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In this collection of wide-ranging essays, MacDougall provides unique insights into the history of documentary and calls for a re-investment in the ideas that originally inspired it.
As one of the world's leading ethnographic filmmakers and writers on film, Macdougall explores the complex relationships between human perception, the senses, and the mind and eye behind the camera, while drawing on his own filmmaking experience - award-winning classics of ethnographic cinema, including
To Live with Herds,
The Wedding Camels,
Photo Wallahs,
Doon School Chronicles, and
Gandhi's Children.
MacDougall urges us to consider how the documentary form can become a 'cinema of consciousness' that more accurately reflects our everyday lives, particularly in this era of reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. He defends the principles that inspired documentary's early practitioners, and also considers issues such as the pressure for self-censorship and the inherent ethnocentrism of our own society and the societies we film.
This book adds new thought-provoking commentaries on cinema to those that readers will know from MacDougall's previous volumes of essays, and is essential reading for students in cinema studies, filmmaking and visual anthropology.
List of contents
Introduction
Part I: Filmmaking as practice1 Looking with a camera
2 Dislocation as method
3 Camera, mind, and eye
4 Environments of childhood
Part II: Film and the senses5 The third tendency in cinema
6 Sensational cinema
7 The experience of colour
8 Notes on cinematic space
Part III: Film, anthropology and the documentary tradition9 Observation in the cinema
10 Anthropology and the cinematic imagination
11 Anthropological filmmaking: an empirical art
12 Documentary and its doubles
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
About the author
David MacDougall is an Honorary Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University, Canberra
Summary
This book of essays brings together his latest ideas on filming, documentary, anthropology and the art of cinema, based on his practice as an award-winning maker of ethnographic films. -- .
