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American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary is a critical history of American filmmakers crucial to the development of ethnographic film and personal documentary. The Boston and Cambridge area is notable for nurturing these approaches to documentary film via institutions such as the MIT Film Section and the Film Study Center, the Carpenter Center and the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. Scott MacDonald uses pragmatism's focus on empirical experience as a basis for measuring the groundbreaking achievements of such influential filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Nina Davenport, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Michel Negroponte, John Gianvito, Alexander Olch, Amie Siegel, Ilisa Barbash, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. By exploring the cinematic, personal, and professional relationships between these accomplished filmmakers, MacDonald shows how a pioneering, engaged, and uniquely cosmopolitan approach to documentary developed over the past half century.

A daring, deep investigation into ethnographic cinema that challenges standard ways of writing film history and breaks important new ground in understanding archives Bad Film Histories is a vital work that unsettles the authority of the archive. Katherine Groo daringly takes readers to the margins of the film record, addressing the undertheorization of film history and offering a rigorous corrective. Taking ethnographic cinema as a crucial case study, Groo challenges standard ways of thinking and writing about film history and questions widespread assumptions about what film artifacts are and what makes them meaningful. Rather than filling holes, Groo endeavors to understand the imprecisions and absences that define film history and its archives. Bad Film Histories draws on numerous works of ethnographic cinema, from Edward S. Curtis's I n the Land of the Head Hunters, to a Citroën-sponsored \"croisière\" across Africa, to the extensive archives of the Maison Lumière and the Musée Albert-Kahn, to dozens of expedition films from the 1910s and 1920s. The project is deeply grounded in poststructural approaches to history, and throughout Groo draws on these frameworks to offer innovative and accessible readings that explain ethnographic cinema's destabilizing energies. As Groo describes, ethnographic works are mostly untitled, unauthored, seemingly infinite in number, and largely unrestored even in their digital afterlives. Her examination of ethnographic cinema provides necessary new thought for both film scholars and those who are thrilled by cinema's boundless possibilities. In so doing, she boldly reexamines what early ethnographic cinema is and how these films produce meaning, challenging the foundations of film history and prevailing approaches to the archive.

How can images be used as an expressive, yet clearly limited, tool to represent “the other” in ethnographic films? Based on the objectives of visual anthropology and visual communication, this article analyzes the four presentational traditions of meaning construction. These traditions have been incorporated into the audio-visual communication context to illustrate the similarities or differences between ethnographic films and ethnographic texts in terms of traditions, structures, features, and limitations. Through the analysis of the four traditions, the relationships between visual presentation and text writing, visual patterns and communication concepts, and visual potentials and ethnographic films have been fully examined. In the context of Chinese ethnographic films, the four presentational traditions have been well showcased and developed. These works, in their different contexts, have constituted a meaningful visual text system of contemporary Chinese anthropology.

This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational cinema—but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking, but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the “humanized” camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.

This paper will take the film The Rules from Ancestors as the basis to discuss the “writing” process of ethnographic film, addressing how a contemporary visual ethnography can be realized through the presentation of a film on ethnic culture. The Rules from Ancestors is an anthropological film about the Traditional Customary Law of the Yi people in China, produced by the author of this paper in 2006. As an integrated anthropological film, its theoretical basis is the “holism” and “legal pluralism” of legal anthropology, and its stories are narrated through objective observation and interactive collaboration. The author attempted to construct an “intermediary context” within the film’s narrative structure. The aim was to establish an experimental visual ethnographic expression that progresses from “complicity” to “sharing”, to replace the traditional ethnographic mode of expression, localized fieldwork. In so doing, I hoped to explore the possibilities of collaborative knowledge production between the photographer, the subject, and the audience, as well as a non-unidirectional methodology for the flow and transfer of knowledge. Through the exploration described above, this paper attempts to respond to the ongoing debate on the relationship between visual anthropology and written anthropology. Is anthropological film a “self-contained system reaching the same goal with different methods”, or simply an “auxiliary tool” of written anthropology? Based on an ethnographic introspection on anthropological filmmaking practices, this paper will provide explicit support to the former standpoint, as well as a discussion on methodology.

One of the most important Native films of all time,Atanarjuat, the Fast Runnertells a powerful and moving story about honor, betrayal, vengeance, and redemption. Set in the vast, visually stunning Arctic landscape, it was the first feature film written, directed, and acted entirely in Inuktitut, the language of Canada's Inuit people. Canada's top-grossing release of 2002, the film became an international phenomenon, receiving the prestigious Camera d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival and earning rave reviews from every quarter, including Margaret Atwood (\"like Homer with a video camera\"), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Chirac, and Roger Ebert. \"The Fast Runner\":Filming the Legend of Atanarjuattakes readers behind the cameras, introducing them to the culture, history, traditions, and people that made this movie extraordinary. Michael Robert Evans explores how the epic film, perhaps the most significant text ever produced by indigenous filmmakers, artfully married the latest in video technology with the traditional storytelling of the Inuit. TracingAtanarjuatfrom inception through production to reception, Evans shows how the filmmakers managed this complex intercultural \"marriage\"; how Igloolik Isuma Productions, the world's premier indigenous film company, works; and how Inuit history and culture affected the film's production, release, and worldwide response. His book is a unique, enlightening introduction and analysis of a film that serves as a model of autonomous media production for the more than 350 million indigenous people around the world.

The first major photofilmic record of the Waiapu River region of Aotearoa New Zealand occurred over a three-week period in March–April 1923, when the filmmaker and photographer James McDonald documented local cultural activities on the East Coast. McDonald was a member of the fourth Dominion Museum ethnological expedition from Wellington, invited to Waiapu by Apirana Ngata to record ancestral tikanga 'practices' that he feared were disappearing. Despite the criticism of ethnographic \"othering\" in the resulting film He Pito Whakaatu i te Noho a te Maori i te Tairawhiti—Scenes of Māori Life on the East Coast, this paper suggests that the fieldwork, from a Ngāti Porou perspective, was assisted and supported by local people. It addresses the entanglements of this event and delineates the background, purpose and results of the documentary photographs and film in relation to Ngata's cultural reinvigoration agenda. This article also reveals the various relationships, through whakapapa 'kin networks' hosting and friendship, between members of the team and local people. Drawing on the 1923 diary kept by Johannes Andersen and on other archival and tribal sources, the author closely analyses these relationships, what Apirana Ngata calls takiaho 'relational cords', which are brought to light so that descendants can keep alive these connections through the remaining film fragments and beyond the frame. These kinship and relational networks were forged and deepened through education, politics, wartime experiences and loss, pandemics and health reform, as well as shared cultural understandings. This reflection on the takiaho, the cords of connection, demonstrates the complex relational logic that informed the Māori subjects in the films, enabling the \"photo business\" to be carried out by the expedition team, in the process producing a lasting cultural legacy for descendants. As Merata Mita memorably put it in 1992, \"Images still live and are very much alive\".

The article aims to present and analyse the current situation of visual anthropology in Slovenia. In the first part the author is discussing ethnographic filming, as it is the most established area of visual anthropology in Slovenia. This is particularly so in terms of documentation by organised visual material and uses of video in museum presentations. The author exposes focus on \"our own\" culture as their common trait. The second part outlines other dispersed and newer trends. The diachronic perspective on uses of photography is analysed as well as inventive new approaches, and student works are recognised as opening up thematic and methodological spectrum. In the conclusion, on the basis of characteristics and trends, possible future directions of visual anthropology in Slovenia are proposed. Cílem článku je představení a analýza současného stavu vizuální antropologie ve Slovinsku. V první části se autorka věnuje využití filmu v etnografii, což je nejlépe rozvinutá odnož slovinské vizuální antropologie. To platí zejména pro dokumentaci organizovaného vizuálního materiálu a využití videí v muzejních prezentacích. Autorka zdůrazňuje společný rys soustředění na „vlastní” kulturu. Druhá část nastiňuje další, méně rozvinuté a novější trendy. Využití fotografie je představeno v diachronní perspektivě, stejně jako studentské práce, které rozšiřují tematické a metodologické spektrum. Na závěr jsou nastíněny možné budoucí směry vizuální antropologie na základě dosavadních charakteristik a trendů.

Observational cinema' has long been central to debates in visual anthropology. Although initially hailed as a radical breakthrough in ethnographic filmmaking, the genre was subsequently criticized as naively empiricist and lacking in reflexive sophistication. In this article, we make a new case for observational cinema. It grows out of a renewed attention to practice. We argue that observational work be understood not as preliminary to anthropological proper but as a distinctive form of anthropology in its own right. /// Le \"cinéma d'observation\" est depuis longtemps un sujet de controverse dans l'anthropologie visuelle. Salué à ses débuts comme une révolution dans l'acquisition d'images ethnographiques, le genre a été critiqué par la suite comme entaché d'un empirisme naïf et dépourvu d'élaboration reflexive. Les auteures plaident ici pour le cinéma d'observation, à partir d'une attention renouvelée pour cette pratique. Elles demandent que le travail d'observation soit considéré non pas comme un préliminaire au travail anthropologique proprement dit, mais comme une forme distincte d'anthropologie à part entière.

These interviews tell the story of one of modern independent cinema's most successful distributors. Documentary Educational Resources (DER) was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971 by ethnographic filmmakers John Marshall and Timothy Asch in order to distribute their own films, but through the work of DER directors Sue Cabezas and Cynthia Close, DER expanded and now distributes hundreds of films by nearly three hundred filmmakers from around the world. Cabezas and Close discuss their struggles to come to grips with the expansion of the field of ethnographic film and to maintain DER's relevance within continually changing technologies.