Ethnographic film

Since the first conference on ethnographic film was held at the Musée de l'Homme 30 years ago, the term has served a largely emblematic function, giving a semblance of unity to extremely diverse efforts in the cinema and social sciences.

Flaherty's attempts to realistically portray Inuit on film were considered valuable for exploring a little-known way of life.

He was filming a Wolof woman making pottery without the aid of a wheel at the Exposition Ethnographique de l'Afrique Occidentale.

[5] In the 1930s, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead discovered that using film was an essential component of documenting complex rituals in Bali and New Guinea.

John Marshall made what is likely the most-viewed ethnographic film in American colleges, The Hunters,[6] based on the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari Desert (the !Kung-San) that spans from 1951 to 2000.

The genre flourished in France in the fifties due to the role of ethnographers such as Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen, and Jean Rouch.

Rouch, who had developed the concept in theory and practice, went against the dogma that in research the camera person must stay out of the event or distance him/herself as an observer.

[8] Robert Gardner, a film artist, collaborated with several anthropologists (Karl G. Heider among them) to produce Dead Birds (1963), a study of ritual warfare among the Dani of New Guinea.

It was filmed over a period of three years, during which MacDougall lived on the school campus, closely observing the boys, their daily rituals, conversations, thought processes, and ways of functioning.

The issue of presentation was noted by Flaherty, when he realized that when the audience is shown individuals dealing with problems, it helps them affirm the rationality of their own choices.

When this speech is in a language unfamiliar to the intended audience of the ethnographic film, the producers generally use voice-over translation or subtitles.

[17] These ethnographic films often presented foreign peoples as a spectacle for Europeans [18] who were promised an experience of other cultures without having to leave their own country.

[24] The cinema, thereby, became an important institution to garner approval and enthusiasm for colonialization and imperialism across gender and class boundaries within colonizing countries.

[27] Many of the early ethnographic films prior to 1920 were not shot by professional anthropologists but by production companies with primarily commercial interests.