Human Studies Film Archives
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Human Studies Film Archives
The Human Studies Film Archives (HSFA) is a sister archive to the National Anthropological Archives within the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. HSFA preserves and provides access to ethnographic films and anthropological moving image materials. It is located at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland. History The Archives started in 1975 as the National Anthropological Film Center (NAFC) by creating and collecting films of anthropological research. The NAFC was founded through the advocacy of notable anthropologists and filmmakers Margaret Mead, John Marshall, Timothy Asch, and Jay Ruby. The first director of the NAFC, E. Richard Sorenson, promoted anthropological film as a scientific research tool. The center received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health. In 1981, the NAFC was renamed the Human Studies Film Archives and became part of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of ...
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National Anthropological Archives
The National Anthropological Archives is a collection of historical and contemporary documents maintained by the Smithsonian Institution, which document the history of anthropology and the world's peoples and cultures. It is located in the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, and is part of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. History The National Anthropological Archives (NAA) is the successor to the archives of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), which was founded in 1879 by John Wesley Powell. In 1968, The NAA was established, incorporating the collections of the BAE, which focused on American Indians, as well as the papers of curators in the National Museum of Natural History's Department of Anthropology, who conducted research around the world. The establishment of the NAA was supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation with the aim of providing a repository of record for personal research materials ...
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Video
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) systems which, in turn, were replaced by flat panel displays of several types. Video systems vary in display resolution, aspect ratio, refresh rate, color capabilities and other qualities. Analog and digital variants exist and can be carried on a variety of media, including radio broadcast, magnetic tape, optical discs, computer files, and network streaming. History Analog video Video technology was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) television systems, but several new technologies for video display devices have since been invented. Video was originally exclusively a live technology. Charles Ginsburg led an Ampex research team developing one of the first practical vi ...
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Film Archives In The United States
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound and, more rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it. Recording and transmission of film The moving images of a film are created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects. Before the introduction of digital production, series of still images were recorded on a strip of chemically sensitiz ...
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Jorge Preloran
Jorge Ricardo Preloran (May 28, 1933 – March 28, 2009) was an Argentine filmmaker and a pioneer in ethnobiographic film making. Life and career Preloran was born in Buenos Aires to an Argentine father and an Irish American mother. He made a short film, ''Venganza'', in 1954, and left Argentina to enroll at UCLA, graduating with a film studies major in 1961. Holding dual citizenship, he served with the U.S. military in West Germany. He began a career as a filmmaker in 1961, when the Tinker Foundation offered him a grant to make several films on the gauchos of Argentina. Preloran sought to redefine the genre of ethnographic films, moving away from depicting their subjects as exotic or primitive, striving to make films that, as he told ''Americas'' magazine, "do not use the people about whom they are made." From 1963-1969 Preloran produced educational films and films on Argentine folklife at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in Tucuman, Argentina. He also began to wo ...
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Yanomami
The Yanomami, also spelled Yąnomamö or Yanomama, are a group of approximately 35,000 indigenous people who live in some 200–250 villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. Etymology The ethnonym ''Yanomami'' was produced by anthropologists on the basis of the word , which, in the expression , signifies "human beings." This expression is opposed to the categories (game animals) and (invisible or nameless beings), but also (enemy, stranger, non-Indian). According to ethnologist : History The first report of the Yanomami to the Northern world is from 1654, when an El Salvadorian expedition under Apolinar Diez de la Fuente visited some Ye'kuana people living on the Padamo River. Diez wrote: From approximately 1630 to 1720, the other river-based indigenous societies who lived in the same region were wiped out or reduced as a result of slave-hunting expeditions by the conquistadors and bandeirantes. How this affected the Yanomami is unk ...
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Napoleon Chagnon
Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon (27 August 1938 – 21 September 2019) was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography ''Yanomamö: The Fierce People'' became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses. Admirers described him as a pioneer of scientific anthropology. Chagnon was called the "most controversial anthropologist" in the Uni ...
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Sound Recording And Reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording. Sound recording is the transcription of invisible vibrations in air onto a storage medium such as a phonograph disc. The process is reversed in sound reproduction, and the variations stored on the medium are transformed back into sound waves. Acoustic analog recording is achieved by a microphone diaphragm that senses changes in atmospheric pressure caused by acoustic sound waves and records them as a mechanical representation of the sound waves on a medium such as a phonograph record (in which a stylus cuts grooves on a record). In magnetic tape recording, the sound waves vibrate the microphone diaphragm and are converted into a varying electric current, which is then converted to ...
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Photograph
A photograph (also known as a photo, image, or picture) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are now created using a smartphone/camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see. The process and practice of creating such images is called photography. Etymology The word ''photograph'' was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light," and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing," together meaning "drawing with light." History The first permanent photograph, a contact-exposed copy of an engraving, was made in 1822 using the bitumen-based "heliography" process developed by Nicéphore Niépce. The first photographs of a real-world scene, made using a camera obscura, followed a few years later at Le Gras, ...
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Ethnographic Film
An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically shot by Western filmmakers and dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology. Definitions of the term are not definitive. Some academics claim it is more documentary, less anthropology, while others think it rests somewhere between the fields of anthropology and documentary films. Anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall wrote in a 1978 paper: "Ethnographic films cannot be said to constitute a genre, nor is ethnographic film-making a discipline with unified origins and an established methodology. 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." The genre has its origins in the colonial context. Origins Prospector, explorer, and eventual filmmaker Rober ...
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Travel Documentary
A travel documentary is a documentary film, television program, or online series that describes travel in general or tourist attractions without recommending particular package deals or tour operators. A travelogue film is an early type of travel documentary, serving as an exploratory ethnographic film. Ethnographic films have been made for the spectators to see the other half to relate with the world in relative relations. These films are a spectacle to see beyond the cultural differences as explained by the Allison Griffith in her journal. Before 1930s, it was difficult to see the importance of documentary films in Hollywood cinema but 1930s brought about a change in the history of these films with the popularity of independent filmmakers. The genre has been represented by television shows such as ''Across the Seven Seas'', which showcased travelogues produced by third parties, and by occasional itinerant presentations of travelogues in theaters and other venues. The British ...
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