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Adrian Cowell film and research collection, 1960-2007

Overview of the Collection

Creator
Cowell, Adrian
Title
Adrian Cowell film and research collection
Dates
1960-2007 (inclusive)
Quantity
68.05 cubic feet (61 boxes) including 770 sound reels (about 250 hours of sound recordings), 449 videotapes (that total approximately 225 hours of material), 9 boxes of photographic materials, and 27 boxes of manuscript material plus approximately 3,000 reels of 16mm film (totaling 1.2 million feet of film or over 560 hours of footage)
Collection Number
PH1262
Summary
Film footage, slides, photographs and written material produced by Adrian Cowell Southeast Asia, mostly from the Shan State in Burma from 1966 to 1996. Also includes a small amount of material from films documenting the Dutch New Guinea in 1960-1961.
Repository
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Special Collections
University of Washington Libraries
Box 352900
Seattle, WA
98195-2900
Telephone: 2065431929
Fax: 2065431931
speccoll@uw.edu
Access Restrictions

The original films and duplicating master are not accessible due to preservation concerns. Arrangements can be made to view the film by contacting the Visual Materials Curator.

Records stored off-site; advance notice required for use.

Request at UW

Languages
English
Sponsor
Funding for this finding aid is partially provided by Boojie Cowell and the Adrian Cowell Film Fund
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Biographical Note

Adrian Cowell

Adrian Cowell was an influential and award-winning British documentary film maker. He is best known for his work on the Amazon rainforest and the tribes who lived there. These films and his writings brought the rainforest ecological crisis to the world’s attention, and spurred international action.

John Adrian Cowell was born February 2, 1934 in Tientsin (also known as Tianjin) in China [although some sources report his birthplace as Tangshan, a nearby town], where his British father, Edmund Cowell, worked in the coal mining industry. Adrian and his brother Christopher went to school abroad in Australia and England. They both attended Ambleforth College, a Catholic preparatory school in North Yorkshire. Adrian went on to St. Catherine’s College at Cambridge. In his first year, he ran the Cowell Oriental Trading Agency, which imported Chinese trinkets from Hong Kong and sold them to fellow undergraduates and shops in London. He also founded the Cambridge University Wine and Food Society. Cowell graduated in History in 1955.

Cowell’s first visit to Burma and introduction to filming was on the pioneering 1956 Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition from London to Singapore, which he helped to organize. The team drove two Land Rovers from London overland on an epic perilous 12,000 mile journey to Burma and on to Singapore. Upon his return, Cowell was helped by Davis Attenborough to edit footage into three television programs which were aired on Attenborough’s BBC Travelers’ Tales series. The following year, the OxCam team undertook the 1957 Oxford and Cambridge Expedition to South America, where Cowell met the Villas brothers and made his first foray into the Brazilian rainforest. This was the beginning of his collaboration with the Villas brothers and his work about the Amazon rainforest. From 1959 to 1961, Cowell worked for ITN (Independent Television News) as Chief of the weekly series Roving Report. Among the programs directed by him are: " Mother Of Most Noble Rivers, " " Back Of Beyond " (1960), " Portrait Of Brazil, " " Caviar In The Caspian, " " Wild Goose Chase, " and " Land Beyond The Moon " (1961).

Cowell and cameraman Chris Menges (who later won two Oscars) returned to Asia several times over thirty years to document political, religious and opium issues. These films about Asia from 1966 to 1996 are the focus of this collection. In 1966, Cowell, together with Menges and George Patterson, became the first and only Westerners to venture into the remote Mustang region of Nepal. The three-man film team traveled with a group of nine Tibetan guerillas into Tibet and filmed their ambush of a Chinese truck convoy. According to some reports, the British government (secretly involved in the war) was alerted of this lapse in security and sent orders to intercept the team before they could leave Nepal, and relieve them of the footage at any cost, but the team and their footage were able to escape safely from Nepal. Another report tells of King Mahendra, the King of Nepal, ordering the Nepalese police to hunt them down. The film team escaped to the Indian border, where they were apprehended, after sending the film out safely. The resulting film, Raid into Tibet, was shown in Britain and the United States.

That same year, Cowell and Menges traveled to the remote Shan state in Burma, where they documented Shan people's insurgency against the military government. Their film The Unknown War introduced Western audiences to the guerilla war undertaken by Shan farmers-turned-fighters.

Also in 1966, Cowell and Menges produced the Light of Asia film series, three films which documented practices of Buddhism facing political change in Tibet, Thailand and Japan.

Cowell and Menges returned to the Shan state in the 1970s, where they revisited the ongoing Shan insurgency. In The Opium Warlords (1974), they introduced the complex role of the opium trade in financing the uprising. While shooting this film, they were trapped for eighteen months behind enemy lines. The Opium Warlords was a pilot for the Opium film series made in 1978. In this series, Cowell examined in depth the heroin economy in Hong Kong, the internal politics of the Shan warlords and their control of the opium trade, their remarkable offer to the United States government, and U.S. response. They returned in 1994 to film the Heroin Wars series, which revisited the subjects of the Opium series, and traced the developments in the complex relationship between the Shan insurgency and the war on drugs over 30 years

Adrian Cowell won numerous awards for his documentaries, including BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) awarded in 1966 for The Opium Trail and 1978 for Opium. Cowell was also the author of numerous articles about the insurgency and drug trade in Burma, and two books on Brazilian Indians, The Heart of the Forest and The Tribe that Hides from Man. Adrian Cowell died of a heart attack Oct. 11, 2011 in London at, age 77.

Chris Menges

Cinematographer Chris Menges was born in 1940 in Kington, Herefordshire. At age 17, he went to work for documentary film maker Alan Forbes and was hired as an apprentice from 1958-60. In the 1960s he became a camera operator for Adrian Cowell's documentaries. In 1963 he joined the World in Action (a weekly current affairs documentary series) team at Granada-tv as cameraman and worked in the Cyprus civil war, the Angola civil war, the Zanzibar revolution, South Africa, and Algeria,, among other locations.

Menges has won many awards: several BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts, several NSFC (National Society of Film Critics), and several ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) awards. His first BAFTA nomination was in 1983 for the Bill Forsyth film Local Hero. His first Academy Award was for the 1984 film The Killing Fields, and his 2nd Oscar was in 1986 with the historical drama The Mission. His directional debut was A World Apart which was celebrated at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and won three major awards. He was nominated by the ASC in 1998 for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Theatrical Releases for The Boxer. His 3rd Academy Award nomination was in 1997 for Michael Collins.

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Historical Background

At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia was dominated by the war in Viet Nam and the drug trade from the Shan region in Burma. After Burma's democratic election in 1960, the Burmese Army staged a coup d'etat in 1962, and instituted military rule, abolishing the constitution. Scholars of Southeast Asia have argued that it was during this cold war period the lawlessness and insurgency in Burma, together with U.S. covert war strategies in the region, helped to re-establish colonial-era networks of opium dependency and caused an upsurge of opium in the world market. For the Shan, the growing U.S. war-machine in Southeast Asia was regarded with both hope and fear; they too might cash in on anti-communist sentiment to support their separatist movement. Such involvement would have meant arms and economic aid, and most importantly in their minds, it would have meant diplomatic and international pressure on the Burmese junta to revert to a legitimate constitution. However, American drug policy priorities were focused on supporting the Burmese military government with aircraft to eradicate the trade. It is against this background of a contradictory covert and overt American presence in the region that Adrian Cowell's footage is set.

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Content Description

The majority of this collection documents the opium and insurgency in Burma from the 1960s to 1990. The collection consists of film footage (including over 850 reels of 16mm film, approximately 900 reels audiotape, and over 270 videotapes), written materials and slides acquired during three forays into the Shan State in Burma (Myanmar) by renowned filmmaker Adrian Cowell (1934-2011). The collection contains raw film footage of Cowell’s time spent “embedded” with various Shan insurgencies, including the Shan National Army in the 1960s, and 16 months that he and English cinematographer Christopher Menges ( The Killing Fields) spent with the Shan State Army in 1972-73. The enormous amount of footage includes interviews with Lo Hsin Han, Khun Sa and several insurgents and militia leaders, as well as footage of market towns in the Shan highlands, rebel camps, opium caravans and battles. Only a small portion of the footage was used Cowell’s BBC documentaries. The Shan State was virtually closed off to the outside world in the late 1950 to 2010, in part due to conflict. The Adrian Cowell Film and Research Collection is the most extensive collection of images and footage of the Shan State in the world. It contains film footage, photographs, extensive notes and other documents collected during Cowell’s trips documenting opium merchants, opium caravans, militias and insurgents and other activities related to the opium trade.

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Other Descriptive Information

In several cases, the same footage was used in many films, as Cowell revisited the themes in his documentaries over several years.

INVENTORY GLOSSARY
  • Project Elements - The assorted subordinate film and audio recordings generated in the production of a film project. The elements include a large amount of footage and audio recordings. While some elements were not used in the final cut, they remain valuable by providing insight into the conceptualization and construction of the final product.
  • Answer Print - The first composite (sound and picture) motion picture that is printed to film after color correction on an interpositive. It also refers to the first version of the movie printed to film with the sound properly synced to the picture.
  • D/P - Special coating on Eastman fine grain film.
  • Episode Print - A copy of a film made from a negative. Each episode is an individual television program that is part of a larger series or serial.
  • Filmstrip - A length of film containing still photographs, often of illustrations, diagrams, charts, etc., arranged in sequence for projection separately and used as a teaching aid.
  • FPS - Feet per second.
  • Release Print - A copy of a film made from a negative, especially a copy made for distribution.
  • SL - Slates.
  • Viewing copy - A copy of the release print made for patron access.

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Use of the Collection

Restrictions on Use

Creator's copyrights transferred to the University of Washington Libraries. Some restrictions exist on copying, quotation, or publication. Contact Special Collections for details. Contact the Special Collections division of the University of Washington Libraries for details.

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Administrative Information

Arrangement

This collection is organized into 5 series.

  • Series 1, Films
  • Series 2, Manuscripts and Photographs, circa 1960s-2000s
  • Series 3, Audio Recordings
  • Series 4, Photographs
  • Series 5, Video Recordings

Preservation Note

Records stored off-site; advance notice required for use.

Acquisition Information

Donor: Boojie Cowell, 2013.

Processing Note

Processed by Libby Hophauf, Andrew Weaver, Susan Fitch, 2014.

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Detailed Description of the Collection

 


2016 (Last modified: 10/5/2020)

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