Dangerous Journey (1944) (Patreon)

To prepare for a 2019 presentation I gave for Death Party Philadelphia on the extraordinary life (and death) of Fakir Musafar (1) I opened my thirty-plus year old copy of the seminal RE/SEARCH #12: Modern Primitives and re-read, probably for the first time in two decades, what may be Vale and Juno’s most (body modification culture) nodally significant interview.

Despite having been released over a decade after Fakir’s official ‘coming out’ at the 1977 Reno tattoo convention, Modern Primitives put Fakir, and his doctrine of body play, onto the shelves of chain bookstores, and more importantly, the hands of an audience who may have otherwise never found him.

On the second page of the interview, Fakir brings up a seemingly lost film he saw as a teenager, Dangerous Journey:

(Excerpt from Modern Primitives, interview by Juno/Vale)

Fakir Musafar: Theaters used to regularly show travelogue movies. One that influenced me a lot was called Dangerous Journey. I’ve had people in New York, Hollywood, and at the Smithsonian Institute hunting archives and vaults for a print of that movie. But I think they’ve all been destroyed!

Vale: What was it about?

F: The daughter of Theodore Roosevelt (2) and a man named Armand Denis went on "The Denis/Roosevelt Expedition" just prior to WWII. They photographed the most bizarre body practices in the world and put them all together in one movie. It was released in 1946. It was a shocker, believe me! It contained some of the best footage of African women getting scarification; women getting giraffe necks (who start at the age of 6 or 7); kavndi (3) bearing in India- it's a fantastic film.

It struck me then that travelogue films were, in their own way, analogous to Modern Primitives in that they took material that was generally only available in an academic context and presented it to a mainstream audience. Travelogue (a term coined in 1904 by Burton Holmes) films allowed the viewer to be transported to cultures, communities, and locations that were out of reach to the average movie-goer in their heyday, and like National Geographic probably found three different audience mindsets:

I can’t tell you why 100,000 people will look at National Geographic, you know, 70% of them might look at it and go, “oh, that’s really interesting” you know, 25% might look at it and go, “that’s disgusting!” But you’ll have that one or two percent in there somewhere like, “that’s really fucking cool, I’m gonna try it!” -Paul King

Travelogue films, like their less legitimate cousin the Mondo movie, are, at times, tough to watch. They were generally made by and for white American and European audiences of the 1930s-1950s; at best they exoticise the Indigenous cultures they document, at worst exploit and denigrate the peoples and practices on which the films were sold. 

They can also, like Dangerous Journey, provide early one-of-a-kind documentation of rites and rituals of vanishing cultures, and viewing them with context in place may still induce a cringe, but also a greater understanding of the time and place that these practices were performed in. 

My search for a copy of the film Fakir couldn’t find initially only turned up a few blurry VHS rips on Youtube, but a deeper search found a pristine restoration on the British Film Institute’s site. I was lucky to have a friend in the UK who was able to get a copy for me, but if you're interested in streaming it  you may need to be in the UK (or have your VPN set to the UK)) when you go to this link: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-dangerous-journey-1944-online

VIP Patreons- shoot me a message if you have trouble viewing it. I may be able to help you out.

Footnotes:

1. Beyond the Suffering of the Body Awaits Bliss, August 26th 2019.
2. Lelia was related to Theodore Roosevelt, but was not his daughter. Her father was adventurer/filmmaker Cornelius Roosevelt, a cousin of Theodore’s, making Teddy her first cousin once removed. Lelia is credited as co-producer and co-director of Dangerous Journey, and writer/producer of Magie africaine (aka Dark Rapture, 1938).
3. The proper term is Kavadi, not Kavandi. Kavadi Aattam (Burden Dance). Bearing the burden (kavadi) can be done without piercing; devotees take a pilgrimage on a set route while engaging in acts of devotion that can be as simple as carrying a pot of milk (pal kavadi) or wearing a full portable altar attached to the devotee with 108 rods pierced into the skin. (vel kavadi) of the chest and back.