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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.

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.

Timothy Asch (1932-1994) was probably the greatest ethnographic filmmaker of the latter twentieth century, and one of the best-known anthropologists of his generation. He worked with Margaret Mead, John Marshall and Napoleon Chagnon, lived and filmed on every continent except Antarctica, and won numerous international prizes. His work, which includes 'The Ax Fight' and more than 50 other films of the Yanomamö Indians of Venezuela, comprises the most widely used resource in the teaching of anthropology today. Timothy Asch and Ethnographic Film combines a biographical overview of Asch's life with theoretical and critical perspectives, giving a definitive guide to his background, aims and ideas, methodology and major projects. Beautifully illustrated with 60 photos, and featuring articles from many of Asch's friends, colleagues and collaborators as well as an important interview with Asch himself, it is an ideal introduction to his work and to a range of key issues in ethnographic film.

Mr. [TIMOTHY ASCH] was born in Southampton, N.Y., and apprenticed with the photographers Ansel Adams, Minor White and Edward Weston in the early 1950s. He served as a teaching assistant to anthropologist Margaret Mead at Columbia, where he received a bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1959.

[TIMOTHY ASCH], an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, died Oct. 3 in Los Angeles of cancer. He was 62.

John Homiak reviews Asch's involvement with the establishment of the Smithsonian's Human Studies Film Archives, providing insight into 'institutional factors that led to the formation of visual anthropology as a subdiscipline' (p. 185). The Ax Fight also was one of the main examples in Wilton Martinez's research on how ethnographic film viewings in the context of varying pedagogical approaches affect student stereotypes of 'primitives.'.

Toby Alice Volkman reviews \"Jero Tapakan: Balinese Healer--An Ethnographic Film Monograph,\" by Linda Connor, Patsy Asch, and Timothy Asch.

Besides his wife, Professor Asch is survived by two daughters, Caya Asch of East Windsor, N.J., and Kim Asch of Manhattan; two sons, Gregory, of Brooklyn, and Alexander, of Canberra, Australia; two sisters, Behri Knauth of Stonington, Conn., and Maedra Kelman of Newark, and two grandchildren. Mr. Asch was born in Southampton, L.I., and apprenticed with the photographers Ansel Adams, Minor White and Edward Weston in the early 1950's. He served as a teaching assistant to Dr. [Margaret Mead] at Columbia, where he received a bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1959. He later studied at Boston University and Harvard, and received a master's degree in anthropology from the former.