Download E-books Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video PDF

By Catherine Russell

Experimental movie and ethnographic movie have lengthy been thought of separate, self sustaining practices at the margins of mainstream cinema. by way of exploring the interaction among the 2 varieties, Catherine Russell throws new mild on either the avant-garde and visible anthropology.
Russell offers targeted analyses of greater than thirty-five motion pictures and movies from the Nineties to the Nineties and discusses quite a lot of movie and videomakers, together with Georges Méliès, Maya Deren, Peter Kubelka, Ray Birdwhistell, Jean Rouch, Su Friedrich, invoice Viola, Kidlat Tahimik, Margaret Mead, Tracey Moffatt, and Chantal Akerman. Arguing that video allows us to determine movie differently—not as a vanishing tradition yet as our bodies inscripted in expertise, Russell maps the gradual fade from modernism to postmodern practices. Combining cultural critique with aesthetic research, she explores the dynamics of historic interruption, restoration, and reevaluation. As disciplinary obstacles dissolve, Russell contends, ethnography is a method of renewing the avant-gardism of “experimental” movie, of mobilizing its play with language and shape for ancient ends. “Ethnography” likewise turns into an expansive time period during which tradition is represented from many various and fragmented perspectives.
Original in either its selection of topic and its theoretical and methodological
approaches, Experimental Ethnography will entice visible anthropologists, in addition to movie students drawn to experimental and documentary practices.

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Their use of experimental movie varieties is heavily certain to the cultural politics of racism and postcolonialism. those filmmakers have, even though, been affected by debates concerning the "positive photos" demanded by way of their respective groups. Their include of experimental shape doesn't sit down simply with the "authenticity" in their racial and ethnic identities. 21 in the area of ethnographic movie, "handing the digicam over" to a local filmmaker usually easily perpetuates the realist aesthetics that experimental movie shape has dislodged. The "authentic identification" of the movie- or videomaker isn't, in different phrases, a adequate revision of ethnographic perform simply because transformations exist inside cultures and groups simply as without doubt as they do among cultural identities. Rachel Moore is going as far as to name indigenous ethnography a "savage empiricism. " 22 Faye Ginsberg has defined the influence of indigenous ethnography on visible anthropology as a "parallax influence. " certainly, it's not the "correctness" of indigenous ethnography lots because the establishing of a number of views that has shifted the emphases of visible anthropology. 23 because the Seventies, ethnographic movie may be stated to be in a kingdom of difficulty, now not simply because nobody is making motion pictures (the creation of video and the one other glance eleven opening of broadcast probabilities have elevated creation exponentially), yet as the prestige of "visible facts" has faltered significantly. As David MacDougall explains: "The early strident demands ethnographic movie to turn into extra medical (or else redefine itself as 'art') were tempered through the belief that many formerly unquestioned assumptions approximately medical fact at the moment are broadly puzzled. it's extra often accredited that the positivist idea of a unmarried ethnographic truth, purely awaiting anthropology to explain it, was once continually a synthetic build. " 24 As a subcategory of documentary movie, ethnography has a huge stake in cinematic realism. As a systematic software of illustration, ethnographic movie assumes that the digital camera files a honest fact, "out there" - a fact specified from that of the viewer and filmmaker. but to accomplish this realism, the filmmaker needs to become aware of a few cardinal ideas, leader between them the admonition to ethnographic matters to not examine the digital camera. yet then reflexivity itself turns into the signature of realism, and that glance again, besides numerous different options, turns into one other point of fact. As Trinh says, "What is gifted as facts continues to be proof, even if the looking at eye qualifies itself as being subjective or target. " 25 In postmodern tradition, whilst reflexive options became recognizable as "style," the evidentiary personality of visible tradition unavoidably shifts. Documentary filmmaking has develop into more and more "subjective," and the nice divide among topic and item, brain and subject, is almost certainly breaking down. during this context, ethnography is liberated from its bond with the true, and from its assumptions approximately fact and which means.

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