In popular memory, the classical Hollywood travelogue is a photo album excursion through safely exotic ports of call where undulating dancers in native costume grinned and cringed before overfed, guffawing tourists. A serviceable short subject wedged between Merrie Melody and 'A' picture in the 1930s

and 1940s, it blended static newsreel photography with the probing ethnographical insights of a Baedeker guide, alternating pallid pans of overexposed horizons with voice-over disinformation enunciated in a zesty baritone ("As the sun sets into the azure Atlantic, we bid a fond farewell to the cheerful people of sunny Montserrat, jewel of the Caribbean...").

So degenerate a breed sprang from a proud lineage: the exploration film. Once a featured and favored motion picture attraction, the exploration film was a true voyage of discovery, no packaged tour but an adventure in cinema. By way of commemoration and commerce, Milestone Film and Video, an enterprising New York distributor, has assembled a series of eight exemplars of the genre dating from the silent and early sound era. Reasonably priced at $39.95 a pop, less if bought in fourpacks, the collection spans the globe and stretches the boundaries of nonfiction cinema. John Grierson's oft-cited pronouncement on documentary as "the creative treatment of actuality" well fits the exploration film if the balance favors the "creative" over the "actuality"--or, in modern terms, the "drama" over the "docu."

Though several notches above the mean average in quality, the Milestone collection is a good sampling of the range and perspective of an obsolete genre. Some items are fairly clear magnifying glasses on native culture, almost scholarly in their impulse for thick description and interior access. Others are working definitions of cultural myopia in their refusal to apprehend the folks in the frame, documents which reveal more about America in the 1920s than their putative subjects. All have the fascination of a rear window peek at lost worlds, relatively untouched civilizations, and untrammeled locations, when the motion picture medium could capture glimpses of cultures that were dying--or already dead--even as the cameras were rolling. The spectator's sense of outrage at the violations and exploitations of the exploration films (moments that are to wince at abound) is liable to be softened by a gratitude that the moments were preserved at all.

Besides, in subject matter if not in outlook, the films are models of multicultural global inclusiveness. A fashionable roll call of indigenous peoples (Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Pacific Islanders) and environmentally privileged landscapes (jungles, forests, and pristine icebergs) checks off a veritable rainbow coalition of ethnic and earthly exotica. On the most obvious level, the infatuation with vistas beyond national shores is a transparent projection of American frontier vision onto new worlds in an age of territorial limitations. On another, it is an intimation of cultural uncertainty, a gnawing realization that the West is not the only place to look, the only way to be.

The dominant figure in the exploration film is not the happy native or fearsome tribesman, but what might be called the promethean cameraman--the bold photographer who ventures into unknown interiors, plucks precious images of primitive peoples and man-eating animals at risk of life and limb, and returns to the western world to project his treasure. Glimpses of the cameraman in the act of photography appear incessantly--if not framed on screen in an intrepid pose than as a felt off-screen presence. He (and in one fascinating case she) serves as diegetic witness and audience surrogate, never letting fainthearted spectators, secure in their seats, forget the dangers and deprivations withstood in service to cinema and entertainment.

No camerapeople were more promethean or self-promoting than the husband and wife team of Martin and Osa Johnson. Almost forgotten today, the Johnsons were a tagteam duo of motion picture imperialists who from 1910 until Martin's death in 1937 traveled the world in search of exhilarating images. A pioneering power couple of the day, they produced a steady stream of shorts and full-length features, gaining enough notoriety to become regulars in the gossip columns and the heroes of a syndicated comic strip that chronicled their exploits. Sixteen-year-old Osa met Martin in 1909 when he passed through her bleak Kansas hometown to present a slide show of his "Trip Through the South Seas with Jack London." Smitten with the rakish adventurer and, one presumes, aching for a ticket out of the plains, she married him six weeks later. Osa became more than a full partner: it is she who holds the gun while Martin angles to get a shot of a charging elephant or yawning lion. The very model of the emancipated Twenties woman, Osa was attractive, able, and energetic, in her way as appealing a feminist soldier of fortune as Amelia Earhart. The recent reprinting of Osa Johnson's autobiography, I Married Adventure, and the publication of Pascal James Imperato and Eleanor M. Imperato's They Married Adventure, a full length study of the Johnsons' oeuvre, makes her ripe for feminist rediscovery. Were she not so retrograde in her attitudes toward what were not then called Third World peoples (whom she disdains) and animal companions (whom she shoots), she'd have been resurrected for role model duty long ago.

The Johnsons' most popular film was Simba (1927), a screen safari complete with faithful native bearers and great white hunters. Released with ripe ballyhoo and racist posters ("Naked Lumbwa Soldiers give battle to raging lions in the open veldt while Martin Johnson grinds the camera!"), it grossed a reported $2.5 million. The film is supposed to be about the search for big game--'simba' means 'lion'--but the real subjects are the Johnsons themselves. To call their view of Africa 'ethnocentric' would be to enlarge the scope of their vision: they filter the continent and its inhabitants through the private lens of their personal experience and ongoing enterprise--namely, the making of a film called Simba. The few close-ups they bestow upon tribal Africans are invasive and aggressive. In one vignette, the camera stares fixedly at a Samburu maiden who seems to flinch under its scrutiny, though she cannot know the humiliations tacked on in postproduction: "Just a little black flapper," chirps an intertitle. Only when the alien is really one of them do the Johnsons name the human and invite him into segregated screen space. None other than George Eastman ("also on safari") drops by for a cameo appearance--Kodak camera in hand, doubtless with some extra film to borrow.

Though the photography is crisp and the line of sight unobstructed, neither Martin nor Osa possessed a sense of visual storytelling or an instinctive talent for narrative drive. For all the undeniably great footage they capture, the couple refuse to let the pictures speak for themselves. A recurrent annoyance is their compulsive use of intertitles for cutesy commentary, a verbal tic that disrupts what should be riveting sequences of natural action. When a herd of charging elephants bears down on Martin, Osa, and an African cameraman in their employ, incessant smart aleck asides sabotage the momentum of the stampede and any sense of imminent danger. (So intertitle-laden is Simba that one feels like yelling "Shut up!" at the silent movie.) Still, there's no denying that the Johnsons corner the game in a series of thrilling time capsule revelations. "Fourteen lions! Count them! Here was a scene without parallel in the history of animal photography," an intertitle brags, before an at-the-creation screen moment that proves them as good as their word. Native Americans got appreciably more respect than native Africans, on the exploration screen anyway. Photographer Edward S. Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes (originally called In the Land of the Headhunters, a title with more contemporaneous marquee but less contemporary PC value) is the earliest and shortest entry in the Milestone series. It is also a sensitive template for the ethnography of the American Indian and the archaeology of early cinema. An obscure tale of intertribal conflict among the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island (and, yes, there is a girl involved) provides the barest of narrative underpinning for a display of ritual folkways, notably some breathtaking images of the Indians, in full war dress and ceremonial costume, gliding across the Pacific in huge canoes. To give 'approach,' Curtis planted his camera smack in the stern of the war canoes for some woozy headhunter point of view shots. On the debit side, however, the restoration is marred by cheesy sound effects, soundtrack dialog and chants, narrative ellipses, blurry video intertitles, and (more understandably) deterioration of the original nitrate print. Ojibwa Indian life "long before Columbus" sets the scene for H. P. Carver's The Silent Enemy (1930). The title refers to hunger, surely an elemental problem but it makes a really dumb name for a film released in the midst of the sound revolution and which showcases one of its stars, Chief Yellow Robe, in a synchronous sound prologue. Silhouetted against a black background and tinted yellow (naturally), the Chief testifies to the film's verisimilitude ("Everything you see is as it always has been--our buckskin clothes, our birch bark canoes, our wigwams, and our bows and arrows.") and offers exculpation for spectator-colonizers in the local Bijou ("Your civilization will destroy us, but by your magic we shall live forever. We thank the white man who help us to make this picture.") Seeing and hearing the aged warrior, whose life span stretches back across time to the Indian wars of the post-Civil War era, is a spooky, guilt-inducing experience. The visuals are splendid and, like Curtis, Carver positions his camera in a canoe for a series of better-than-steadicam travel shots down some cascading rapids. Unfortunately, the fabricated narrative--another tribal triangle involving deceitful shaman, virile warrior, and beautiful maiden--evokes the ballad of Running Bear and Little White Dove. To their credit, however, neither the Curtis nor the Carver film paints the native American as all noble savage, dancing with wolves and dripping with spirituality. Finally, and tellingly, no white eye intrudes into either The Silent Enemy or In the Land of the War Canoes; the appearance of a cowboy or cavalry uniform would shatter the suspension of disbelief by jerking the spectator away from diverting myth and into unsavory history. Worlds away, the frozen wastes of the North and South Poles exerted a magnetic pull that was as philosophical as geographical--as if, with cartography and exploration having reached their global limits, all that remained to contemplate was a blank, existential void. Two of the Milestone films--With Byrd at the South Pole and Herbert G. Ponting's 90 |degrees~ South--are located in Antarctica. In the former, Paramount newsreel cameramen Joseph Rucker and Willard Van der Veer spent a year with Robert Byrd's mission to fly over the South Pole, the time commitment alone displaying a measure of journalistic dedication unimaginable in a wired, instantly uplinked CNN world. Though generally no-nonsense and informative, With Byrd at the South Pole confirms a consistent trait of the exploration genre. Its vignettes of human (and canine) interest linger in the mind longer than the hard news story of Byrd's epochal flight. The film's most memorable moment is the execution of an aged husky, whom one of Byrd's men--which one is discreetly left unrevealed--is forced to shoot rather than abandon to the frozen wastes.

Ponting's 90 |degrees~ South is a documentary record of Capt. Robert Scott's disastrous expedition to the South Pole in 1910. This is the third time around for Ponting's priceless footage, it being the sound version of material released episodically in 1911-1912 and later compiled for a silent version in 1924, The Great White Silence. For a motion picture made near the dawn of cinema and under appalling conditions, the quality of the film grain is astonishingly sharp and well-preserved. While Americans treated documentaries as dated and disposable consumer items, the British early on recognized the film medium as a national heritage and held their footage in proper custodial care. In fact, Ponting's celluloid hagiography was an integral part of the mythmaking machinery that installed Captain Scott as a dauntless hero for generations of British schoolboys rather than as the reckless dolt he was.

Ponting himself narrates 90 |degrees~ South and appears at the beginning, in a specially filmed sound sequence, addressing the camera straight-on and stiffly. At first glance, he evokes the kind of addled upper crust clubman who might barge into a Monty Python sketch, but Ponting's British constancy and raw affection for the men, his misty recollection of a peak experience twenty years after the fact is cumulatively affecting. Still green in memory, the men of the expedition--and their horses and dogs, whom he names and bestows close-ups on--appear like apparitions before him on the screen. Integrated into the moving imagery, Ponting's still photography is starkly beautiful and eerily appropriate for a horizon that itself seems inert and expressionless. One image makes for cold foreshadowing. Watching over the men from atop a mountain overlooking their base camp, a cross marks the burial site of a fallen explorer, a symbol more warning than solace. When Ponting shows a brief shot of himself, fighting frostbite while cranking his motion picture camera, he's earned his moment in the sun, another Prometheus taking fire from the ice. The intrepid team of Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper are represented by their two best-known documentaries, Grass (1925) and Chang (1928). Grass follows the mass migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari tribe over treacherous mountain ranges and raging rivers into a verdant pasture in Iran. The opening shot is a stunner: against a perfect equilibrium of sky and earth, an endless column of humans and animals bisects the screen. Like its subject, Grass is rough going, even with "lady journalist" Marguerite Harrison along for fish-out-of-water juxtapositions and female appeal. Chang is more of a crowd pleaser in its deployment of what was already the exploration film convention of westernizing the natives and anthropomorphizing the animals. The film pretends to depict a typical season in the life of a Thai family, a group transformed straightaway into a proto-American nuclear unit who just happen to reside in grass huts in the jungle. The familial antics and much of the wildlife footage is transparently staged--sometimes spectacularly so, as during a climatic elephant roundup that features a jumbo cast of hundreds. At RKO in the next decade, Schoedsack and Cooper would cull their personal backstories for an epic tale of an explorer-impresario who brings back the eighth wonder of the world in King Kong (1933).

The fate of the mighty Kong befell a goodly number of the featured creatures in the exploration films, which as a genre racked up an astronomically high animal body count. A procession of future endangered species--rhinos, elephants, hippopotami, tigers, lions, mountain goats, and bears--are shot and speared for the delectation of the folks back home. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but the animal slaughter here is a staged sacrifice for the benefit of the spectator, a kind of 'money shot' ensuring something real is being recorded--death. Sometimes, by way of justification, the promethean cameraman is portrayed as under threat of attack from the big game. Via first person point of view shots, lions lunge into frame and elephants charge the camera. Even so, the modern spectator may well be rooting for the beasts to devour the photographer. Aiming to soften the violence of a Westside posture that looks on the rest of the planet as a free-fire zone, Milestone's newly restored prints are creatively scored with the soothing sounds of an indigenously correct musical soundtrack. Chang has a Thai-flavored music background, Simba is accompanied by African instruments, In the Land of the War Canoes mixes in drums and chants, and so on. Among silent cinema purists the reigning esthetic of restoration holds that the original scores must remain inviolate in order to recover faithfully the original experience of the lost medium. Yet insisting on a fidelity to a standard that was never normative in the first place--silent film pianists and orchestras always improvised--seems dimwitted if a new track can upgrade the experience. Of course, whatever the melody, it should enhance the image, not merely accompany it. The tonalities of the Milestone soundtracks have a tendency to nod out and drone on. A whimsical interlude in Grass, for example, begs for a musical motif of sprightly effervescence, while the dreary buzz of the Iranian score plays oblivious to the action on screen. Perversely, the biggest disappointment in the collection is the most famed entry, F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty's ill-fated collaboration Tabu (1931), a Polynesian excursion by way of German expressionism and Irish romanticism. Hollywood's colonization of the mind apparently works retroactively because throughout this tale of forbidden love, conceived by two of the cinema's greatest artists and beautifully shot by Floyd Crosby, the spirit of Dorothy Lamour peeks out from behind the palms. Speaking of Flaherty: one can't help but come away from the Milestone collection with a renewed appreciation for the decade's most famous spectacle on ice, Nanook of the North (1922), the classic tribute to an Inuit hunter and his family. Flaherty's gorgeous framing of, and open respect for, his subjects-cum-partners is even more remarkable when set against the blinders worn by his contemporaries.

Despite all the condescension and callousness, however, the exploration genre expressed an eager curiosity about alternative worlds and primitive lives. Read the opening intertitle to Grass--"The way of the world is West"--as a rank misdirection. After all, the great age of exploration films coincided with the great rage for Jungian psychology and Boazian anthropology, a time sympathetic to notions like the psychic unity of mankind and the cultural relativism of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934). In the wake of the carnage of the Great War few westerners could speak with a straight face about the intrinsic superiority of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian civilization. Doubtless, too, for alienated denizens of the modern metropolis, a daily battle with something as tangible as the elements must have had an almost nostalgic appeal. If few Americans questioned a natural order that placed Euro-Caucasians at the top of a racial taxonomy, the heralded 'decline of the West' predisposed others to attend warily to the state of the competition, even to embrace tentatively their remote kinship with strange folk in distant lands. A heritage at once cinematic and cultural, the exploration film chronicled worlds and peoples whose time was literally running out, not unspoiled, surely not unmediated, but close enough to the original for western eyes of discovery to see more than their own reflection. H.P. Carver's The Silent Enemy: An Epic of the American Indian (1930)

Edward S. Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes: A Drama of Kwakiutl Life in the Northwest (1914)

Martin and Osa Johnson's Simba: The King of Beasts, A Saga of the African Veldt (1928)

F.W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty's Tabu (1931)

Herbert G. Ponting's 90 |degrees~ South: With Scott to the Antarctic (1933)

Joseph Rucker and Willard Van der Veer's With Byrd at the South Pole: The Story of Little America (1930)

Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper's Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)

Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper's Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925)