The trailer of the docufilm “Albania Beautiful and Primitive”

The trailer of the docufilm “Albania Beautiful and Primitive”. (73 min.)

This footage is part of the Burta and Elliot Taylor collection at LOC (Library of Congress) http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf2n39n8dn/

The Taylors were a very interesting couple, and in fact their personal document archives are held by the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA where The Taylors originally met as students, and where Elliott ended up teaching and serving as Dean after they had retired from traveling the world as missionaries.

The Taylor footage contains some of the oldest available 16mm motion picture footage of Albania.

The Elliott & Burta Taylor Collection contains rare film footage of Albania (1929-1935), transcribed on videotape with a voice-over narrative done by Burta Taylor (c1990). The slides Elliott Taylor took–representing unusual views and seldom-visited sites in more than twenty countries–are a core component of the Taylor Collection; but the collection consists not merely of slides and films, for it also contains considerable correspondence and other papers. This latter material, which consists in part of hundreds of letters written by the Taylors to each other, family and friends, during their years abroad, vividly describes his life in Rome (1928-29), her life at College of the Pacific (1928-29) and in the department of social work at Bryn Mawr College

(1929-30), as well as their shared life in Albania (1929-35).

The Taylors also took photos, and collected objects from their travels. Many of the objects and artifacts ended up in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.