From Objects to Actors: Knud Rasmussen’s Ethnographic Feature Film The Wedding of Palo

• Main Author: Volquardsen, Ebbe
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 2015
• Subjects: Greenland; Rasmussen; greenlandic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694174.003.0016

This chapter examines one of Denmark’s best-known ethnographic fiction feature films, Knud Rasmussen’s The Wedding of Palo (1934), directed by Friedrich Dalsheim, and shot in Western Greenland. While in many ways a documentary in the salvage ethnography tradition of the first part of the twentieth century, and sharing many similarities with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Volquardsen examines the significance of this film for the contested geopolitical status of Greenland in the early 1930s. Foregrounding the venerable status of Knud Rasmussen as an explorer and ethnographer in Danish history, this chapter shows how the film continues to be both cherished and mocked as a thwarted historical document for the Greenlandic population. The legacy of this film, showcasing seal-hunts, kayaking tricks, and domestic and cultural traditions (including drum-dancing), has remained significant and occupies a complex position in Denmark-Greenland cultural relations.