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A little about Watson…

Watson Kintner was not an anthropologist, archaeologist, or ethnographer. He had no cultural or geographically-specific area of study or interest. He had no formal or even informal training in ethnographic research, photography, or film. He seemingly spoke no other language than English.

Kintner was an employee of RCA and was a part of the team that led to the standardization of the power vacuum tube known as the 6L6 found common in amplifiers and radios. By no means the inventor or a resulting multi-millionare of industry, Kintner was thrust into affluence enough so that he was able to spend a great deal of time in the second half of his life traveling to places in the world largely unseen by western technology in a time when only anthropologists from the west were likely to have access to, knowledge of, or interests in visiting.

It is because of this need for anthropological and aercheological assistance getting to these places and getting around these places that Kintner’s association with Penn moved from Chemical Engineering to the Penn Museum.  It is seemingly because of his employment with RCA that Kintner was one of the first dozen or so people in the US to own the new fangled Kodak 8mm motion picture cameras.

Although he was an amateur is nearly everything he is remembered for – his name is but a footnote to a footnote to an endnote in the tomes of the history of radio, RCA, and the vacuum tube – his films represent some of the most interesting and rarest mediated looks at non-western culture prior to worldwide mediation.

The camera was his only recurrently present companion in travel. Beginning in 1933, at the age of 43, and continuing until he was 79, Kintner traveled throughout Mexico in the 30s; Guatemala, Ecuador and present day Guyana in the latter half of the 40s; and in the 1950s traveled to Morocco, Nigeria, and East Africa: Pakistan, Indonesia, Kashmir, Nepal, India, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. For his final decade of travel, the 1960s, Kintner traveled through Australia and the South Pacific, Iran, Japan, Afghanistan, Chad, Turkey, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Jordan, and Istanbul.

In the last ten years of his life, Kintner retired to a simple life but continued to host weekend symposiums at the University of Pennsylvania Museum on the value of photographic and movie-aided ethnography. Kintner did not share his wisdom with the students. He was, afterall only a Chemical Engineer. No, he himself, ever the humble amateur, did nothing but lend his name and money to these conferences preferring to hand the reins over to trained photographers from Life Magazine.

Watson Kintner is a forgotten, yet stereotypical cog of the twentieth-century American dream machine. He rose to a position of privilege and prominence working on the vacuum tube and gained wealth early enough in his life to enjoy it. Armed with one of the first commercially available 8mm cameras, Kintner traveled a seemingly endless journey throughout the world between the 1930s and 1960s. His films present a vision of the early-twentieth century, pre-mass-mediated nonwestern world from a Westerner’s perspective, his take on international cultural interaction, early air and automobile travel, and luxury sea travel without parallel. Though these are amateur films in the sense that Kintner was not a trained cameraman and seemingly had no commercial intention for his films, the films are not simply “home movies.” Kintner’s camera is poised as a documentarian would poise a camera in search of footage.

Kintner passed away in 1979, unmarried – like his only sister Floy. Without Kintner himself to preserve the importance of Kintner, he was forgotten. It wasn’t until 2004 that I happened upon the films and convinced senior archivist Alessandro Pezzatti at the Penn Museum to find me some money (since I was a Master’s degree recipient with no clear job prospect) in order to pay me, that the films had been watched, cataloged, and, dare I say, appreciated. We cowrote a naively ambitious $300,000 preservation and access grant to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Despite convincing two different Museum administrations of its importance and gaining the well wishes of several film preservationists, we were rejected.

This documentary is a journey of discovery, by Mr. Kintner, by others, and by me.