DbcultAccessing Vault...
Cult Review
Archivist John
Senior Editor
Imagine, for a moment, that cartographers once drew sea-monsters at the edge of parchment to warn sailors away from existential vertigo. The Footsteps of Capt. Kidd does something eerier: it erases the monsters yet keeps the vertigo, projecting it frame by tremulous frame onto every leaf and cheekbone that Dr. Edward A. Salisbury’s expedition stumbles across. This is not your grandfather’s safari reel; it is a phantasmagoric ledger of hunger—hunger for gold, for footage, for the right to narrate a continent that had already heard too many cock-and-bull stories before the first crank camera ever whirred.
Shot on location through the mosquito-drunk hinterlands of 1926, the film marries the observational DNA of Robert Flaherty to the feverish mythopoeia of a Treasure Island fever dream. There are no sound-stages, no matte paintings—only the sweat-beaded sincerity of actual canoes sliding past actual bromeliads, while the ghost of William Kidd chuckles somewhere beneath the roots of ceiba trees. Salisbury, equal parts ethnographer and ringmaster, understood that audiences no longer craved mere documentation; they wanted the perfume of risk, the narcotic hush that maybe—just maybe—those chests of indio gold were still cooling their heels beneath volcanic ash.
Hence the film’s hypnotic duality: it is both field report and incantation. One instant you’re scrutinizing Quechua children bartering plantains, the next you’re pitched headlong into a nocturnal cave sequence lit by a single magnesium flare that turns the limestone into cathedral glass. The tonal whiplash is intentional; Salisbury wants you off balance, unsure whether you’re watching science or séance. Compared to the studio-bound escapism of The Christian, Kidd’s footsteps feel like someone drilled a hole in the screen and let the jungle leak through.
Let’s talk hue, because this picture breathes chromatically. The surviving 35 mm tinting is a bruised kaleidoscope: amber for equatorial noon, cyan for moonlit river, rose for the flirtatious blink of a barmaid’s skirt in a coastal cantina. These colors do not decorate—they infect. They creep into your subconscious until you swear you smell guava rot when the screen burns ochre. Contemporary critics of the time dismissed tinted stock as “cheap ornament,” yet here it functions like the variegated scales on a snake: warning, seduction, camouflage. When a Catholic procession emerges, candles haloed in citrine, the sequence feels less like piety and more like a contractual negotiation between conquistador ghosts and the living bodies that still carry their epigenetic shame.
Contrast this chromatic bravado with the monochrome austerity of Evidence, another 1926 release obsessed with crime and absence. Where Evidence withholds, Kidd saturates; where Evidence whispers, Kidd erupts into phosphorescent sneezes of coral and jade. The dialectic is instructive: both films stalk the same thematic quarry—how to reconstruct an event whose factual debris has long since composted—but they elect opposite forensic strategies.
Postcolonial theory loves to scold expedition cinema for “othering” its subjects, yet Salisbury’s gaze is more self-lacerating than conquering. Yes, the camera ogles bare torsos and markets teeming with parrots, but it also swivels back to capture the expedition members—sun-flayed, bug-bitten, lenses fogged—looking suspiciously like the defective avatars of empire. In one unguarded moment, the cinematographer’s shadow falls across a petroglyph shaped like a hanged man; the inadvertent superimposition lands like an admission that the true curse is not Kidd’s bullion but the very act of extraction—of ore, of imagery, of narrative.
Viewers primed for the orientalist pageantry of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine will find themselves disarmed: Kidd refuses the safety of geographical distance. The Americas here are not a sublime backdrop; they are a contested text whose footnotes keep biting the scholars composing them.
Words in silent cinema often behave like drill sergeants—barking exposition, corralling ambivalence. Not here. Salisbury’s intertitles arrive sodden with brine and rum, sometimes rhyming, occasionally lying. One card reads: “The map lied; the river rewrote itself nightly; we followed the grammar of turtles.” Such poetic sleight-of-hand collapses the boundary between diegetic journal and audience hallucination. You begin to distrust the very words meant to orient you, which paradoxically duplicates the expedition’s epistemological vertigo. It’s as if Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness got re-scripted by a drunken bard who insists on singing the footnotes.
Editing rhythms oscillate between languor and arterial spurt. Watch how Salisbury lets a shot of spider monkeys linger until boredom borders on the spiritual, then—whiplash—cuts to a machete splitting a cacao pod in macroscopic detail, milk-white pulp spraying toward the lens like pirate coin. This dialectic of stillness and violence cues the viewer to sense history as a series of ruptures masquerading as continuity. Soviet montage theorists would swoon; yet the calculus isn’t propagandistic but poetic, closer to the tidal hiccups of Aloha Oe than to the didactic clippers of Eisenstein.
No orchestral score survives, and thank the cinematic pantheon. The absence forces you to hallucinate audio: the rasp of heliconia leaves, the soft thud of a coconut falling where no one hears it—except you, in the dark. Cinephiles who revere the sonic austerity of After Dark will recognize how silence operates as an ethical aperture, allowing space for the viewer’s complicity to echo unanswered.
Women are scarce on this voyage, yet when they surface—an afro-Peruvian market queen haggling over manioc, a half-Miskito girl who sells the crew medicinal bark—they hijack the frame with proto-feminist electricity. The camera doesn’t ogle; it genuflects, sensing matriarchal knowledge systems that dwarf the men’s compass. In doing so, Kidd stealthily queers the masculine ethos of most expedition docs, aligning itself more with the gender-fluid undercurrents of Robbery Under Arms than with the chest-thumping bravado of Rupert of Hentzau.
Recent 4K scans by the George Eastman Museum reveal fungal etchings that look eerily like Kidd’s signature—an accident of chemical decay that now passes for autograph. Purists cry heresy at digital cleanup, yet I’d argue the fungus is part of the text: empire as spore, as archival contagion. The restoration team wisely retained these blooms, recognizing that to erase them would replicate the same hygienic impulse that drove colonial mapmakers to flatten living terrain into governable grids.
Stack Kidd beside The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays and you witness the chasm between studio artifice and open-vein actuality. Pair it with Mysteries of London and you perceive two cities—one grid-lit, one leaf-choked—both drowning in their own legends. And beside A Daughter of Australia, Kidd looks like an antipodean inversion: instead of exporting convicts, it imports curse.
We late-model spectators arrive armed with Wikipedia and guilt, yet the film slips our analytical handcuffs. It is neither racist screed nor woke redemption arc; it is a mirror smeared with river mud, reflecting only what we project. Try pausing on a single frame of cloud-shrouded temple steps and you’ll swear you hear your own pulse duplicating the 16-frame-per-second stutter—proof that the real treasure chest is the anxiety of empire we’ve inherited, not some doubloons oxidizing beneath strangler figs.
Because every era needs its artistic shipwreck, a splintered galleon on which to read its own rot while pretending to hunt for gold. Because The Footsteps of Capt. Kidd offers not answers but salt-encrusted questions that will keep sprouting barnacles in your brain long after the lights rise. And because, in an age when algorithmic docu-fragments masquerade as exploration, Salisbury’s fevered celluloid confession feels like inhaling undiluted ether—dangerous, nauseating, and, for those who survive the trip, indispensably alive.
Stream a 2K scan courtesy of George Eastman Museum or catch a rare 16 mm print at your local cinematheque—then tell the projectionist to keep the house lights dim; some treasures gleam brightest in the dark.
IMDb 6.5
1918
Community
Log in to comment.
Loading comments…
