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EvansKnight ANTH476 Prof.

Simi

In analyzing the state of ethnographic film circa 1982, Karl Heider looks back at what was then the past 80 or so years of its history, examining the trends in its development both within a purely ethnographic field and without. From his arguments, it seems that the genre underwent a flowering early period, a somewhat less than illustrious middle stage, and, by the second half of the twentieth century, again experienced a rebirth. Theearliestfilmreferencedin the article is one that was made at a time when ethnographic film was barely nascent, a short and rather slapdash attempt torecordanAboriginalAustraliankangaroodance,butatitsheart, composed theconceptionofethnographicfilmasagenre.Ofcourse,giventhecircumstancesof any kind of filmmaking at the time, which is to say its exorbitant expense and the trouble involved in actually recording, editing and producing a final film, this is unsurprising, and it is indeed rather impressive that Baldwin Spencer was at all capable of catching these earliest images on film. Following Spencers example, early ethnographic filmmakers like Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Molinowski took to the islands of Polynesia, to record what could be described as culture in its purestform,notterriblyaffectedbytheoutsideworld.Meadswork, in Heiders eyes, constituted both the good and the bad aspects of thefilmmakingprocess,for its ethnographic content was fairly unbiased and attempted to depict the lives of the people of Bali and New Guinea in a realistic light, but at the same time the issues that plagued all early attempts atfilm,ethnographicorotherwise,gotinthewayofacleanartform.RobertFlahertys endeavorsinethnographicfilm alsopresenttheviewerwithfineexamples,butwouldbeplagued

with problems as well. In his first attempt, Flahertys depiction of native life, such as Nanook, when presented without sound (and only the occasional frame of explanation), engage the viewer and bring him into the mindset of the anthropologist and ethnographer. The greatbreak came with the introduction of soundsynchronous film, and the addition of narration to older films (Nanook). This new aspect of the films, as well as their having to be sped up or slowed down to accommodate the sound, changed the manner in which the viewer interacts with the film, focusing more on the explanation of events, rather than the discovery and hypothesis engendered by their earlier counterparts. The main problem, however, with Flahertys and others films was an attempt not to convey the present state of culture, but to reconstruct a romanticized past. Many of the instances portrayed in Nanook, for instance, were things that the subject himself had never in fact done, but had learned form his forefathers as a cultural legacy, rather than a practical one. Indeed, as filmmaking itself expanded its purview, ethnographic films became more aboutjuxtaposingimagesandsound,withoutnecessarilybeing concerned with continuity of the activities taking place. The films about the Nuer, for example, represented some improvement in the process of making ethnographic films, but at the same time tended to jump from image to image, with no discernable pattern cutting in and out of ceremonies and depictions of daily life with little explanation, all set over the recordedaudioof Nuer elders discussing what was important to them in their lives. Heiders look into what was then the future of ethnographic film is especially interesting, specifically the example of the Navajo filmmakers. Allowing the Navajo to create their own ethnographicfilms,inaninformal, untrained setting, made for an entirelydifferentpointofviewinthefilmsthatweremade.Heider

references the SapirWhorf hypothesis, which in thisinstanceseemstobeinfulleffectthefilms made by the Navajo take a completely different tack that those made by outside observers, bringing to the forefront the differences in how the Navajo perceive their world. This, perhaps morethananythingelse,presentswhatmightbeabrighterfuturetoethnographicfilm,freeofthe often subtle (but equally often obvious) biases held by Westerners and outsiders who have madethesefilmsforsomanyyears.

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