Abstract
After World War II the research film increasingly became instrumental in medical science and cultural anthropology, especially in the recording and analysis of non-recurring events in isolated or “primitive” communities. Ambitiously, Carleton Gajdusek and Richard Sorenson in the 1960s sought to accumulate a global film archive of such communities, focusing on clinical disorders, such as kuru among the Fore people of New Guinea, and patterns of child health and development. Ostensibly objective, and certainly distancing, the camera also was for them a desiring machine, thus relating their archival project to the contemporary experimental films of Warhol in New York. Comparison with associated documentary film, with its emphasis on editorial selection, thematic coherence and narrative closure, reveals differences in how filmic investigators engage with their subjects, as well as discordances in valuation and ethics.
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