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11 Anthropological filmmaking: an empirical art Theoretical considerations Anthropological filmmaking is necessarily defined by what is considered anthropological at any particular time. But because there is no unanimity about the definition of anthropology, either today or historically, there are many different conceptions of what constitutes an anthropological film. These range from using film (or video) as a simple recording technology, to films made according to specific rules or principles (designed to yield certain categories of knowledge), to audio
nor telling me what to think about them. It was made from the viewpoint of someone who had actually been there. Today I consider observational filmmaking to be a unique documentary film practice. It produces films that differ from most of the other documentary films that we see. It differs also in more subtle ways from similar approaches like Direct Cinema and cinéma-vérité , for it does one thing the others do not do. Instead of focusing exclusively on its subject, it puts the process of finding out
This handbook is intended for those wanting to use documentary filmmaking as a research method to explore subjects and also as a way of expressing ideas. Its focus is practical rather than technical, aiming to complement the many handbooks that already exist covering filmmaking, digital videography, sound recording and video editing. It concentrates on aspects of filmmaking for research purposes at an introductory level that are not so well documented elsewhere, such as the practical stages involved in the production of an ethnographic film. The underlying principal of this handbook is to broaden the application of ethnographic filmmaking to suit a wide range of research areas and documentary expression, encompassing sensory, fictive, observational, participatory, reflexive, performative and immersive modes of storytelling. I have chosen to avoid detailed discussion of technology as this dates quickly. This handbook aims to assist individuals in their personalised searches using online facilities to develop research methods and also teaching, by decoding technical terminology and explaining filmmaking workflows.
willing and able to engage in such debates. Such polemics linked publications and possibly boosted sales too. Watson’s remarks aptly described much amateur activity, but it would be unfair to overlook those films that did explore contemporary society. Watson’s wake-up call for more socially engaged filmmaking was not new. 2 Since the mid-1920s, some filmmakers had tackled topical concerns in factual and
The first years of the new millennium provide an opportunity for assessing how beur filmmaking has developed since the flourishing of the banlieue film in 1995 and the surprise success of Djamel Bensalah’s Le Ciel , les oiseaux … et ta mère in 1999. Since 2000, there has been an increase in the number of beur filmmakers – Kamel Saleh, Karim Abbou (born in 1968 in Puteaux), Kader Ayd (born in 1976 in Nanterre), Rabah Ameur
4 Documentary map-making and film-making in Pat Collins’s Tim Robinson: Connemara Derek Gladwin A map is a sustained attempt upon an unattainable goal, the complete comprehension by an individual of a tract of space that will be individualized into a place by that attempt.1 – Tim Robinson In sum a film is a map, and … its symbolic and political effectiveness is a function of its identity as a cartographic diagram.2 – Tom Conley Documenting through map-making and film-making In the documentary film Tim Robinson: Connemara (2011), director Pat Collins spotlights
Filmmaker Karen Thorsen gave us James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, the award-winning documentary that is now considered a classic. First broadcast on PBS/American Masters in August, 1989—just days after what would have been Baldwin’s sixty-fifth birthday—the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990. It was not the film Thorsen intended to make. Beginning in 1986, Baldwin and Thorsen had been collaborating on a very different film project: a “nonfiction feature” about the history, research, and writing of Baldwin’s next book, “Remember This House.” It was also going to be a film about progress: about how far we had come, how far we still have to go, before we learn to trust our common humanity. But that project ended abruptly. On 1 December 1987, James Baldwin died—and “Remember This House,” book and film died with him. Suddenly, Thorsen’s mission changed: the world needed to know what they had lost. Her alliance with Baldwin took on new meaning. The following memoir—the second of two serialized parts—explores how and why their collaboration began. The first installment appeared in the sixth volume of James Baldwin Review, in the fall of 2020; the next stage of their journey starts here.
This article examines how the ironic construction of queer masculinity from biker culture, a realm of consumer fetishism and hetero-masculinity, in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), influences Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive. As Anger’s film appropriates pop-culture images and icons of biker culture, fetishes of post-Second World War American masculinity, Refn uses overt references to Anger’s film to wage a similar reappropriation of muscle car culture, in the process challenging contemporary images of heterosexual masculinity in Drive. Like Anger, Refn relies upon the dynamics of fetishism and postmodernism’s illumination of the distance between sign and object to subvert muscle cars’ associations with masculine violence and rivalry, mobilising them instead to exploit the inherent multivocality of the fetishised object, seizing the car (and its mobility) as a getaway vehicle to escape prescriptions of identity and limiting definitions of gender and sexuality.
In contrast to the canonical history of cinema and film theory, often dominated by academic texts and Western and/or male voices, this article presents a casual conversation held in 1961 between four of the most influential women in the post-war Japanese film industry: Kawakita Kashiko,,Yamamoto Kyōko, Tanaka Kinuyo and Takamine Hideko. As they openly discuss their gendered experience in production, promotion, distribution and criticism, their thoughts shed light on the wide range of opportunities available to women in filmmaking, but also on the professional constraints,and concerns which they felt came along with their gender. Their conversation reveals how they measured themselves and their national industry in relation to the West; at times unaware of their pioneer role in world cinema. This piece of self-reflexive criticism contributes to existing research on both womens filmmaking and the industry of Japanese cinema, and invites us to reconsider non-hegemonic film thinking practices and voices.
The new wave of Korean cinema has presented a series of distinct genre productions, which are influenced by contemporary Japanese horror cinema and traditions of the Gothic. Ahn Byeong-ki is one of Korea‘s most notable horror film directors, having made four Gothic horrors between 2000 and 2006. These transnational horrors, tales of possession and avenging forces, have repeatedly been drawn to issues of modernity, loneliness, identity, gender, and suicide. Focusing on the figure of the ghostly woman, and the horrors of modern city life in Korea, this essay considers the style of filmmaking employed by Ahn Byeong-ki in depicting, in particular, the Gothic revelation.