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Poster for The Tipi
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Released
1912 · FILM

The Tipi

Directed by
Written by
Color
Black & White
Runtime
8 min
Language
NL
AdventureDramaWestern

Synopsis

At the age of 14, Joris Ivens was drawn to Cowboys and Indians stories and decided to create one of his own. He wrote a script and used a camera from his father's shop to make his first film, *Wigwam*, in which his own family members appeared as the cast. In the film, Black Eagle, a villainous Indian, abducts the daughter of a farming family. Flaming Arrow, portrayed by the young Ivens himself, rescues the child and returns her to her family. The film concludes with the characters smoking a peace pipe. Though filmed in the spring of 1912, *Wigwam* was theatrically released in December 1915.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 8

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Shot by Kees Ivens

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