I should advice you to check out Jean Rouch's films, they could be of great
interest for your research.
Enjoy,
Juan Antonio
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dr Mikel Koven" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 7:13 PM
Subject: Ethnographic Film
The Ethnographic documentary is all fine and good (although interesting
no one mentioned the work by David MacDougall or Karl Heider. The issue
of how popular film can be seen as 'ethnographic' is a particularly
relevant issue for me.
Here is a quote from Heider's book which I used in my thesis (the joy of
not deleteing old files...)
In some sense we could say that all films are "ethnographic": they are
about people. ... There are many films which have little pretension to
ethnographicness but which are of great interest to the ethnographer. I
personally feel that The Last Picture Show [1971], about the high school
class of 1952 in a small Texas town, is a statement which captures the
culture of my own high school class of 1952 in Lawrence, Kansas.
Likewise, The Harder They Come [1973] (about Jamaica), Scenes from a
Marriage [1973] (about middle-class Swedish marriage), or Tokyo Story
[1953] all present important truths about cultural situations. As
statements (native statements, in fact) about culture, these films are
important, and they could very easily be used as raw data or documents
in ethnographic research. I am tempted to call them more than just "raw
data" and think of them as "naïve ethnography" (Heider: 5).
Some films of particular interest might be Wes Craven's Serpent and the
Rainbow (particularly along side reading Wade Davis's ethnobotonist
account), Matewan, almost any film by Woody Allen, and the list goes on.
Dr. Mikel J. Koven
Dept of Theatre, Film and TV
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
(01970) 621605
[log in to unmask]
http://users.aber.ac.uk/mik
http://users.aber.ac.uk/mikstaff
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