Ethnographic Film - Origins

Origins

Prospector, explorer and eventual filmmaker, Robert J. Flaherty, is considered to be the forefather of ethnographic film. His film Nanook of the North falls into the second category, combining home movie, documentary and stagecraft. Flaherty's attempts to realistically portray Inuit people (although he actually used actors and staged a good deal of the production) were nevertheless valuable pictures of a little-known way of life, viewers none-the-less saw his films as "real". Flaherty had no method of study nor training in anthropology, but he did have good relationships with his subjects.

The contribution of Felix-Louis Regnault should be noted as his project may have started the movement. He was filming a Wolof woman making pottery without the aid of a wheel at the Exposition Ethnographique de l'Afrique Occidentale. He published his findings in 1895. His later films followed the same subject, described to capture the "cross cultural study of movement". He then proposed there to be an archive of anthropological film after becoming more experienced with motion pictures.

The to the Torres Straits, initiated by Alfred Cort Haddon in 1898, covered all aspects of the Torres Straits life. Haddon wrote to his friend Baldwin Spencer recommending he use film for recording evidence. Spencer then recorded the Australian Aborigines, a project that consisted of 7,000 feet of film, later housed in the National Museum at Victoria.

In the 1930s, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead discovered that using film frame-by-frame was an essential component of documenting complex rituals in New Guinea; John Marshall made what is likely the most-viewed ethnographic film in American colleges (The Hunters), his filming of the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari (the !Kung-San) spans from 1951 to 2000. His ethnographic film N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman is not only ethnography but also a biography of the central character, N!ai, incorporating footage from her childhood through adulthood. Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch's two famous films, The Ax Fight and The Feast (filmed in the 1960s), are intimately documented ethnographic accounts of an Amazonian rainforest people, the Yanomamo.

The genre flourished in France in the sixties due to the role of ethnographers as Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch. Light 16 mm cameras synchronized with light tape-recorders would re-evolutionise the methods of both cinema and anthropology, founding a new discipline, visual anthropology.

Rouch, who has developed the concept in theory and practice, went against the dogma that in research the camera person must stay out of the event or distance himself as an observer. He decided to make the camera interfere and became an actor, developing and popularizing Cinéma vérité and becoming a pioneer of docufiction. This was of course earlier deemed the "observer effect" by Gregory Bateson, who was perhaps unaware of the dogma Rouch was attempting to violate. Bateson, as one of the earliest to write about using cameras in the studies of humans, was not only aware of the observer effect, but both he and his partner, Margaret Mead, wrote about many ways of dealing theoretically and practically of that effect.

Robert Gardner and Karl Heider were among the first to carefully plan the use of filming and editing as crucial research techniques. This resulted in the classic multi-point of view Dead Birds (1964). David Maybury-Lewis was among the first to receive enough funding to send many video cameras into the field in a single field setting to gain multiple simultaneous points of view. In the 1970s, Judith and David MacDougall introduced subtitling their subjects' speech and went on to make films that involved more collaborative relationships with their subjects. In the 1980s, Trinh T. Minh-ha fostered a movement in ethnographic filmmaking that questions ideas of objectivity in film by using experimental montage and reflexive production techniques.