Ethnographic Film
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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 Ro ...
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David MacDougall
David MacDougall (born November 12, 1939) is an American-Australian visual anthropologist, academic, and documentary filmmaker, who is known for his ethnographic film work in Africa, Australia, Europe and India. For much of his career he co-produced and co-directed films with his wife, fellow filmmaker Judith MacDougall. In 1972, his first film, ''To Live with Herds'' was awarded the Grand Prix "Venezia Genti" at the Venice Film Festival. He has lived in Australia since 1975, and is currently a professor in the Research School of Humanities & the Arts at Australian National University. MacDougall has produced films covering a wide range of subjects, be it the semi-nomadic Turkana people of Kenya in '' The Wedding Camels'' or an elite North Indian boys' boarding school in ''The Doon School Quintet''. Influenced by cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema in the 1960s, he is considered to be one of the pioneers of observational cinema, films that present the observations of an indiv ...
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Cinéma Vérité
Cinéma vérité (, , ; "truthful cinema") is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct Cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth. History Cinéma ...
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Video Ethnography
Video ethnography is the video recording of the stream of activity of subjects in their natural setting, in order to experience, interpret, and represent culture and society. Ethnographic video, in contrast to ethnographic film, cannot be used independently of other ethnographic methods, but rather as part of the process of creation and representation of societal, cultural, and individual knowledge. It is commonly used in the fields of visual anthropology, visual sociology, and cultural studies. Uses of video in ethnography include the recording of certain processes and activities, visual note-taking, and ethnographic diary-keeping. Video ethnography involves: • Observation, including extensive filming of practitioners, • Allowing practitioners to view the video recorded material and reflexively discuss their practice, • Transforming practice through practitioner led change, and • Building the capacity for the ongoing and critical appraisal of practice. Video-ethnogra ...
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Visual Anthropology
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual ...
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Visual Anthropology
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual ...
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Salvage Ethnography
Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he and his students aimed to record vanishing Native American cultures. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have used the term as part of a critique of 19th-century ethnography and early modern anthropology. Etymology The term "salvage ethnography" was coined by Jacob W. Gruber, who identified its emergence with 19th-century ethnographers documenting the languages of peoples being conquered and colonized by European countries or the United States. According to Gruber, one of the first official statements acknowledging that a major effect of colonialism was the destruction of existing languages and ways of life was ''The report of the British Select Committee of Aborigines'' (1837). As a scholarly response, Gruber quotes James Cowles Prichard's address before th ...
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Media Ecology
Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term ''media ecology'' was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968. Ecology in this context refers to the environment in which the medium is used – what they are and how they affect society.''Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews,'' by Marshall McLuhan, edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, Foreword by Tom Wolfe. MIT Press, 2004, p. 271 Neil Postman states, "if in biology a 'medium' is something in which a bacterial culture grows (as in a Petri dish), in media ecology, the medium is 'a technology within which a umanculture grows.'" In other words, "Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word eco ...
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Ethnofiction
Ethnofiction refers to a subfield of ethnography which produces works that introduces art, in the form of storytelling, "thick descriptions and conversational narratives", and even first-person autobiographical accounts, into peer-reviewed academic works. In addition to written texts, the term has also been used in the context of filmmaking, where it refers to ethnographic docufiction, a blend of documentary and fictional film in the area of visual anthropology. It is a film type in which, by means of fictional narrative or creative imagination, often improvising, the portrayed characters (natives) play their own roles as members of an ethnic or social group. Jean Rouch is considered to be the father of ethnofiction. An ethnologist, he discovered that a filmmaker interferes with the event he registers. His camera is never a ''candid camera''. The behavior of the portrayed individuals, the natives, will be affected by its presence. Contrary to the principles of Marcel Griaule, ...
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Docufiction
Docufiction (or docu-fiction) is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is (as direct cinema or cinéma vérité) and which simultaneously introduces unreal elements or fictional situations in narrative in order to strengthen the representation of reality using some kind of artistic expression. More precisely, it is a documentary mixed with fictional elements, in real time, filmed when the events take place, and in which the main character or characters—often portrayed by non-professional or amateur actors—are essentially playing themselves, or slightly fictionalized versions of themselves, in a fictionalized scenario. In this sense, docufiction may overlap to an extent with some aspects of the mockumentary format, but the terms are not synonymous. A film genre in expansion, it is adopted by a number of experimental filmmakers. The neologism d ...
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Democratic Republic Of Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in Central Africa. It is bordered to the northwest by the Republic of the Congo, to the north by the Central African Republic, to the northeast by South Sudan, to the east by Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, and by Tanzania (across Lake Tanganyika), to the south and southeast by Zambia, to the southwest by Angola, and to the west by the South Atlantic Ocean and the Cabinda exclave of Angola. By area, it is the second-largest country in Africa and the 11th-largest in the world. With a population of around 108 million, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the most populous officially Francophone country in the world. The national capital and largest city is Kinshasa, which is also the nation's economic center. Centered on the Congo Ba ...
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The Doon School
The Doon School (informally Doon School or Doon) is a selective all-boys boarding school in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, which was established in 1935. It was envisioned by Satish Ranjan Das, a lawyer from Calcutta, who prevised a school modelled on the British public school while remaining conscious of Indian ambitions and desires. The school admitted its first pupils on 10 September 1935, and formally opened on 27 October 1935, with Lord Willingdon presiding over the ceremony. The school's first headmaster was Arthur E. Foot, an English educationalist who had spent nine years as a science master at Eton College, England. The school houses roughly 500 pupils aged 12 to 18, and admission is based on a competitive entrance examination and an interview with the headmaster. Every year boys are admitted in only two-year groups: seventh grade in January and eighth grade in April. As of May 2019, boys from 26 Indian states as well as 35 non-resident Indians and foreign nationals ...
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