on Tuvalu,” The Journal of Pacific History vol. 45, no. 1 (2010), pp. 57–70. 37 Gerd Koch, Die materielle Kultur der Ellice-Inseln (Berlin: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1961), pp. 169–170. 109 Fig. 5.1 and 5.2: Drawings by E. Armgardt after photographs by Koch of Ailima Saipele playing tā, 1960. The drawn figures and hands correspond to Ailima Saipele’s figures and hands in the later published photographs. 110 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? Honor Maude, Canberra, Australia In the history of Ailima Saipele’s string figure film, Honor Maude (1905–2001) plays the role of both the initiator of the film’s creation and the expert and author of the accompanying publication. Alongside Caroline Furness Jayne (1873–1909) and Kathleen Haddon (1988–1961), Maude was one of the world’s most important string figure experts.38 All three were interested in recording and analyzing not only the final patterns, but also the way in which the string figures were made. Maude had already published on string figures from the Gilbert Islands in the 1930s and published a monograph on them in 1958, followed by many other articles and monographs.39 But how did Honor Maude find Gerd Koch? Significantly for gender relations in the sciences (and beyond), it was not Honor Maude herself who corresponded with Koch, but her husband Henry Evans Maude (1906–2006). In 1962, between his two expeditions to Niutao, Gerd Koch was contacted by Henry Evans Maude, former British Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands and professor at the Australian National University. In addition to Henry Maude’s wish to persuade Koch to publish an English translation of his book on the material culture of the Ellice Islands, other common denominators were quickly found: Henry Maude wrote of “helping the Ellice Peoples to regain a proper pride in their cultural achievements,”40 and Koch of “[giving] them a little more confidence in their own way of life.”41 Statements such as these hint at another aspect of salvage anthropology: It is not only the cultural achievements—be they practices, narratives or objects—that are “rescued,” preserved and exhibited in the West. In the course of this, (Western) ideas about traditional cultures are also produced, 38 See Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül, “Introduction” in this volume. 39 H. C. and H. E. Maude, “String-Figures from the Gilbert Islands,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 45, no. 2 (178) (1936), pp. 1–16; H. C. and H. E. Maude, String-Figures from the Gilbert Islands (Wellington: The Polynesian Society, 1958); Honor Maude, The String Figures of Nauru Island (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia 1971). 40 Henry Maude to Koch, October 27, 1962, Ethnological Museum Berlin, hereinafter referred to as EM Berlin. 41 Koch to Henry Maude, September 20, 1992, EM Berlin. 111 which often block out everything new and hybrid, all forms of appropriation and transition in the cultures being researched— as indicated, for example, in Koch’s approach to concealing modern influences. In most cases, it is this produced, seemingly pure original culture that is to be reinforced or even restituted. Nevertheless, in the person of Honor Maude and the string figures, the hybrid is given a chance.42 In his letters, Henry Maude swiftly moves on to asking Koch, on behalf of his wife, for detailed information about the string figures in his book.43 Koch hadn’t paid much attention to the string figures on his first visit and had hardly taken any notes due to a lack of time—just a few Leica photos of the various stages of the figures, fifty five of which he sent to Honor Maude (fig. 6.1). To make up for his earlier omissions, Koch promised on his next trip “to include the constructions of their string figures in my 16 mm movie-films,”44 which met with great interest from the Maudes: “From such films she [Honor Maude] (or any other string figure specialist) should have no difficulty in copying the construction and recording it in correct terminology for publication.”45 The plan to film Ailima Saipele on the next trip was thus decided—and furthermore, the Maudes and Kochs were also to meet in person. A few years later, Honor Maude wrote the accompanying publication for the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica on this and other string figure films by Koch. Koch wrote the “General Preliminary Remarks.”46 If one compares the drawings that Maude had newly made with those published a few years earlier in Koch’s Die materielle Kultur der Ellice-Inseln, there is a remarkable difference in perspective: the former are made from the point of view or gaze of the ethnologist; that is, from the front onto the pattern. Ailima Saipele has been removed and thus made invisible (fig. 6.2). Maude’s drawings, on the other hand, are made from a first-person perspective (fig. 6.3). This style of depiction goes back 42 See Schulze and Waltenspül, “Introduction.” 43 He also asks whether Koch would like to publish a paper with his wife on Togan String Figures. See Henry Maude to Koch, October 27, 1962, EM Berlin. 44 Koch to Henry Maude, November 6, 1962, EM Berlin. 45 Henry Maude to Koch, March 15, 1963, EM Berlin. 46 Honor Maude, “E 885/1965 Polynesier”; see also the publications accompanying films E 883 and E 884. 112 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? to Caroline Furness Jayne, who drew the figures “as they are seen by the person making the figure.”47 As the viewer of the drawing, I become Ailima Saipele or Honor Maude and hold tangutu in my 47 Caroline Furness Jayne, quoted in Robyn McKenzie, “One continuous loop: making and meaning in the string figures of Yirrkala” (Ph.D. diss., The Australian National University, 2016), p. 99. Fig. 6.1: Photograph of Ailima playing string figures around 1960. The photo served as the basis for the drawing published in 1961. However, the photo was only published in Honor Maude’s accompanying publication from 1969. Fig. 6.2: Drawing by E. Armgardt after Koch’s photographs of Ailima’s hands. Fig. 6.3: Drawing of the same figure by Honor Maude from a first-person perspective, also published in the accompanying publication. 113 hands. The hands (which are also cut off in this picture) are not simply objects of an (ethnological) gaze, but extend towards my body. This circumstance can be interpreted as a moment of connection, as a continuously renewing bridge into the present, as— as suggested by film phenomenology—an act of embodied vision. It may be no coincidence that it was female ethnologists who brought about this shift in perspective towards an embodied gaze. But Honor Maude’s representations in text and image are by no means limited to inviting viewers to virtual embodiment or being instructions for participation. Her collected string figures and their methods of making are something else: data. Maude systematized the string figures she knew from Oceania and beyond into tables in which she arranged the different figures on a horizontal plane and the locations on a vertical plane (fig. 7). In such a “diffusionist project”, as Robyn McKenzie writes, the “‘ethnological value’ or ‘significance’ of the study of string figures” is seen as “providing ‘data for determining past cultural relationships’.”48 Maude’s tables lead us away from an embodied vision and back to an already mentioned central aspect of ethnological work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: systematization. 48 McKenzie, “One continuous loop,” p. 113, see also pp. 128–129. Fig. 7: Honor Maude’s table with string figure patterns (horizontal) and geographical occurrence (vertical). 114 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? The Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, Göttingen, Federal Republic of Germany The string figure film with Ailima Saipele—filmed by Gerd Koch with a later accompanying publication by Honor Maude—appeared in the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica in 1965. The EC and the institutions that administer it in the past and today—the Institute for the Scientific Film and the German National Library of Science and Technology—are central stakeholders in the web of relationships surrounding the film, as they have integrated it into scientific, legal and economic processes and had a decisive influence on its reception and use, an influence which continues today. What happened to Ailima Saipele’s film the moment it was included in the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, and thus in a project that was steeped in the ordering (modern) sciences? In the following, I will take a closer look at the film against the background of the EC concepts. 1. Making Visible, Comparing, Preserving, Saving, Fixing, etc. The aim of the EC was to establish scientific film as a research and publication medium. The EC was intended to make the movement processes of the animate and inanimate world researchable with the help of the specific possibilities of cinematography. The EC was subdivided into three disciplinary sections: Biology (zoology, botany, microbiology), Technical Sciences, and Ethnology (ethnology and folklore studies). Movements that corresponded to the following categories were considered suitable subjects for EC films: processes too fast or slow for the human eye to perceive; processes that should be compared with others; and processes “that will soon no longer be recordable”—including “ethnological movement sequences”—which should be filmed and made accessible before they disappeared entirely, as founder of the EC and director of the Institute for the Scientific Film Gotthard Wolf writes.49 In the logic of the EC, the string figure film fulfilled the last two inclusion criteria in particular: It served the purpose of cul49 See Wolf, Der Wissenschaftliche Dokumentationsfilm, p. 23. 115 tural comparison and “fixed” the practice and culture that was regarded as vanishing.50 2. Systematizing, Inventorying, Modularizing In order to include the films in the EC, they were cut up into socalled “smallest thematic units,” representing the “inventory of movements” of—for example—an animal species or an entire culture. The systematization was based on an “encyclopedia scheme” in the “modular principle,” which arranges the types of movement on a vertical level and the objects or subjects on a horizontal level.51 Wolf writes with regard to Koch’s films from Kiribati: “The 40 units compiled in Table I are part of about 70 units which, according to G. Koch, represent practically the complete movement documentation of the Gilbert Islands.”52 The fundamentally salvage anthropological assumption of the ethnological section of the EC goes hand in hand with the idea of a complete cultural documentation. This presumptuous idea of completely capturing “one” culture or its “inventory” on seventy films considerably undermines the liveliness, complexity and changeability of the lives of the people on Niutao, Onotoa or Tabiteuea. The term “inventory” is further interesting in relation to the question of who owns the films: it refers to the entirety of the possessions owned by an institution or similar. In this logic, the string figures as a practice belong to the movement inventory of the people on Niutao, they are their “property,” which is personally shared and passed on. However, the IWF (and later the TIB) appropriated the knowledge by making it accessible to the world on film. Through filming, “knowing” is separated from “owning,”53 whereby a transfer of ownership takes place: The 50 The string figure film from Basel contains slow-motion sequences, which means that it also fulfills the first criterion. 51 Wolf’s description of the vertical and horizontal arrangement of types of movement and objects or subjects of movement bears strong similarities to Honor Maude’s table of string figures, which she had already published in a similar way in String-Figures from the Gilbert Islands in 1958. Gerd Koch’s photographs of Ailima Saipele merged into both a diffusionist (Maude) and an encyclopaedic (Wolf) project. 52 Wolf, Der Wissenschaftliche Dokumentationsfilm, p. 122. 53 Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi and Marius Buning, eds., Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2023). 116 Sarine Waltenspül Who Owns the Films? Who Shows the Films? string figure knowledge is detached from Ailima Saipele, who practices it. It is reproduced, expropriated in its cinematic form and transferred to the inventory and ownership of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica. 3. Objectifying The EC was deeply rooted in the German post-war era of the 1950s and shaped by Gotthard Wolf’s efforts to ensure the objectivity and accuracy of scientific films. During the Second World War, Wolf headed the secret department for technical research films and was responsible for investigating projects important to the war effort for Nazi Germany. Virtues such as accuracy and objectivity guided the engineer’s work for years and were incorporated into his later conception of the EC.54 This can be clearly seen in Wolf’s judgment of Koch’s earlier films from the Tonga and Fiji Islands made in 1951/1952, which “already largely show the beginnings of the very detailed coverage of a limited subject later preferred by the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica.” He goes on to point out that “other films from this period also tend to emphasize the objective mode of representation later demanded by the Encyclopaedia.”55 The ethnologist Koch adopts Wolf’s rhetoric in regard to scientific film when he writes that film is the only way to “exactly” capture the process taking place.56 At the same time, Koch criticized the isolation of the movements into artificial units, as well as the isolation of the movements from their surroundings, the people, their behavior and their reactions. He uses a girl’s smile as an example, which “should by no means be omitted from the editing process because it is not directly ‘part of the subject’.”57 It is likely that Koch had Ailima Saipele in mind here. In 1972, Koch went so far as to criticize the EC system in general by calling for a form of film “that deals less with the subjects according to our 54 See Sarine Waltenspül, “Geschichtsvergessene Digitalisierung. Nationalsozialistische Provenienzen wissenschaftlich-technischer Filme aus der Sammlung des IWF,” Technikgeschichte 91, no. 2 (2024), pp. 139–174. 55 Wolf, Der Wissenschaftliche Dokumentationsfilm, p. 147. 56 Gerd Koch, “Möglichkeiten und Begrenzungen ethnographischer Filmarbeit,” Research Film, Le Film de Recherche, Forschungsfilm (December 1972), pp. 578–585, here p. 580. 57 Ibid., p. 583. 117 concepts and classifications” and “would capture the events more through the eyes of the natives [Einheimischen]”—but still filmed by the ethnologist.58 In the course of recording the film in the EC, the subjectivity of those making the film (Gerd Koch) and those being filmed (Ailima Saipele) is abstracted and the people objectified accordingly, which goes hand in hand with the next point. 4. Naming Koch’s ethnological films were inserted into the EC’s naming scheme. The labeling of the filmed people differs fundamentally in European and non-European ethnology. In the former, a geographical designation was chosen (e.g. Basel-Land), whereas Wolf explicitly equates the latter with the biological classification scheme: “The classification criteria thus correspond to a certain extent to those used in the biology section. The animal names are replaced by the tribal names [Stammesnamen].”59 This different naming structure of European and non-European people, in which the latter are equated with animals, can be described as nothing other than racist. The racist structure of the EC’s classification not only determined the titles of Koch’s films, but also those of thousands of others that were produced over decades and are still accessible online with the same titles today. The racist structure is thus reproduced without comment or context on the AV portal of the TIB. Ailima Saipele not only loses her name, but is made into a “Polynesian type.” Barbara Lüem, “Barbara Keti,” Basel, Switzerland If we take seriously the call for a change in thinking from an approach based on individual rights to an ethics of care, another actor added an aspect to the question of showing/not showing the films: the Swiss ethnologist Barbara Lüem. Barbara Lüem traveled to Niutao several times. After being asked by the Niutao community about Gerd Koch’s films on her 58 Ibid., p. 585. 59 Wolf, Der Wissenschaftliche Dokumentationsfilm, p. 118. The open access version of this publication was generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. DIAPHANES, Zurich 2025 Layout: 2edit, Zurich Cover image: Ruth Altenbach and Dunia Lingner, photographed by Piet Esch. 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