Search Results

The Expedition Films of Major Luiz Thomaz Reis

Maite Conde

in Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil

Brazil’s Rondon Commission produced a number of documentaries, including Os sertões de Matto Grosso (The Hinterlands of Matto Grosso, 1912), Rituais e festas Bororó (Rituals and Festivities of the ... More

Brazil’s Rondon Commission produced a number of documentaries, including Os sertões de Matto Grosso (The Hinterlands of Matto Grosso, 1912), Rituais e festas Bororó (Rituals and Festivities of the Bororó Indians, 1917), and Ronuro, Selvas do Xingú (Ronuro, Jungles of the Xingú Indians, 1924), which were directed by Major Luiz Thomas Reis. This chapter examines these films in detail. Analyzing their fascination with charting and mapping the lands and especially the bodies and cultures of indigenous peoples in Brazil’s Amazon basin, it looks at how the films’ spectacle of panoramic and anatomical difference were intimately linked to contemporary discourses concerning the constitution of a modern and progressive Brazil that, in particular, hinged on making both productive and profitable for Brazil’s future progress.Less

Between Paris and the Land of Nowhere

in The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema

In contrast to other leading figures of ethnographic cinema, such as Robert Gardner or David and Judith MacDougall, who have made films in several different continents, Jean Rouch returned ... More

In contrast to other leading figures of ethnographic cinema, such as Robert Gardner or David and Judith MacDougall, who have made films in several different continents, Jean Rouch returned religiously to the same relatively circumscribed part of West Africa throughout his life. Even while he was being lionized as a leading figure in the world of cinema in Paris in the 1960s, he continued to return to the region with great regularity. Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Rouch would shoot at least two films in West Africa every year, usually more. This chapter focuses on the films made during this period. A number of new themes and genres appeared in Rouch's West African repertoire over this period, one of which concerned social and economic development. Hunting was another theme from his earlier work that Rouch continued to explore through his filmmaking in the 1960s. But whereas his earlier films had concerned the hunting of hippopotami in the waters of the Niger River, the films of the 1960s were about the hunting of lions in the semidesert that stretches across the frontiers between Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso.Less

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

Ute Holl

in Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction

This chapter examines the example of Bateson and Margaret Mead, who as anthropologists made use of photography and film to record Balinese characters and culture. They took pictures and shot films of ... More

This chapter examines the example of Bateson and Margaret Mead, who as anthropologists made use of photography and film to record Balinese characters and culture. They took pictures and shot films of dances and trances and, as Holl suggests, became exposed to a magic that was the consequence not so much of Balinese trance techniques as of cinematographic technologies that they themselves had brought to Bali. In fact, they ignored not only the cinematographic time structure that creates an imaginary effect through the conversion of discrete pictures into movement perception, but also the illusionary and trance-producing aspects of film. They experienced the difficulties (perhaps the impossibility) of achieving a balance between scientific self-mastery and abandoning selfcontrol.Less

“Sensory Ethnography”

Scott MacDonald

in Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema

The Sensory Ethnography Lab, founded by Lucien Castaing-Taylor at Harvard in 2006, has become a productive “studio” for feature films that combine an ethnographic consciousness with avant-garde ... More

The Sensory Ethnography Lab, founded by Lucien Castaing-Taylor at Harvard in 2006, has become a productive “studio” for feature films that combine an ethnographic consciousness with avant-garde approaches. The resulting films—collaborative works like Ilisa Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass, J. P. Sniadecki and Véréna Paravel’s Foreign Parts, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s Leviathan, Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana, along with these filmmakers’ solo works—are the quintessential avant-docs of the moment. This five-part interview includes a discussion of Sweetgrass with its makers; a discussion with Castaing-Taylor about his installation work; a conversation with Castaing-Taylor about the thinking embodied in the Sensory Ethnography Lab; a discussion of Leviathan with Castaing-Taylor and Paravel; and a discussion of Manakamana with Spray and Velez.Less

Documentary Educational Resources: A Brief Oral History

Scott MacDonald

in The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama

Any important contribution to the history of cinema requires more than accomplished filmmakers. Indeed, filmmaking accomplishment itself is nearly always dependent on the availability of exhibition ... More

Any important contribution to the history of cinema requires more than accomplished filmmakers. Indeed, filmmaking accomplishment itself is nearly always dependent on the availability of exhibition venues and distribution organizations. Documentary Educational Resources (DER) is a crucial distributor for a wide range of ethnographic films from across the world. Founded by John Marshall and Timothy Asch in 1971 in order to make their own films available, DER now makes available to colleges and universities, schools, and festivals, eight hundred films by hundreds of nonfiction filmmakers from across the globe who are committed to cinema as a form of cultural education and immersion. This interview with the three women who have served as DER’s executive directors over recent decades traces the evolution of a model independent distributor.Less

Robert Gardner

Scott MacDonald

in Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema

This interview with Robert Gardner focuses on his early experimental films, made in Seattle; his arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he headed Harvard’s Film Study Center and worked with John ... More

This interview with Robert Gardner focuses on his early experimental films, made in Seattle; his arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he headed Harvard’s Film Study Center and worked with John Marshall; his input into the organization of the Carpenter Center for the Arts; his emergence as an important and controversial ethnographic filmmaker with Dead Birds and Forest of Bliss; his television show Screening Room, which broadcast avant-garde films, documentaries, and animations to a quarter of a million people in the Boston area; and several recent works that provide retrospectives of his career. Along the way, Gardner talks about his proposed collaboration with avant-garde filmmaker Sidney Peterson, his meetings with Robert Frost and Francis Flaherty, and his suspicion of cinema-verite filmmaking.Less

Anthropology and the cinematic imagination

David MacDougall

in The looking machine: Essays on cinema, anthropology and documentary filmmaking

The anthropologist George Marcus has written that cinema helped to inspire the use of montage-like juxtapositions in ethnographic texts. In this chapter, the author argues that the emergence of a ... More

The anthropologist George Marcus has written that cinema helped to inspire the use of montage-like juxtapositions in ethnographic texts. In this chapter, the author argues that the emergence of a cinematic imagination, which imagines the world constructed around the viewer, had more effect on anthropological writing than the presence of films themselves. Concern about how the construction of documentary films represents reality also probably preceded similar concerns by anthropologists about the writing of anthropological texts. In the 19th and early 20th century, anthropologists conceived of images as a source of knowledge, but this waned as they turned to less visible aspects of culture. Interest in visual anthropology only revived after the Second World War with the work of Jean Rouch and John Marshall, the first of whom pioneered a form of intense, immersive cinema, and the second who employed filming and editing strategies that placed the viewer imaginatively within the three-dimensional field of the scenes filmed. This tended to counteract the perceptual and conceptual ‘flatness’ of earlier representations of culture. Malinowski’s and Evans-Pritchard's writing had contributed to a more immediate and rounded view, but ethnographic cinema confirmed it, making a significant contribution to anthropology as a whole.Less

Photography and Film in Ireland and Alaska

George Gmelch and Sharon Bohn Gmelch

in In the Field: Life and Work in Cultural Anthropology

This chapter discusses visual anthropology and several related research projects. One involves an analysis of historical images to explore the introduction of photography into Tlingit territory and ... More

This chapter discusses visual anthropology and several related research projects. One involves an analysis of historical images to explore the introduction of photography into Tlingit territory and the uses to which early photographs were put. A second uses old photographs of Irish Travellers in interviews with them to elicit their reflections on the dramatic changes (e.g., loss of nomadism) that have occurred in their lives. The chapter then discusses two forays into film: Sharon’s work as co-producer of an ethnographic film about the Tlingit, and both authors’ experiences as subjects in a documentary for Irish television.Less

The Attractions of the North: Early Film Expeditions to the Exotic Snowscape

Marina Dahlquist

in Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic

This chapter examines a large number of actualités - short non-fiction films from the early history of cinema - set in the Scandinavian Arctic. Exemplifying with early documentaries made by primarily ... More

This chapter examines a large number of actualités - short non-fiction films from the early history of cinema - set in the Scandinavian Arctic. Exemplifying with early documentaries made by primarily Swedish and French film companies, including Pathé Frères, Svenska Biografteatern, Svensk Kinematograf and Svensk Filmindustri, Dahlquist discusses the exoticization and racialization of the Sámi population that were constituent of the these early films. Such tropes, Dahlquist shows, were common also in other forms of visual mass media at the time, exhibits at the Stockholm open-air museum Skansen included. The chapter traces production, distribution, circulation, and reception history of these films. Dahlquist also presents key thematic and visual components of Victor Sjöström’s silent drama film Daughter of the Peaks (1914).Less

Craig Johnson

Scott MacDonald

in The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama

Craig Johnson was the “third man” in what has become one of the legendary ethnographic adventures and bodies of ethnographic cinema: the series of films about the indigenous Yanomamö living in the ... More

Craig Johnson was the “third man” in what has become one of the legendary ethnographic adventures and bodies of ethnographic cinema: the series of films about the indigenous Yanomamö living in the highland jungles of southern Venezuela, produced by anthropologists Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch. Johnson, who took sound for the canonical The Ax Fight (1974) and other Yanomamö films, and edited some of them, had never spoken publicly about his involvement in and thoughts about his early filmmaking adventure, until this interview. In the years following his disenchantment with the Yanomamö project, Johnson worked on various films and now, through his Interpret Green, develops and constructs interactive installations for museums.Less