16mm prints courtesy of John Cannizarro

During the 1960s and 1970s, amateur ethnographer Hermann Schlenker made a slew of exceptional non-narrated ethnographic films documenting material culture and social customs in far-flung places like Afghanistan, Melanesia, and the Upper Amazon.  These rare films, originally released in the US for the educational market, have not been screened publicly for years and are not present in the current canon of ethnographic film.