Ethnographic Film Research Articles

Uma câmera-flecha; mobilizações, cosmopolítica e modos de aldear o cinema

The Brazilian context of the last few years has reinforced Rudyard Kipling’s maxim: “The first casualty of war is the truth”. Later, Paul Virilio would correct the sentence by saying that war victimizes the “reality”. In these recent battles, in which the Brazilian State strives to suppress a series of rights conquered by native peoples, cinema and indigenous communication have revealed themselves as important tools (weapons) against the “machine for grinding worlds”, which is like the writer Ailton Krenak names this “entity” called Capitalism.We saw the emergence of a series of productions carried out and starring by indigenous people, which bring us an enormous renewal of narrative and aesthetic processes. It is as if it were a counter-anthropology or the reverse of the ethnographic film. When we occupy the artefacts of cinema, it is understood that indigenous films represent cameras-arrow that launch themselves into the world, helping to displace traditional notions about science, politics and philosophy, in the quest to expand the concept of Cosmopolitics, engendered by Isabelle Stengers and defended by authors such as Bruno Latour.

Images and ethnography: issues of opacity and misconception

In this article I intend to debate the place that images occupy in ethnographic research and their methodological interest, which characterizes the conditions for the insertion of a visual character in the ethnographic narrative. According to Novaes,1 images communicate and, even in silence, it is necessary to take into account what they have to say, especially in empirical work. In this way, the article will focus on photography as an instrument that opens in gestures and expressions for field research, to think about its use as a production technology for the construction of a visual ethnographic narrative, such as the experience of ethnographic cinema, which will be presented shortly. The hypothesis to be developed here is whether photography can operate as a translation of knowledge gathered in the field. For this, it is important to highlight the methodological interest in the use of the image from the researcher- photographer to the researcher-filmmaker and, as an example, the ethnographic film Les Maîtres fous (The Crazy Teachers), by Jean Rouch2 is analyzed.

Extending the Frame

AbstractFor a century or more, ethnographic filmmakers have been expected to produce discrete, bounded films of a length that conforms to established conventions. But over the last decade, changes in viewing patterns and the proliferation of web‐based screening sites have brought new possibilities into view. This essay explores what these changes might mean in terms of moving beyond the limitations of the self‐standing film. How might a multipart approach allow filmmakers to broaden the scope of their inquiry and articulate more complex interpretive perspectives? What does extending the frame of ethnographic film offer to anthropological research and teaching?

Giving a Voice to Minority: Practical Exploration of Ethnographic Animation

Ethnographic animation, a novel form of visual ethnography, is capable of recording and representing traditional cultures, experiences, memories and other non-textual historical materials and cultural elements of ethnic minority groups. As a medium tasked with recording facts, how to ensure that the content displayed by ethnographic animation is true and accurate is an issue that animators need to pay attention to. Based on the author's ethnographic animated short film Longhorn Miao’s Love Songs, this paper demonstrates that establishing a balanced relationship between etic and emic perspectives and applying participatory design methods in the process of ethnic animation practice can effectively help community members express their cultural views and voice through animation, thus showing the cultural interpretation of ethnic minorities to the greatest extent. The research results of this paper will provide a reference paradigm for animation practice related to ethnic minorities.

Ghosts on the Scene of Gas

Abstract This article describes a vision of time (the past and the future) in post-industrial dynamics that the author and her co-researchers could gain through shooting a film in the region of Lhokseumawe, Aceh, a once fruitful site of extraction of natural gas subsequently planned to become a Special Economic Zone. It engages with the notion of “worlding” processes and pinpoints, in the ethnographic case of Aceh, the difficulty to access them through discourse because specific strategies of silencing and erasure are enforced throughout an emotional landscape. It is argued that it was the use of film-making as a relational tool aiming to create images that enabled the researchers to see through time and beyond regimes of invisibility. This is how they met ghosts on the gas scene. The steps in the making of an ethnographic film are used as a narrative lead. A scene is set up where the extractive economy of gas is linked to a global vision of development and prosperity as well as to present and past national politics, including a thirty-year-long war of resistance (1975–2005). The creation of a Special Economic Zone is shown to provide a relevant interpretive prism. Different styles of self-staging reveal cultures of suffering in North Aceh. It is argued that fear as a collective emotion takes different shapes across time and serves different political scenarios. Dispossession of land and under-remunerated work appear on the scene; the film’s feminine characters’ positive look to the future appears as an active effort of elaboration of the evolving context. The film Aceh, After is on free access at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR89korhLwQ.

Conceptualising festival ecosystems. Insights from the ethnographic film festival subcircuit

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the positioning of specialised festivals within the wider film festival ecosystem, using ethnographic film festivals as a case-study. Drawing on concepts developed within environmental research in Anthropology, we propose a structural and relational model for the analysis of festivals as all-encompassing socio-cultural events. Firstly, we conduct a literature review of concepts used in Film Festival studies’ to define film festivals and their connections, and then put these concepts in dialogue with that of the “ecosystem’. Secondly, we use our model to analyse specialised festival ecosystems (documentary, LGBTQ+, horror, young audiences, etc) by looking at their relationships with different agents and their environments. Thirdly, we focus on ethnographic film festivals, looking at their interaction with key agents such as universities, or anthropological associations, in order to understand their role in the academic recognition of Visual Anthropology. We look at shifts in the festivals’ self-definition and positioning within and beyond the ethnographic film festival ecosystem, to identify dynamics which apply also to other subcircuits and can explain their different roles and relationships with the film industry, local communities, or the cultural field as a whole.

Indus Blues: A Short Collection of Impressions on an Ethnographic Documentary

This is a spontaneous review discussion about the ethnographic film ‘Indus Blues’, produced by Jawad Sharif in 2018 and it has won many awards on several occasions. Nine reviewing persons were asked to write some lines about their first impressions, which were then discussed and summarized. The review discussion mainly contains the data provided.

THE “WHITE DARKNESS”

Rather than considering the modernist aesthetic of primitivism as singular, this article contends that there are multiple and diverse primitivist projects. Each of these speaks to its historical context, and this article considers that of the Ukrainian-born, American avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren’s primitivist investments in Haiti through her published writing, diary entries and her film footage produced between 1948 and 1953. Deren’s work must be understood in relation to US imperialism and the occupation of Haiti (1915–34). It is also informed by her complex modernist aesthetics, Trotskyist politics and proximity to the New Negro movement through her association with choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Despite a clearly articulated modernist vision for her film in Haiti, when confronted with the material reality of Haiti itself Deren abandoned her film in favour of a written “personal ethnography.” This article considers Deren’s refusal of film and the fracturing of her aesthetic gaze, framed as a refusal to manipulate reality, in the context of colonial ethnographic film. Finally, it considers the legacy of – and resistance to – Western imperialism and voyeurism informing Haitian artistic works today, as well as the policies of the Geto Byenal (Ghetto Biennale), held in Port-au-Prince from 2009 onwards.

IMAGE OF THE SHAMAN IN ETHNOGRAPHIC CINEMA (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE FILM “OLD MAN PETER”)

The article considers ethnographic cinema as a form of visual representation of religious phenomena (manifestations of shamanism) among the Ob Ugrians. The authors argue that ethnographic films are of particular value for the study of indigenous shamanism. They demonstrate not only ritual practice and rites, but the ordinary, non-ritual side of the life of shamans as well as combine research and cinematic approaches. As a case study, the documentary "Old Man Peter", shot by filmmaker I. A. Golovnev in 2004-2008 in the Ob North, in the places of residence of the Kazym Khanty, is considered. Based on the experience gained during the filmmaking in the place of the Kazym River, the diary of the author of the film and scientific literature, the authors reconstruct the cult practices of the Kazym Khanty (veneration of nature spirits, Bear cult, Bear Festival) that exist in modern Khanty culture as rudiments. The main themes and plots related to the formation of the cinematic image of the Khanty shaman Petr Sengepov, the leader of the local community is considered. Authors came to the conclusion that modern ethnographic films that represent shamanism not as splendiferous, but as a personal phenomenon, are an effective tool for the "cultural revitalization" of local communities. Visualization of shamanism in ethnographic cinema allows to capture the characteristics of the worldview of indigenous peoples.

Film Review: Forsaken Fragments

Review| June 01 2022 Film Review: Forsaken Fragments Forsaken Fragments by Robert Gardner, 50 min., 2021. Scott MacDonald Scott MacDonald Scott MacDonald’s many books on independent cinema include collections of interviews with independent filmmakers, the five-volume Critical Cinema series from University of California Press, and more recently Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (2014) and The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2) (2019)—as well as explorations of particular moving-image artists and films/videos, and of institutions that have kept independent media alive. He teaches film history and programs film events at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2022) 49 (2): 104–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.2.104 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Scott MacDonald; Film Review: Forsaken Fragments. Afterimage 1 June 2022; 49 (2): 104–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.2.104 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search In October 2009 Bard College honored Robert Gardner’s filmmaking career, which included remarkable, if now sometimes controversial, contributions to ethnographic cinema—Dead Birds (1963), Rivers of Sand (1974), Deep Hearts (1981), Forest of Bliss (1986), and Ika Hands (1988)—as well as dozens of episodes of Screening Room, a late-night, Boston-area TV interview show that focused on independent filmmakers. For the Bard event, Gardner put together a fifty-minute compilation titled “Nine Forsaken Fragments.” In his comments at Bard, Gardner was diffident about the individual fragments or the compilation being considered finished films. As time has passed—along with Gardner himself in 2014, and Peter Hutton, who had organized the Bard event, in 2016—Gardner’s “fragments” have become something more than a compilation for a one-time occasion. In 2021, Documentary Educational Resources, the distributor of much of Gardner’s work, released Forsaken Fragments: a compilation of fourteen short pieces that together can be... You do not currently have access to this content.

“There's really almost nobody there who's trying to make sense of it”

“There's really almost nobody there who's trying to make sense of it”

Humour, agency and the [re]negotiation of social order within workplace settings

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper was to explore the role and function of humour within sports coaching from a symbolic interactionist perspective. This was particularly in light of the structure of humour and how its resulting [inter]actions prevented as well as facilitated the advancement of individual agency. Data were gathered from a ten-month ethnographic study that traced the players and coaches of Senghenydd City Football Club (pseudonym) over the course of a competitive season). Exact methods of data collection included participant observation, reflective field notes, and ethnographic film. The results describe the presence of humour’s idiosyncratic nature (e.g., soft, hard, and aberrant), particularly in relation to how coaches and players influenced the negotiated order to which others had, to greater or lesser extents, comply. a reflective conclusion illustrates how concepts such as humour are entwined in everyday life, and thus contribute to the construction and negotiation of contexts, like coaching, .

The Renaissance Revisited

The Renaissance Revisited

The Dance Company Film

The Dance Company Film

Does Ethnographic Film (Still) Matter? Reflections on the Genre in a World of Multimodality

For almost a century ethnographic filmmakers liked to think of their work as the radical alternative to a hidebound textual anthropology. Such claims are now increasingly challenged. On the one hand, the rise of “experimental’ or “multimodal” scholarship has changed the existing terms of debate about alternative modes of anthropological practice. On the other hand, debates about the decolonization (or decanonization) of the discipline have served to underline long-standing problems in conventional narratives of the tradition of ethnographic film. What is the future for ethnographic film? Is it now an obsolete form, superseded or absorbed into the broader and more diverse category of multimodal anthropology? Or is there a case to be made for retaining its distinctiveness as a mode of inquiry?

‘I went there to live’: A case-study of Šarūnas Bartas’s Tofalaria and Few of Us

I argue that contemporary filmmakers, including today’s most artistically acclaimed Lithuanian film director, Šarūnas Bartas, whose works examine an ethnographic subject, question the rigid distinction between art and ethnography and prompt us to rethink the definition of ethnographic film. However, since they are primarily interested in the result, these filmmakers inadvertently perpetuate a cinematographic colonialism instead of trying to challenge obsolete models of representing other cultures. To make my point, I analyse two of Bartas’s early films: Tofalaria (1986) and Few of Us (1996), both shot in the area of the Eastern Sayan Mountains informally known as Tofalaria and inhabited by the Tofalars, the smallest indigenous ethnic group in Russia. Although they focus on the same subject, these films employ two different strategies of filmmaking and visual representation: Tofalaria can be considered as a conventional ethnographic documentary in which a voice-over describes the images and tells the story of the Tofalars, whereas Few of Us is a fiction film which has a narrative structure and features professional actors alongside local amateurs. Both films share the same premise: Tofalar culture and the Tofalars themselves are dying. Moreover, Tofalaria is depicted as a non-place, to use Marc Augé’s term, and has therefore lost its anthropological meaning.

Arctic Marine Hunters in the Documentary Film: The Book of the Sea

Aleksei Vakhrushev’s documentary film, entitled The Book of the Sea (2018), is an ethnographic film belonging to visual anthropology. It depicts the daily survival of the Arctic sea hunters of Chukotka. The narrative structure of The Book of the Sea unfolds in two lines: one is the current life of the Eskimo (Yupik) and Chukchi people, who continue the tradition of sea hunting in the Bering Strait of the Far East of Russia, and the other is ancient myths, especially the story of “the woman who gave birth to a whale” that forms their spiritual foundation. The former is embodied in live action and the latter in animation, completing this film in a hybrid form called “animated documentary.” This article examines how live-action documentary and imaginary animation are arranged in parallel and intersected in The Book of the Sea, removing the boundary between reality and myth, and how the modern time of the sea hunters and the ancient time in the mythology coexist and communicate with each other. In particular, we noted that the narrative unity using the double plot structure of the documentary storyline and the animation storyline, and the claymation and expression techniques that colorfully visualize the abstract realms of the myth and consciousness world, bring the theme of the film to life more effectively. The Book of the Sea satisfies its role as an ethnographic film and its perfection as film art. It shows the organic relationship between the life of modern sea hunters and the ancient Arctic maritime culture through weaving reality and myth. This unique film of visual anthropology is also used for educational purposes to preserve the traditional culture of Chukotka marine hunters.

Double Vision: Encountering Early Ethnographic Films in the Digital Archive

In 1908, Georg Thilenius, director of the Hamburg Museum für Völkerkunde, sent a group of researchers on an expedition to the then-German colonies in Melanesia and Micronesia. The team was also equipped with a film camera. In comparison to the several thousand photographs, sketches, and notes the quantity of film produced was very low: only around eleven minutes could be shot on 35mm footage. This footage, transferred to 16mm film in the 1940s and digitised in 2018-19, is analysed both as an event of early ethnographic filmmaking and as a specific archival object: to date the object biography of the Hamburg films shows significant changes of their materiality and no less important ruptures concerning their preserving archives. This featurette raises questions about the significance of film recordings for ethnographic research, the role of archives and museums in their preservation or digitisation, and, not least, their entanglement in German colonial politics. It reconstructs the object biography of the Hamburg films based on signatures, inventory lists, and descriptions of the expedition members to shed light on this entanglement and to question its status as an archival object. In doing so it argues for a relational understanding of ethnographic filmmaking and its preservation that accounts for the responsibilities, constraints, and different interests of the people and institutions involved in capturing, distributing, and transforming moving images into an archival object.

ЭТНОДОКУМЕНТАЛЬНОЕ КИНО ТЮРКСКИХ НАРОДОВ КАК ФОРМА РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИИ ЭТНОКУЛЬТУРЫ

The article presents the analysis of the specific features of ethnic culture representation by means of Turkic-language ethnodocumentary cinema. The authors consider ethnographic film as a cultural phenomenon, emphasizing the author's intention to add the global significance and value to the reflected culture in the films under consideration, which allows it to take its place in world history and on the ethnographic map of the Earth. The author's attitude is based on personal observations, relying on collected knowledge, which has a special representative-author's character that allows to represent the unique conditions of encounter with a culture in unique circumstances. The author, on the one hand, acts as an observer of culture and, on the other hand, becomes a full participant in the reflected events, demonstrating the author's manner and interpreting not only what he sees, but ethnic culture as a whole. Ethnographic films are not always based on ethnic events, but more often on the creation of characters in the narrative, on which the author's emphasis is placed. However, performativity and eventfulness combined with imagery allow the viewer to depict the event as it is perceived based on the viewing experience. The main thing in the film is cultural identity, as expressed through a whole range of images, which leads to an understanding of ethnic identity as a special form of cultural representation of an individual. Among the main features of the Turkic-speaking ethnocumentalism are the following: the anthropological nature of the representation of a person of culture based on a detailed accentuation of everyday life; the search for similarities and differences of cultural texts, which represent traditional formats of everyday life, rituals and mentality; the interpretation of the documentary's author based on his participation in the shooting process; the peculiarities of the orientation of collective perception in the process of perceptual design in the film programme with creative use of cinema as a channel of cultural representation; the creation of a kind of navigation of screen information and social regulation of the content of an ethnofilm by involvement in the process of creating an ethnofilm; the transfer of the aura of culture based on the consonance of the aesthetics of the film with the aesthetics of culture.

Devemos apelidá-los de estudos cine-culturais? O cine-mundificar da música popular e dos estudos juvenis

This article explorescinematic research-creation, or what I call cine-worlding. Indeed, ccine-worlding has the potential to contribute to a research practice unique to popular music and youth studies, areas of cultural life characterised by their openness and innovation with new media. Being aware of these opportunities means taking advantage of the technologies currently available. But there is an obstacle. Cinematic production must come together with research. Traditional cinematic research methods, due to their costs, difficulties with peer review and lack of institutional support, have not been accepted by academia. It has been anthropology that has done the most to develop cinematic research through ethnographic film. New developments in the digital cinema ecosystem have been little explored so far. The digital cinema ecosystem, emerging since 2009, consists of relatively cheap digital cameras and smartphones, free professional-grade digital platforms, a worldwide network of film festivals and the transformation of most art-house cinemas into digital screenings. This means that digital cinema made on a laptop can be shown anywhere. We are at the best possible moment for academic filmmaking, but then why do academics do so little of it?