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A comprehensive history of ethnographic film since cinema began in 1895. It shows how the genre evolved out of reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogues prior to the Second World War into a more academic form of documentary in the post-war period.
List of contents
Introduction: Authorship, Praxis, Observation, Ethnography
Part I: Histories: Ethnographic film in the twentieth century
Introduction
1 The long prehistory of ethnographic film
2 Expeditions, melodrama and the birth of ethnofiction
3 The invisible Author: films of re-enactment in the postwar period
4 Records, not movies: the early films of John Marshall and Timothy Asch
5 Reflexivity and participation: the films of David and Judith MacDougall in Africa and Australia
6 Entangled voices: the complexities of collaborative authorship
7 The subject as Author: indigenous media and the Video nas Aldeias project
Part II: Authors: Three key figures
Introduction
8 Jean Rouch: sharing anthropology
9 Robert Gardner: beyond the burden of the real
10 Colin Young: the principles of Observational Cinema
Part III: Television as meta-author: Ethnographic film in Britain
Introduction
11 Ways of doing ethnographic film on British television
12 Beyond the 'disappearing world' - and back again
13 The decline of ethnographic film on British television
Part IV: Beyond observation: Ethnographic film in the twenty-first century
Introduction
14 The evolution of Observational Cinema: recent films of David and Judith MacDougall
15 Negative capability and the flux of life: films of the Sensory Ethnography Lab
16 Participatory perspectives
An epilogue: Return to Kiriwina: the ethnographic film-maker as Author
Appendix: British Television Documentaries produced in collaboration with Ethnographic Researchers
Textual references
Film references
About the author
Paul Henley is Professorial Research Fellow at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester and an ethnographic film-maker. He was previously the founding director of the Granada Centre, 1987-2014
Summary
A comprehensive history of ethnographic film since cinema began in 1895. It shows how the genre evolved out of reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogues prior to the Second World War into a more academic form of documentary in the post-war period. -- .
