G. J. Cons believed that ‘any director of geographical films […] needs to have an appreciation of the content and scope of human geography’. However, in A Foot-Hill Town, his account of the human geography of Darjeeling is circumscribed. While the film outlines something of the ethnic mix of Darjeeling and of the trades that are carried out in the area, there is very little contextualisation of the distinct political and cultural factors that drew people to this hill station. 

These omissions can be attributed to Cons’ own biases. He believed that ‘it is the adjustment of human groups to their environment that needs portraying’ and that ‘it is man in action in the region that defines the angle of vision for the selection of the sequences’ (Cons, 1935, 78). A Foot-hill Town attempts to bear out these beliefs. The film begins with the use of maps, which illustrate Darjeeling’s location in the sub-continent. The viewer is then brought towards the town in sequences that illustrate the journey along the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. Tea clippers are shown at work and the commentary states that the ‘moist warm air is suited for growing tea bushes’. There is also a useful panning movement that illustrates first the workers and then their geographical location among the clouds that gather in the mountains. The maps are regularly returned to; they effectively illustrate the fact that Darjeeling is a narrowly shaped town, built along a ridge in the Himalayas.

‘Man in action’ provides the main subject of the film. Here it is notable that A Foot-hill Town concentrates most fully on Darjeeling’s Asian population. The most extensive sequence is filmed in the town’s bazaar and features a variety of people buying and selling wares. The viewer is informed that ‘you can buy everything the Indian housewife wants’, and is duly shown the sale of earthenware, jewellery and the making of betel nuts, which ‘all Indians love to chew’. The film offers a deliberate ethnographical study of the various groups using the market, and the viewer is instructed to ‘notice the different kinds of clothes you can see among the people in the street and the different kinds of faces’. Singled out are ‘beggar women from Tibet’, ‘girls from Nepal’ and ‘Europeans who have taken to Indian life and clothes’ (here there is footage of a white couple who are dressed in robes).

Elsewhere there is less commonality between the Europeans and the Asians. In a contemporary Darjeeling guidebook travellers were informed that ‘The dandy-bearers and rickshawmen are either Bhutias or Lepchas’, and warned that ‘They are a dirty, impudent, extortionate set as a rule, but even so, like most hill-men, are “always merry and bright”’ (Newman’s Guide to Darjeeling and Neighbourhood, 193-, 48-49). In this film there is footage of these rickshaw-bearers at work, hauling two English visitors up the steep slopes towards Observatory Hill. To the accompaniment of overdubbed sounds the commentator states that the coolies ‘grunt and groan’, largely in the hope that they will get ‘a good tip’.

It is perhaps this focus on ‘man in action’ that encourages the film to downplay Darjeeling’s political role. There is footage of Government House (in which rickshaw bearers are also in evidence), but it takes up a brief amount of screen time. While it was being filmed it appears to have been unoccupied: the commentator states that this British-styled residence is the place ‘to which the Governor of Bengal comes in summer, when it is very hot in the plains around Calcutta’. There is no footage of the Governor himself, and in contrast to the footage of the bazaar these scenes are largely depopulated.

Some of the omissions in A Foot-Hill Town can be attributed to the material that was to hand. G. J. Cons believed that in the filming of a region ‘its most significant rhythms, daily and seasonal, must be carefully selected and then arranged in an appropriate time sequence to give unity’ (1935, 79). In this documentary, however, he was let down by the footage that was available. Although the film was re-edited to give a sense of journeying from the base of the foot-hill towards its peak, it has no temporal rhythm and there is little balance between its scenes. The Monthly Film Bulletin criticised the film on the grounds that the scenes of tea clipping ‘did not remain on the screen long enough’ and that ‘more of the geography of the surrounding country could have been shown’ (MFB, 1 December 1937, 262).

The journal is not critical of one of the film’s other omissions: using Cons’ own words, there is ‘no attempt to explain the causes of the phenomena depicted’ (1935, 79). Here, however, it should be borne in mind that the film was designed for viewing in the classroom, and that the same critique could equally be applied to films in the same genres with non-colonial subjects. Con believed that if contextualisation were needed, ‘it can be left to the teacher and the text-book’ (1935, 79).

Richard Osborne (October 2009)