How Ethnographic Films have developed in 1920's

How Ethnographic Films have developed in 1920's

Introduction

Ethnographic films are a part of visual anthropology. Visual anthropology is typically considered a sub-field of cultural anthropology that developed out of the study and production of ethnographic photography and film. However, there are some anthropologists who disagree and instead place it “squarely within the discipline of anthropology” (El Guindi, 2004, p. 19). Visual anthropology is useful for ethnographic research, media analysis, and studies of material culture. Visual anthropology also encompasses the anthropological study of representation, including areas such as performance, museums, art, and the production and reception of mass media(Eriksen,Thomas,2001).

Films in today's world are considered to be the most powerful medium for expanding and understanding visual anthropology. As a mass medium, television has a power of immediacy unlike few other visual media. It also has the ability to popularize science on a mass scale. It can show science news and events in real time. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its space missions from the 1960s to the present day have helped popularize rocket science, astronomy, and astrophysics. Beyond the medium's ability to draw worldwide audiences of hundreds of thousands for historic events like landing on the moon, everyday television programming includes numerous science-based images. These include meteorological images of the daily and weekly weather patterns, obtained using Doppler radar technology, as well as commercials for companies such as Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, and General Electric that use images of science in their corporate advertising (Monoghan et.al,2000).

Discussion

History of Ethnographic Films

Early ethnologists were using photography as a research tool . Many of these photographs, like those of Native Americans made by Edward S. Curtis, were made in an effort to preserve societies and their way of life . Historically, anthropological filmmaking was associated with documentary filmmaking; Barnouw suggests that a person who made such a film was a “documentarist as travel lecturer” , for instance, some of the first ethnographic films (e.g., Promenades des Éléphants à Phnom Penh with the intent of exposing “pristine” cultures. This same pattern persisted in later ethnographic films, such as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, in 1922, about the lives of Arctic peoples and Robert Gardner's Dead Birds, in 1965, about the Dani people of New Guinea (Hendry,Joy,1999).

In the history of visual anthropology within the scientific realm, early pioneers and their accomplishments included the following:

Félix-Louis Regnault, chronophotographic film of a Wolof woman making pots and later a study of body movement and behaviour, 1888-1896

Alfred Haddon, photography of Torres Strait, 1898

Baldwin Spencer, photographs, films, and recordings of aboriginal society in central Australia, 1899

Franz Boas, 16-mm films of the Kwakiutl, 1930

Marcel Griaule, 35-mm films Au Pays des Dogon and Sous les Masques Noirs, 1935-1938

Ethnographic Films-Apart of Ethnographic Anthropology

Some credit Regnault, a physician interested in anthropology, as the first ethnographic filmmaker . All of these early research projects were marked by difficulty in transporting heavy, rudimentary equipment to the field. In the ethnographic arena, the work of John Marshall (Bushmen series), Tim Asch ...