Megan Hermida Lu

Megan Lu is a Ph.D. candidate in American & New England Studies at Boston University. She completed her MFA in Film & Television Studies at Boston University. Her Master’s thesis focused on the representation of Asian Americans in early Hollywood cinema. Her work explores race and gender in early Hollywood filmmaking and examines how such representations influenced subsequent social, political, and legal thought.

A Case for Amateur Travel Films: John Van Antwerp MacMurray

Two men perch on a ledge as the sun beats down upon them, leaning against a brick wall, resting their feet on the dusty road. They wear simple, relaxed clothing—slacks and a long sleeve shirt—that imply the modest work of a laborer or tradesman. They eat their lunch silently and serenely, but this respite is fleeting because after mere seconds, the two gaze forward alarmedly, staring intently at the camera. One, visibly disturbed by its presence, dashes off screen. The other gazes on steadily, chewing his food, maintaining eye contact.

Despite its brevity, this scene reveals multitudes about the men in front of the camera, the man behind the camera, the viewers at home, and the camera itself. It bears historical importance to anyone interested in the cultural history of China in the early twentieth century, and international relations between the U.S. and China. It reveals the spontaneous, and frequently uninvited, nature of amateur filmmaking. It showcases, however fleeting, the lives of these unnamed men, lives that have not been preserved in the annals, lives that have not had the privilege of constructing their own historical narrative outside of their defiance in the face of this camera. In other words, this brief scene suggests the untapped potential of amateur travel films to redefine our historical understanding.

The architect of this brief scene is American diplomat John van Antwerp MacMurray, who alongside his family, vacationed in the Western Hills of China during his tenure as Minister to China (1925-1929). An amateur filmmaker, MacMurray captured these two men in his 1925 film Trips in Hills, and this scene is representative of MacMurray’s cinematic oeuvre, and in many ways, representative of amateur filmmaking at large. The moment described above reads commonplace—two workers taking a lunch break—but its mundanity allows for important historical, cultural, and aesthetic analysis. This mirrors the majority of his content. He regularly documents the daily toil of local workers, many of whom are paralyzed at the sight of the camera; he records the leisure activities of his family members as they explore the natural and built environment; he also captures majestic scenes of the hills and surrounding landscape. Like most amateur travel filmmakers, his content is mundane and his style unpolished. I offer MacMurray as a standard for amateur travel filmmakers, an archetype for the stylistic and content-oriented analysis of such films. With this said, amateur filmmaking is for personal use, and thus intimately private. While MacMurray is a case study, his viewpoint is not representative of the whole. 

An amateur film is any film that exists outside of the normal exchange value, thus produced as something other than commodity. [1] This, of course, excludes professionally made non-fiction films and even many avant-garde films that are intended for a wide distribution. MacMurray’s films, which were produced for personal and family use, fit within this classifier, but I particularly examine his amateur travel films, or those films produced when he either traveled or lived abroad. More specifically, I explore the films he produced when he was stationed as U.S. Minister to China, covering his travels throughout China, Korea, and the Philippines. This narrow scope allows me to examine the nature of early amateur filmmaking, including its influences and style, but it also allows me to interrogate a U.S. tourist’s perception of the American Pacific. In this context, the American Pacific refers to a geographically specific form of American orientalism [2], one that targets Asian nations that abut the Pacific Ocean. However, the American Pacific also suggests the contemporary American beliefs of these spaces, the constructed imaginary of the landscape and people. For this research, the ideological construction of a geography supersedes the importance of a physical geography. MacMurray’s films, therefore, provide valuable insight into contemporary American perceptions of the “oriental” spaces to which he traveled. 

An amateur travel film shares a close kinship with other nonfiction films, including ethnographic cinema and travelogues. The difference lies in the framework of production, wherein amateur film is intended for private use, while the latter two are intended for public consumption and shared as commodity. Still, like ethnographic cinema, an amateur travel film emphasizes actuality, and it records, most prominently, cultures different than one’s own. In other words, both amateur travel films and ethnographic films prioritize difference, which results in the construction of othered space. Scholars including Alison Griffiths [3], Fatimah Tobing Rony [4], and Jennifer Peterson [5] examine ethnographic cinema and its enduring popularity, much of which hinges on the depiction of difference. Viewers fervently consume such content with both “amazement and unease,” [6] or desire and derision. This translates to the pleasure of detachedly observing foreign cultures, but the fear of actual engagement. This fascination has been commodified through cinema, whose mechanical reproduction allowed cheap, fast, and plentiful distribution of ethnographic and travel cinema. The ubiquity of such film in the early twentieth century, through the travelogue’s widespread commercial distribution and ethnographic cinema’s scholarly distribution in universities and museums, conventionalized notions of difference, framing it through tropes including performance and nudity. [7] Amateur travel filmmakers, including MacMurray, reinforce and reflect these conventions in their own films. For these reasons, ethnographic cinema and travelogues are useful comparison points for the ways in which amateur travel films constructed American identity through the exoticization of difference, which bolstered xenophobia while also justifying imperialism

With this said, most scholars of travel cinema have been preoccupied with the one approach that emphasizes cinema’s construction and objectification of the Other. This paper opposes this singular analytical approach to travel films. While scholars have, rightly so, explored and interrogated the colonial gaze embedded in American amateur filmmaking, this foregone conclusion has prevented scholars from exploring greater potential for these films. In “Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes famously argued that an interpretation of a text should not rely solely on the author’s identity, that the text exists autonomously, and we can distill meanings distinct from the author’s intended purpose. [8] As I will explore, the style of amateur filmmaking, with its lack of overt narrative and obfuscation of the filmmaker, is uniquely purposed for such polysemous reading. 

Consequently, in returning to MacMurray’s films, I propose two seemingly conflicting arguments regarding their legacy. The first suggests that these films, in line with contemporary media and tourism practices, essentialize Asian people and cultures. The second argument is that these films offer an alternative reading that privileges the autonomy of people who have been representationally suppressed and physically oppressed. The difference stems from analytical framing.

In the former framework, a close analysis of content reveals MacMurray’s preoccupation with highlighting difference, perhaps an unsurprising revelation for an American in the foreign service. As previously mentioned, this interest in difference is a well-documented phenomenon of travel film, most specifically ethnographic cinema, which constructs power hierarchies privileging the filmmaker’s background by presenting indigenous subjects and cultures as Other. More particularly, these filmmakers suggest this Otherness by positioning their native subjects as existing in a separate temporal realm that opposes the process of modernization. [9] This separate temporal realm is characterized by an unchanging, bucolic state, wherein the people live seemingly unaware of rapid globalization. Filmmakers construct this space through the highlighting of difference, including an emphasis on nature and an absence of technology.

Furthermore, this paper closely examines MacMurray’s films to identify the ways he presents an Americentric narrative through his filmmaking and its related preoccupation with difference. By Americentric, I refer to the ways in which his films privilege a perspective of American progress, thus dominance, through juxtaposition with temporally displaced Otherness. MacMurray’s films locate this narrative in Asia—specifically in China, Korea, and the Philippines—a space that his contemporaries constructed as lesser, dirty, and violent. His Americentric view, therefore, does not just reflect a belief in American dominance, but also reflects his assimilation of contemporary American visual culture that, most famously in the words of Edward Said, orientalized Asian people and cultures. 

On the other hand, how does our viewing experience, and subsequent interpretation, change without the acknowledgement of MacMurray as filmmaker? Amateur film’s style, including its undeveloped narrative, releases viewers from overtly inscribed ideologies, granting greater interpretive freedom. Amateur film, therefore, approaches film’s ideal as proposed by Siegfried Kracauer, who argues that the medium of film poses the ability to redeem the modern world through its revelation of physical reality. In other words, film’s record of reality strips away modern ideologies (such as religion, consumerism, etc.) that blind our vision. [10] Critics have, rightly so, criticized the alignment of film and reality; it is important to emphasize film’s, even amateur film’s, constructed nature. However, amateur film is certainly less constructed than commercial cinema, particularly in its two defining elements: quotidian content and spontaneous style. With a microscopic exploration of the everyday and an unpolished, nearly unguided presentation of this content, the amateur film offers viewers the space for individual interpretation, resulting in manifold readings. MacMurray’s films certainly reflect the ideologies that shaped his perceptions of China, but their proximity to reality removes some filters clouding interpretation. His amateur style dismantles his influence over the mundane image, allowing viewers to see people—perhaps not as they truly are, but certainly as they have never before been represented in cinema.  

This paper balances these two frameworks for viewing, one that historically situates these films, taking into account the ways in which the filmmaker’s identity impacts his (and our) ways of seeing, and the other that unencumbers the films from the gaze of the filmmaker, recouping amateur film—with its spontaneous style and quotidian content—as a source of revolutionary reading that affords power to subjects that have been silenced by commercial media. 

In returning to the opening scene of the men lunching, MacMurray’s framing suggests differences in clothing, in food, in technology, in work culture, etc. The simplicity of their lives temporally displaces them, further disconnecting them from the filmmaker and the modernity represented by his machine. Additionally, based upon their response to the camera, it is clear that MacMurray filmed these men without their acknowledgement, thus positioning them as worthy of observation but not engagement. On the other hand, in watching the scene without reference to MacMurray’s background, we can view these men as autonomous. Their startling gaze is accusatory, framing MacMurray and his viewers as uninvited interlopers. Their noncompliance with the camera—whether through absence or disinterest—defies the filmmaker’s attempt to categorize them. While the subjects in such films are often portrayed as powerless, and it is important to analyze the very dangerous power dynamics at play, it is likewise important to explore the humanity, individuality, and even agency in such films. 

This paper examines such potential of amateur travel films, using MacMurray’s work as a case study. It begins with a background on the life and influence of John van Antwerp MacMurray, followed by a cataloguing of his films. This paper then shifts to an analysis of MacMurray’s style and content, first exploring the ways in which he orientalized through an emphasis on difference, and then moving towards alternative readings. This paper suggests the unrealized value that amateur film poses to scholars, particularly for interdisciplinary fields such as American Studies. Only through a combined historical and stylistic analysis of the films can one understand their potential as something more than supporting documents for historians or unpolished, and thus uninteresting, case studies for media scholars.

BACKGROUND

John Van Antwerp MacMurray was born in Schenectady, NY in 1881. In childhood, he attended several elite boarding schools, followed immediately by his enrollment at Princeton University, where he befriended the university’s president Woodrow Wilson. [11] MacMurray settled on a career in the government, and a recommendation from Wilson secured him a seat in the Foreign Service exam. In 1907, his career began with his first posting as Consul-General and Secretary of Legation in Bangkok. 

In 1925, Calvin Coolidge appointed MacMurray to the role of Minister of China, a position that he had greatly coveted. Little did MacMurray know that the political landscape of China had vastly altered since his last visit in 1918. He found an unstable regime with warring political factions and a growing Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) that threatened the status quo established in the Washington Conference. Ultimately, in 1929, the Chinese Nationalist government demanded the immediate abolition of extraterritorial rights which exempted foreigners from local regulation; MacMurray offered a gradual abolition. Unhappy with this suggestion, the Kuomintang took their demands immediately to a more sympathetic Washington, bypassing MacMurray entirely. Resentful of his diminished role and skeptical of Washington’s appeasement of China, MacMurray resigned from his post in October 1929 with the desire to “get my handcar off the track before the train comes by.” [12]

MacMurray returned to the Foreign Service when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him as Minister to the Baltic States in 1933. He then served as Minister to Turkey, and although he was once again offered ministership to China in 1937, he refused. After serving a brief stint as Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, John Van Antwerp MacMurray finally retired in 1944. He passed away in September of 1960.

It is against this volatile background, confronting a civil war, a combative local government, and an unsupportive home government where MacMurray produced his travel films. From 1925-1928, MacMurray toted his Cine-Kodak Motion Picture camera around the world, producing over twenty-five 16 mm films that span both personal and professional content. He began filming just two years after the release of the Cine-Kodak, the first 16 mm film camera, a watershed moment for film history as it made amateur filmmaking affordable, transportable, and ultimately possible. By the time of his appointment as Minister to China, MacMurray was already an accomplished amateur photographer; his papers, which are held at Princeton University, include thousands of photographs taken throughout his travels. It is worth noting that this experience in photography certainly influenced his style of filmmaking, as it did for most amateur filmmakers at the time. 

FILMS

Princeton University has preserved and digitized twenty-six surviving 16 mm films produced by John Van Antwerp MacMurray during his tenure as Minister to China. [13] Like most travel films, their contents are personal in nature, but their scope can be divided into three categories: vacations, daily life, and work. The chronicled vacations take place primarily in China with trips to the Western Hills (1925-1928), Chefoo (1926) [14], and Kalgan (1928) [15]. In addition, he filmed his travels to the Philippines (1926) and Korea (1928) [16]. The reels that chronicle his daily life in Peking do not solely focus on the quotidian, but are also punctuated by special events in the life of his family and friends. Finally, his work films chronicle moments where he served in an official capacity as Minister to China. These moments include his spectatorship of Marine drills (1928), his inspection of ports along the Yangtze River (1928), his presence as the Nationalist troops entered Peking (1928), and his attendance at the internment of Sun Yat Sen in Nanjing (1929). Some of these films are particularly notable for their singularity; MacMurray’s film, for instance, is the only existing recording of the Nationalist troops’ arrival in Peking, so it has profound significance for scholars of Chinese history. However, despite this coverage of rare events, MacMurray spends the majority of his energy on documenting the quotidian.

In Snapshot Versions of Life (1987), anthropologist Richard Chalfen outlines the “appropriate” topics for home movie making. These topics include vacations, holidays, special events, and “local activity” of “slightly unusual events.” [17] In other words, Chalfen suggests that home movies emphasize the noteworthy or unusual moments in life, and while ordinary topics are not typically filmed, “common” activities are more often represented in travel films. [18] Here, Chalfen reflects the content that was privileged in amateur movie making magazines and preoccupied the minds of most amateur filmmakers; but like most scholars, his focus is confined to home movies, with only superficial reference to travel films. 

Using MacMurray’s films as a case study, my research identifies five broad categories of content that appear in amateur travel films of the American Pacific. MacMurray films (1) the “uncommon” events that Chalfen claims dominates home movies, but he spends a greater deal of time on quotidian topics including (2) landscape, (3) animals, both domestic and wild, (4) transportation, and (5) people. By exploring these topics, one might see how amateur travel filmmakers share a unified impulse, while also reflecting their individuality and that of their environment. More pertinently, however, these “mundane” categories, dull for their ordinariness and proximity to reality, are one element facilitating more complex readings of these films. 

UNPOLISHED AND MUNDANE

Produced within a decade of the advent of amateur filmmaking, MacMurray’s films showcase a consistency of style that I argue is inherent to all amateur filmmaking, both of its day and beyond. This style reflects a mix of both unintentional and intentional film practices. Amateur filmmaking has largely faced a lack of interest from scholars and archives due to its unpolished style. Amateur filmmaking scholars emphasize the way in which amateur works are maligned, deemed unsophisticated and “lack[ing] originality, skill, and criticality.” [19] This unpolished nature that separates amateur film from commercial cinema is surely the most recognized style of amateur filmmaking, and it is present across these films’ cinematography, editing, narrative, and materiality. The “unpolished” look results from an unintentionality in the filmmaking practice that reflects a reliance on hard cuts, shaky framing, and discontinuity, all resulting from their spontaneous filming. Discontinuity is particularly important for any analysis of amateur travel filmmaking. A professional filmmaker understands how to implement film language to create a narrative and guide the viewer. MacMurray does not reflect such sophistication; his films are but a series of moments, seemingly disconnected except for their proximity to each other. Were they not on the same reel, it would be nearly impossible to construct their context. Without a narrative, viewers have more room for interpretation.

With this noted—the unpolished, damaged, spontaneity of MacMurray’s films—it is also important to note moments where these films align with more traditional notions of cinema. It is in these moments, where MacMurray does follow certain “rules,” where one can see how he has individually internalized Hollywood cinema and its film language. These moments showcase an intentionality that is valued in art, and this intentionality is reflected in his careful framing, primitive camera movement, composition, and varied focal length. Still, such film language is not developed enough to construct a narrative.

Overall, the style of MacMurray’s films most closely resembles the “cinema of attraction,” a term coined by Tom Gunning to describe films from roughly 1907-1913 that sacrificed narrative in a bid to engage viewers through the visual alone. MacMurray, too, is attracted by the spectacle, and through his films he displays little interest in telling a story, and a greater interest in capturing moments. His films showcase a fascination with the new technology itself, apparent from his focus on movement. Still, his overall oeuvre does suggest an evolving film language linked to the sophistication associated with narrative cinema. His earliest film from this period Trip in Hills (1925) is his shakiest, with a notable number of overexposed and unfocused shots. By 1927, he begins introducing limited camera movement, and by Yangtze (1928), MacMurray adeptly displays his composition and movement, both within and outside of the frame. Overall, though, MacMurray’s skillful framing is apparent throughout his films, reflecting his previous exposure to photography. 

Moving to the content of the films, as an American tourist in Asia, MacMurray largely sought “authentic” cultures and experiences. [20] Problematically, authenticity too often manifested as primitivism, which constructed power hierarchies privileging the tourist. Particularly for tourist filmmakers and photographers, they feel secure behind their apparatus, disconnected from their subjects, and thereby free from responsibility toward them. This quest for authenticity, also the primary motivator behind ethnographic cinema, centers on seeking out and highlighting difference. It is through his construction of difference where MacMurray presents an Americentric view of his travels, which stages American cultural practices as the norm, and which reflects American visual depictions of Asia. 

MacMurray primarily highlights difference in his emphasis on the Quotidian, which takes on a new meaning through the lens of a tourist, since in travel “the ordinary becomes exotic” [21] and therefore worthy of documentation and collection. It is thus in amateur films where the mundane becomes cinematic. MacMurray emphasizes mundane activities, particularly within street scenes, where locals sell wares, eat food, clean storefronts, etc. The very act of recording these events suggests his fascination with them, viewing them not as mundane, but as noteworthy in their difference.

For example, a mundane focus of MacMurray’s is transportation, but his emphasis on boats, cars, etc., make a larger argument about modernity, comparing cultural progress. His emphasis on transportation, therefore, is one more way that his films emphasize difference. Whether war ships, locomotives, airplanes, or cars, MacMurray captures machinery that exemplify the technological revolution in the early twentieth century. While this documentation likely signals MacMurray’s interest in new technology, his rapt attention to it also suggests an exoticization of it. For example, in films like Shanghai and South, his images of war ships are juxtaposed with rickshaws.

Modernity is presented as out of place in the landscape, the exception and not the rule. It is important to note the many ways in which modernity is reflected in amateur travel films because modernity, or rather the need to escape from modernity, is a primary motivator behind U.S. tourism. [22] Thus, while MacMurray captures modern technology in juxtaposition with more dated technology (i.e. an American warship next to a Chinese sampan) to demonstrate differing levels of “progress,” there is another motivation. He seeks authenticity, and the older industrial means found within cities not yet impacted by modern technology affords just that. MacMurray’s emphasis on modernity creates power hierarchies privileging American industry, but also reflects disappointment over the loss of authentic culture. [23]

AMATEUR ORIENTALISM

While MacMurray’s oeuvre generally displays difference through quotidian activities, I will perform a closer analysis of one of his “special” events—an Igorot dance performance from his 1926 trip to the Philippines. This scenes showcases the ways in which amateur filmmakers such as MacMurray recycled visual tropes that orientalized Asian cultural practices. The dancing was the highlight of a festival that was organized in MacMurray’s honor by his friend John C. Early, governor of the Mountain Province. The U.S.’ history of colonialism in the Philippines is a history ordered entirely by racism, or more specifically, by shifting notions of race that determined the qualifications for self-governance. While the U.S. promised self-governance, they continuously altered the price of admission, and the Philippine people were both perceived as and shaped into subordinates. [24] Not gaining independence until 1946, the Philippines remained a U.S. territory at the time of MacMurray’s visit, and the film is an interesting visual reminder of the U.S. presence in the Philippines, and subsequently the U.S. imperial regime. 

It is in this political environment where MacMurray filmed Filipino dancers. The film Philippines opens with a long shot of the coastline; MacMurray pans right towards the water, capturing the undulating waves. This encapsulates his affinity for movement within the frame. He then cuts to a shot of the tree line and captures a man scaling the trunk of the tree (a visual trope repeated in other films including Trips in Hills). He cuts once more to an aerial shot of a winding road and he tracks the movement of a car as it progresses along the curves. Here we have, once more, framed movement and an emphasis on transportation. The subsequent shots vary in content. He frames the tree line again before cutting to medium shots of Philippine people as they hike with packs on their backs, presumably serving as guides for MacMurray’s party. He provides an aerial view of a village and then snapshots of some villagers. The preceding description all occurs within the first two minutes of the reel, after which he begins filming the Igorot dance performance. This scene totals 5 minutes, the longest scene in all of MacMurray’s travel films during this period. To capture the dance, MacMurray holds the camera at eye-level, approximating a full shot. Aside from some shakiness due to its handheld nature, the camera remains stationary as the dancers move within the frame. He captures several dances, which appear to have an intentional arrangement that orders dancers based on age and sex. He spends several seconds on each dance while interjecting each shot with the reactions of the audience.

MacMurray is methodical with his camerawork. His filming of the Igorot dancers takes up nearly the entire reel.  His interest is clear, not only from the relative length of time that he spends on the performances, but also the ways he allows the dancers to overwhelm the frame. His shaky panning of the crowds reveals a desire to capture the fullness of the event. Furthermore, he ends the dance performance with a “living portrait.” He gathers a group of male dancers and poses them in two lines; he then pans down the line of dancers.

The camera moves very slowly across the line of dancers, many of whom are naked or nearly. He films this portrait twice, the only instance of MacMurray repeating a shot. 

We know of MacMurray’s fascination with the performance not solely from the film itself. MacMurray took a series of photographs of the performance, which he turned into a photo album. This series primarily comprised individual portraits of the Igorots, which he turned into postcards. In addition to the postcards, he wrote his mother a description of the dance in a letter that he composed upon return to Peking. [25] Thanks to this letter, we have accompanying narration to the film. He writes of various dancers, drawing caricatures of some people, including the man who was “a little drunk,” or the “particularly uprightly and engaging head-hunter” who taught the others a dance from another village. [26] His characterization of these dancers  signals an exoticization. 

The research of turn-of-the-century scientists, including anthropologist Félix-Louis Regnault who is credited with producing the first ethnographic film, proliferated an obsession with and anxiety about race. This obsession extended to the popular imaginary as various entertainments peddled visual “ethnographies” including postcards, dioramas, “native” exhibits at fairs, photographs, and of course, films. Born in this age of imperialism, MacMurray was doubtlessly entrenched in such popular visual language, and it certainly influenced his personal travel films. For example, MacMurray’s filming of the Igorot dancers invariably stemmed from awareness of, if not direct observation of, the Igorot village at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. This exhibit, the prominent attraction in the Midway, drew audiences who desired to see “authentic” village life while simultaneously rejecting the “savagery” on display during the tribal dance. [27] The buzz, and related outrage, around the exhibit reached the desk of President Theodore Roosevelt who, in fear that the exhibit would undermine U.S. colonial efforts in the Philippines, demanded the dancers wear pants. Public outcry over this impact of clothing on the exhibit’s authenticity eventually prevailed and Roosevelt withdrew this request. [28] The discourse around the Igorot exhibit perhaps best represents the larger American struggle of “desire and derision” surrounding the American Pacific. Mirroring this very popular exhibit, MacMurray filmed Igorot dances in Philippines, and like the fair organizers that exaggerated cultural difference, his camera emphasized difference, perhaps most forcefully in its emphasis on nudity. This is but one example of how amateur filmmakers are influenced by popular visual culture. 

MacMurray’s films showcase his Americentrism. He does not just represent difference, but constructs it with specific reference to the American Pacific. In other words, his films follow in a long line of American visual culture that represents the “Orient.” His recording of the Igorot performance, and its connection to the 1904 World’s Fair Midway, is one such reflection, but there is a storied history of U.S. orientalism in visual culture dating from the nineteenth century, including the Chinese Museum in Boston, Barnum’s famed “Siamese Twins,” and the arrival of yellowface minstrel performances that framed Asian immigrants as plague-carriers. [29] By the end of the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans began framing Asian immigrants, most particularly Chinese immigrants, as “coolies” that undercut wages and strangled the American dream. In the early twentieth century, the fear of Asian immigration manifested through the “yellow peril,” an archetype of Asian aggression that sought to destroy white nations (note the emphasis on race rather than specific nationality) and pollute the white bloodline through the threat of miscegenation. For Americans, imperial movements in spaces like the Philippines, and the subsequent boosts in immigration that threatened miscegenation, introduced the yellow peril; the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), framed as the first conquest of the “East” over the “Wast” cemented this perceived threat. The yellow peril rose to visual prominence in political cartoons around the country, and it was best presented in Hollywood through the Fu Manchu film series. 

MacMurray’s films do not reflect the hyperbole and outright aggression of visual culture such as museum exhibits and political cartoons. However, early twentieth century films such as Madame Butterfly (1915), The Forbidden City (1918), and Broken Blossoms (1919) constructed oriental visual shorthand. These tropes manifested through various oriental signifiers that project [30] fantasies of and about the American Pacific. These signifiers are typically inanimate objects scattered throughout the mise-en-scene that immediately trigger a connection with Asia. Hollywood leaned heavily into this imagery, adopting cherry blossoms, paper lanterns, kimonos, stone dragons, etc., often mixing cultural symbolism, to signify the orient. MacMurray’s films certainly echo these oriental signifiers, suggesting the ways in which he has acclimated and reciprocated the visual shorthand of contemporary popular culture. For example, in Peking Scenes, MacMurray frames his landscapes with cherry blossoms and emphasizes Peking citizens worshipping in temples. These two signifiers—temples and cherry blossoms—feature heavily throughout his footage. His emphasis on certain physical and natural landmarks reflects their ubiquity in popular visual culture, including film. 

Relatedly, MacMurray’s films closely mirror the visual styles presented in contemporary ethnographic cinema and travelogues, which emphasized “performance,… exotic mise-en-scene, and the spectacle of nudity.” [31] MacMurray captures all three in Philippines alone, but he trades in these tropes throughout his footage. With ethnographic cinema’s proliferation in American museums, and with the travelogue’s exhibition alongside popular commercial features, one can safely assume MacMurray’s familiarity with both. Whether consciously or not, MacMurray’s films are a product of the visual culture that he had assimilated over the course of his life, Americentric visual culture that orientalized Asian people, culture, and land.

Now, while it is important to discuss these critiques of MacMurray’s film, it is all too simple to dismiss them as prejudiced products of their time. MacMurray’s films are not weaponized like some forms of visual popular culture, many of them politically motivated to marginalize and attack Asian populations (e.g. minstrelsy); in fact, it is unclear that MacMurray intended any offense to China or its people. He displayed a fascination and admiration for country, particularly in the way he frames nature, as well as the living portraits of his staff taken in the Western Hills. The problem from such clips is that China, and the other countries to which he traveled, are framed as idyllic and unchanging: an Eden. By emphasizing the bucolic, MacMurray mischaracterizes the very fraught and dangerous reality of China during its civil war. In this way, MacMurray follows suit with travel writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Jack London, men who loved their adopted lands but didn’t acknowledge the impact their presence had on its people. In fact, in London’s writings of Hawai’i, he identified with the locals and disavowed his status as a foreigner. [32] In this way he (and MacMurray) claim the land. Queen Lili-uokalani of Hawai’i had a name for such people who self-othered to take imaginary possession of the islands—quasi-Americans. [33] MacMurray follows suit in his filming of China, Korea, and most especially, the Philippines. 

RECOUPING THE AMATEUR FILM

However, MacMurray’s films exist beyond his intentions; we, as unintended viewers, can derive meaning—and empowerment—from them, in addition to offering our critiques. Cinematic subjects can exist beyond the gaze of the filmmaker, projecting an agency, refusing the status of what Frantz Fanon coined “objecthood.” [34] While MacMurray’s subjects did not—as far as we know—craft their own films, they projected an agency through their own gaze, particularly within MacMurray’s street scenes. Throughout MacMurray’s travels, when he films the quotidian of the local population, the majority of the people gaze at his camera, most of them smiling. A likely reason for this is the novelty of the motion picture camera. As previously discussed, MacMurray was one of the first to adopt the transportable Cine-Kodak camera, which was only released by Eastman Kodak one year prior to his appointment to China. MacMurray’s camera, therefore, was likely the first that these people had seen of its kind, so it is no wonder they gazed in awe at its working. This gaze, however, implies their autonomy; they are not passive figures in MacMurray’s exotic narrative, but individuals that question and confront him with their stare. The most powerful images, however, are from the moments where locals seem disinterested, even bothered by MacMurray’s presence. 

One such moment is the clip that opened this chapter, the scene of the two men lunching from Trips in Hills. The same film includes another interesting moment of defiance. During the filming of one of many street scenes, MacMurray focuses on a street vendor’s cart, but the shot is blocked by several people. In the foreground, a man locks eyes with the camera, taking up nearly a quarter of the frame and refusing to move. He smiles, staring down the camera for the duration of the clip (~5 seconds). Behind this man, in the middle ground, another man laughs at the camera before ducking behind his friend. In the background, the vendor hides behind the pillar of his cart and also slowly exits the frame. Here are three different reactions to the presence of the camera: one person who embraces it, one who observes it warily, and one who rejects it. These three men autonomously determine their relationship with the camera. Their engagement with it reflects an interest in the mechanism, but also a refusal to be governed by it—or MacMurray. Just as MacMurray displays a desire and derision in recording these men, they reflect desire and derision in being recorded.

In returning to the categories of content previously described, MacMurray’s emphasis on animals and nature showcase his admiration for this region’s beauty, but it simultaneously obscures the identity of the people living off its land. Similarly MacMurray’s emphasis on events and transportation showcase his interest in local customs and the region’s technological progress, but it also creates hierarchies of difference that privileges the American experience. MacMurray’s filming of the local people showcases his othering of their culture despite his affinity towards it; but it is also important to acknowledge the moments of their individual power, as existing outside of and beyond his gaze. 

The goal in examining the content of MacMurray’s films is not to place a value on these films, but to explore their nuances. As Edward Said noted when analyzing Rudyard Kipling’s complicated relationship with India, it is both possible to celebrate an artist’s aesthetic achievements while also acknowledging their problematic ties to colonialism and subjugation. [35] MacMurray’s films have great historical importance that does not always place locals in a “displaced temporal realm.” [36] An ideal example of this is his documentation of the parade of Nationalist troops capturing Peking in 1928. And while MacMurray’s films essentialize local populations, revealing the problematic presence of the U.S. and its European allies overseas, they also give these people an opportunity for self-representation. These films are not one thing, so they should not be examined as such. 

CONCLUSION

In returning to the opening clip, the men who lunch show a defiance, an unwillingness to be recorded that resists the representations of Chinese people in American popular culture. Had MacMurray a more polished film style, equipped with editing, that allowed him to craft a narrative, he may have cut this scene, thus erasing the autonomy of these men. But that was not the case for MacMurray, nor for amateur travel filmmaking more largely. It is precisely the unpolished, spontaneous style of amateur filmmaking that allows for greater self-representation of the subjects filmed. 

MacMurray’s films highlight cultural difference, which was something common in contemporary visual culture including Hollywood features, ethnographic/educational films, travel photography, and postcards. Difference became commodified, and American consumers collected this difference in a desire to observe it, but a reluctance to actually engage with it. On one hand, MacMurray’s films assimilate and reproduce this narrative of difference that presents American culture as the norm and places his subjects in a separate temporal realm, unchanging and unprogressing.

However, while amateur travel films do engage in this popular visual discourse, by their very nature, they accomplish something different. Because they do not—for the most part—have a mature narrative, because they do not have a wide, intended distribution, they showcase the American Pacific in new ways. They showcase mundane, rote, everyday life and activities, and because there is very little editing (virtually no post-editing), they display a fullness in the lives of these people. This is important for (1) better historical understanding of the Quotidien, but also (2) because it grants greater autonomy and power to these people that have been distanced and marginalized in every other form of visual culture. This is what I mean by the mundane becoming cinematic—these quotidian activities are granted power by the very act of filming them, and they allow viewers to see people in ways that have not been constructed for them. Amateur travel films give agency to the historically marginalized, and as untapped objects of study, they are valuable resources for historical reflection.

Due to their relatively open access and low cost of production, amateur travel films are important documents that represent more inclusive, multi-voiced experiences of the past. [37] If commercial cinema presents a dominant view, amateur cinema presents alternative, even subversive, readings of it. MacMurray’s films are but one example of how amateur cinema broadens our understanding. 

Endnotes

1. Taxonomy employed by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman in Mining the Home Movie.
2. John R. Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (Hanover, New Hampshire: Hanover, New Hampshire : Dartmouth College Press : Published by University Press of New England, 2005), 4.
3. Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
4. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye : Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1996).
5.  Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams : Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham: Durham : Duke University Press, 2013).
6. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, xix.
7. Ibid., xx.
8. Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Modern Criticism and Theory:A Reader, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood, 2nd ed..(Harlow, U.K.: Harlow, U.K., 2000).
9. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other : How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, NY: New York, NY : Columbia University Press, 2014).
10. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, Film (New York: New York, Oxford University Press, 1960).
11. John Van Antwerp MacMurray, How the Peace Was Lost : The 1935 Memorandum, Developments Affecting American Policy in the Far East (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford, Calif. : Hoover Institution Press, 1992), 10.
12. Ibid, 27.
13. According to the digital archivist, Helene Van Rossum, the archives hold additional films produced by MacMurray, but it lacks the funding to digitize them. This throws into relief the problem of prioritization in archiving.  In general, amateur films are deemed less worthy of preservation, and some films are being privileged over others.
14. Present day Yantai.
15. Present day Zhangjiakou.
16. His films cover a trip to present day North Korea.
17. Richard Chalfen. Snapshot Versions of Life. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, 62.
18. Ibid, 64.
19. Justin Wolff, “Amateurism and American Visual Culture: An Introduction,” Panorama 5.1, no. Spring (2019).
20. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: New York : Schocken Books, 1976), 7.
21. Tom Selwyn, The Tourist Image : Myths and Myth Making in Tourism (Chichester: Chichester, 1996), 201.
22. Ibid.
23. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 227.
24. Paul A. Kramer. Blood of Government : Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
25. Helen van Rossum, “Trips to Southern China and the Philippines, 1926 and 1929,” The Reel Mudd (blog), n.d., https://blogs.princeton.edu/reelmudd/2010/08/watching-the-igorot-in-the-philippines-1926/.
26. Ibid.
27. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, 64.
28. Ibid. 67.
29. Robert G. Lee, Orientals : Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1999), 25.
30. Homay King, Lost in Translation : Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham, NC: Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2010).
31. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, xx.
32. Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary, 23.
33. Ibid, 23.
34. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New ed.. (London: London : Pluto Press, 2008), 121.
35. Edward Said, “Introduction,” in Kim, by Rudyard Kipling (Penguin Books, 1987).
36. Rony, The Third Eye, 8.
37. Nicholson, “Framing the View,” 116.