The Authoring of Observational Cinema: Conversations with Colin Young

Abstract

Based on a series of conversations with Colin Young that have taken place over more than thirty years, this article explores how a certain set of practical and institutional circumstances, in combination with a series of philosophical and aesthetic ideas about the nature of cinema, first led to the emergence over the late 1960s and early 1970s of the approach to ethnographic filmmaking that would become known as “Observational Cinema.” Although it was those whom Colin Young trained, inspired or simply influenced who worked out the practical filmmaking applications of his ideas, it was he who initially formulated the foundational concepts underpinning this approach to ethnographic filmmaking. As such, although he has been a “filmmaker-maker” rather than a filmmaker himself, Colin Young has a rightful claim to be considered, in the sense defined by Roland Barthes, as the original “author” of Observational Cinema.