Jungle Bound: Angkor, Cambodia
by Travel Film Archive & Deane H. Dickason
A smart compilation of Angkor daily life and artistic activities in the late 1930s.
Published: 1936
Authors: Travel Film Archive & Deane H. Dickason
Language : English
Fascinating document, this footage of Angkor Wat by globe-trotter Deane H. Dickason — author of the infamous Virgins of Bali (1932) — shows how integrated to the Cambodian daily life the Ancient Khmer Temples were back then.
Cambodian boxing, court dances, Buddhist ceremonies are taking place on causeways or inside the temples.
Note how all original music has been suppressed, replaced with some pseudo “oriental” musak.
Watch Deane Dickason’s documentary films on TravelFilm.
Tags: history, music, Angkor Wat, 1930s, martial arts
About the Authors
Travel Film Archive
A suscription list of historic travel-related documentaries.
Deane H. Dickason
Deane H. Dickason (23 June 1898, Granada, Colorado, USA — 12 Nov 1953, Hong Kong, China) was a movie producer, director and actor, known for Castilian Memories: Manila (1934), the hugely controversial Virgins of Bali (1932), In Maori Land (1936) and Down Singapore Way (1946).
Starring Balinese teenage girls Ni Wayan Tagai and Ni Wayan Ubamgo, Virgins of Bali — labeled as a “Love Lyrical Adventure on the Island of Bali — has been deemed as ‘quasi pornographic’ and ‘an early sexploitation film’. At that same time, Charlie Chaplin filmed bare-breasted girls in Bali. The vogue for “exoticized, eroticized” Balinese dances in the 1930s was part of what triggered anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson to spend two years in the island.
Married to Sarah Crawford Rorer (1907−1986) and then to Mary Monica Walsh (1910−1993), Dickason was an avid traveler. He filmed and narrated ‘Jungle Bound’: Angkor, Cambodia in 1936, and published a smart guidebook, Wondrous Angkor, the following year.
