The Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2015
“Kenneth Turan’s DVD Pick: Silent Movies”
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and In the Land of the Head Hunters are Kenneth Turan's DVD picks of the week.
DVDBEAVER.COM, February 16, 2015
"BOTTOM LINE:
The audience here is, obviously, limited, but having watched the the two films completely and the extras I can endorse the value present. Film students will find this as fascinating as I did once you start digging into the impressive results of this huge project. The Milestone Blu-raylooks to have been a real labor of love and I can't imagine the package being much more complete. Those keen should already have ordered! "
Indian Country Today, February 19, 2015
Christina Rose, “Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: 100 Years Later, Edward Curtis' Movie Plays Again”
“According to William Cranmer, hereditary chief and chairman of the U'mista Cultural Society in Alert Bay, Canada, ‘Many of our old relatives were part of the film and when we saw them as teenagers, that was great for us. We appreciated that the story was told in the way things happened in those early days. We saw the canoes as they were expertly paddled by the people of the day. We saw the way they used the designs on the house fronts and the history of those designs. There is a lot of information that is useful for us today. If Mr. Curtis hadn’t made that film, we wouldn’t see it.’”
New York Times, February 19, 2015
J. Hoberman, “‘In the Land of the Head Hunters,’ a Recreated Artifact of Ancient Ways”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/movies/homevideo/in-the-land-of-the-head-hunters-a-recreated-artifact-of-ancient-ways.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1
"This, too, is a heroic tale. As Curtis used motion pictures to help preserve Kwakwaka’wakw life, so a tribe of archivists and historians applied their skills to approximate his approximation. His ambitious “salvage anthropology” has itself been salvaged."
Fulvue Drive-In, February 21, 2015
"This already makes it one of the best Blu-ray releases of the year, on the level of any Criterion or limited edition/exclusive release. This is one of those films so important, you have likely seen some clip from it and not even known it. Now, you should see it all."
Movie Metropolis, February 21, 2015
“In The Land Of The Head Hunters” is definitely not a documentary (it is set well in the past, for one thing) and some of its representations of Kwakwaka’wakw traditions are inevitably the product of Curtis's vision and cultural biases rather than fully faithful recreations. Regardless, these moving images are still an invaluable record of a place and a people seldom represented on film and, just as importantly, of individuals now long gone." -- Christopher Long
