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Beyond Observation offers a historical analysis of ethnographic film from
the birth of cinema in 1895 until 2015. It covers a large number of films made
in a broad range of styles, in many different parts of the world, from the
Arctic to Africa, from urban China to rural Vermont. It is the first extensive
historical account of its kind and will be accessible to students and lecturers
in visual anthropology as well as to those previously unfamiliar with
ethnographic film.
Among the early genres that Paul Henley discusses are
French reportage films, the Soviet kulturfilm, the US travelogue, the classic
documentaries of Robert Flaherty and Basil Wright, as well as the more academic
films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Among the leading film-makers of the
post-war period, he discusses Jean Rouch, John Marshall and Robert Gardner, as
well as the emergence of Observational Cinema in the 1970s. He also considers
‘indigenous media’ projects of the 1980s, and the ethnographic films that
flourished on British television until the 1990s.
In the final part, he
examines the recent films of David and Judith MacDougall, the Harvard Sensory
Media Lab, and a range of films authored in a participatory manner, as possible
models for the future.
The definition of ‘indigenous media’ If the emergence of portable sychronous sound in the 1960s was fundamental to the emergence of more overtly participatory modes of ethnographic film authorship over the following decade, a further technological development in the 1970s facilitated a film-making praxis in which those who had traditionally been only the subjects of ethnographic films could become the authors of their own films about their lives. This technological development took the form of portable, easy-to-use and
through language” (chủ nghĩa quốc gia bằng ngôn ngữ).30 This development was observed with apprehension by the secret police. The creation of a modern indigenous media had not only exposed the old secret societies to the surveillance of the colonial state, it had also begun to unite the disparate groups of “feudal” elite into a broader coalition against the colonial state: Annamite society was, before the war, a handful of individuals from which emerged several feudal families. I indicated that these times had passed and that new groupings have been formed … the most
originators and the spectators of their own representations (be it in cinema, video, or other media): ‘Within “indigenous media”, the producers are themselves the receivers, along with neighbouring communities and, occasionally, distant cultural institutions or festivals’ (Shohat and Stam 1994 : 34). This taxonomy can be applied to Berber cinema in Algeria, particularly in the 1990s when production was dependent on participation
development, and a far cry from the old assumption that states should not intervene in the internal affairs of other nation-states. Indigenous media reform was certainly a major strand of the process of attempting to create a climate of peace and reconciliation in Bosnia, although this was very much felt to be the responsibility of non-military and non-governmental organizations. But, so long as there was a NATO presence, there remained a need for SFOR to communicate not only with local media, however hostile they remained but also, because of this, directly with the local
. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press , 260–9 . Gelder , Ken , and Jane M. Jacobs . 1998 . Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press . Ginsburg , Faye D . 2003 . ‘Embedded aesthetics: Creating a discursive space for Indigenous media
?’, GNU Operating System http://goo.gl/aBna2t (retrieved 01 October 2013). Halkin, A. (2008) ‘Outside the Indigenous lens: Zapatistas and autonomous video-making’, in P. Wilson and M. Stewart (eds) Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics , Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 55–78. Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000) Empire , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Horgan, J. (2001) Irish Media: A Critical History Since 1922 , London: Routledge. Indymedia Ireland (2003) ‘Tá Indymedia ag Oscailt’, http
-colonial struggle was a result of the spread of indigenous media. As the French secret police had observed, the latter helped to transform “Annamite society” from a “handful of individuals from … feudal families” into “a tightly-knit opposition,” united by a new national culture.114 This supposedly ancient national culture, which was “unknown to the Annamites,” would later be invoked by the two postcolonial states in Vietnam as the basis for claiming national territorial sovereignty. This sovereignty, however, is distinct from that of the imperial court, whose weak tyrannical
rule was the first law of media control. Utilising a rhetoric familiar in mid-Victorian Britain to curb opposition, the empire builders classified the Anglo-Indian press as ‘responsible’ while their Indian counterparts were ‘irresponsible’. Hence the former were cultivated as bulwarks against the rising tide of nationalism, whereas the Raj controlled the operation of the indigenous media through
intrinsically linked to the wider UK and in particular London. In their landmark study Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media , Ella Shohat and Robert Stam confirm that artistic, cultural and political alternatives through a wide range of non-Eurocentric media including Third World films, rap videos and indigenous media, overlooked in popular culture and in academia before the 1990s, need to be accessed and given proper attention. Their mediation on multiculturalism is best understood as the self-representation of