World Ethnography in Film
Elmer Beal, Jr. - Instructor

Course Syllabus

Ethnographic film is a product of the twentieth century. Anthropologists from the western world had already spread out to study and write about the cultures which, with their technology and economic system, they had colonized. As film became available as a medium for documentation, peoples who were unfamiliar to Europeans and Americans began to be put on film and to be brought vividly into the theater and classroom. There is something so directly engaging about moving images - the opportunity is there to feel as if one has traveled and seen for oneself. In the early years, it seems many neglected to recognize the power and artistry of the medium to present the filmmaker's vision and not the reality of the exotic cultures they filmed.

By the late 1960's, in the critical ethos of the times, audiences generally, and anthropologists especially, wondered if the medium could be anything other than the objectification of colonized peoples and the abstracted vision of the filmmakers. Still, we have a deep interest in people and places far from home. Can film give us enough of the cultural context so that the viewer understands the exotic and doesn't feel ethnocentrically biased against it? And what of the many films made in the early years? Many of them document cultures which have changed radically since they were first filmed (like the people of highland Papua New Guinea whose first view of the outside world came in the 1930's with Australians carrying a 16mm camera). Such footage is an irreplaceable record of a people whose isolation will never be restored.

So film, despite its problems, can be a source which allows us to appreciate our common humanity with its incredibly diverse creativity in the development of custom, tradition, and the other elements of culture. Properly critiqued, even primitive ethnographic films can provide some cross cultural comparisons and insight into the ways of others. Since the advent of video technology, film has undergone a kind of democratization, and we now find tribal peoples using video to document their own cultures in order to preserve them or to present them to the rest of the world on their own terms.

In order to begin comprehending this medium and its many messages, twenty films are presented with accompanying lectures and discussion. Students are encouraged to view each film several times and additional films are made available for supplemental viewing outside of class. Two texts are provided (Ethnographic Film by Karl Heider, and Innovation in Ethnographic Film by Peter Loizos) which explicate the genre, discuss technical aspects of the medium, and chronicle its history as ethnography (as opposed to commercial film). Students are expected to become familiar with the vocabulary of professional criticism to evaluate subject matter, ethnographic authentication, strategies of argument, realism, authorial and subjective voice, and representation of the film creators as well as their subjects.

Students are asked to submit a written review of each of the twenty films, commenting on cinematography, other technical matters (such as type of narration, music, whether the audience is addressed, etc.), how the construction of the film affects them as viewers, and ethnographic content. Students are also asked to reflect on whether film can successfully "do" ethnography. To aid in this, (and to understand both the limitations and peculiar advantages which film has as an ethnographic device) students are asked to select from a list of written ethnographies to compare what is possible with texts.

College of the Atlantic; 105 Eden St. Bar Harbor, ME, 04609
Phone: 207-288-5015 Fax: 207-288-4126
Admission: 1-800-528-0025

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