Introduction to Ethnographic Cinema

Cinema's value for anthropological research was clear almost immediately. In 1898, only a few years after the Lumière brothers first projected a motion picture for a public audience, A.C. Haddon made a series of films while conducting ethnographic fieldwork as part of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits. In 1922, Robert Flaherty's widely popular Nanook of the North broke new ground, demonstrating that it was possible to craft a compelling feature-length film from elements of reality, leading to the emergence of a new genre: "documentary film."

Beginning with Haddon and extending into the films by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, this early period of ethnographic cinema tended to focus on performance—using film to elicit demonstrations of ritual, dance, hunting and cooking technique, and so on, with the camera standing in for an audience.

What is ethnographic cinema: art or science? What is its purpose: research, teaching, analysis, interpretation, communicating with the public, or something else entirely? In the second half of the twentieth century, debates about the epistemological value of ethnographic cinema periodically gripped the field, especially as few anthropologists had any training in how to understand and critically evaluate films. Timothy Asch and John Marshall both experimented with approaches to filmmaking for the purpose of anthropological analysis and teaching. Robert Gardner, who had worked on Marshall's first film The Hunters, took a different approach, experimenting with using the expressive capacities of cinema to explore the universal significance of particular stories.

Beginning in the late 1950s, innovations in film technology—especially synchronized sound and lighter, more mobile cameras—made possible new directions for ethnographic cinema. New "schools" of filmmaking developed, with David MacDougall and Jean Rouch as leading figures of Observational Cinema and Cinéma vérité, respectively. Partly as a reaction against heavily narrated, overly didactic films, MacDougall and Rouch both experimented with ways of placing the camera into the flow of everyday life and collaborating with their film subjects—with an impressive breadth of results. Their films suggested new approaches to the anthropological project, anticipating later inquiries into the relationship between knowing and seeing, the formal and aesthetic qualities of ethnography, and the ethics of collaboration.

In the twenty-first century, ethnographic filmmakers continue experimenting with cinematic techniques, technologies, and avenues of distribution to discover new ways of making anthropology on film, while drawing on past models. Lucien Taylor, Véréna Paravel, and J.D. Sniadecki of Harvard's Sensory Ethnographic Lab incorporate a variety of cameras and cinematographic techniques in a synthetic approach that recalls the films of Robert Gardner. Nicola Mai references Jean Rouch's 'ethnofictions' as influential in his approach to making collaborative films that are projected in theaters and art galleries alike. Anna Grimshaw of Emory University's Visual Scholarship Initiative extends the theory and techniques of observational cinema into an exploration of the possibilities afforded to anthropology by multi-part film series.

The concept of a genre of "indigenous film" remains somewhat contested. It is often glossed as the historical emergence of the former subjects of ethnographic cinema taking up the camera for themselves. Yet, this occurred in uneven ways, following distinct trajectories particular to their political context. At the heart of the problem is how broadly to apply it: should it be limited to those filmmakers who self-consciously position their work in the terms of indigenous, Aboriginal, or First Nations politics, or does it also include the emergence of Third World national cinemas following anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? 

Rather than parse out categories from the outset, we opted for a more inclusive approach, allowing the individual films to exhibit their particular perspective and context. A guiding principle was that "indigenous" is a political concept, not merely a descriptive category. We focused on filmmakers who approached filmmaking as a mode of self-determination. We also chose to highlight films recorded in the filmmaker's native languages--sometimes for the first time.

Finally, this section highlights films that can be viewed productively in a critical relationship with other films included in this guide. Consider, for example, pairing Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) with Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (2001). Or Jean Rouch's films with those by Ousmane Sembene or Safi Faye, who played a role in one of Rouch's films before traveling from Senegal to France to study anthropology herself.