Ethnographic Film: Failure and Promise

Abstract

Ethnographic films cannot be said to constitute a genre, nor is ethnographic film-making a discipline with unified origins and an established methodol­ ogy. Since the first conference on ethnographic film was held at the Musee de l'Homme 30 years ago, the term has served a largely emblematic func­ tion, giving a semblance of unity to extremely diverse efforts in the cinema and social sciences. A canon of ethnographic films has gradually emerged, and in the past dozen years a movement has grown up nourished by founda­ tion grants, further international conferences, theoretical publications, and training programs. Faced with defining ethnographic film, some writers (7, 14) have con­ cluded that one can only say some films are more ethnographic than others, or that films become ethnographic by virtue of their use (37, 38). Since all films are cultural artifacts, many can tell us as much about the societies that produced them as about those they purport to describe. Films can thus serve as a source of data for social science in the manner of myths, rock paintings, and government papers. From World War II onwards, fiction as well as documentary films have been studied sporadically for their ethnographic content (2, 5, 16, 35). In practice, most discussions of ethnographic film set aside films useful to anthropologists as naive cultural documents and narrow the field to those made with some discernible intention of recording and revealing cultural patterns. Some writers, induding Rouch (27) and de Heusch (8), have refused to pursue further distinctions, arguing that to do so is to inhibit the cross-fertilization of varied approaches. Others (1, 12, 14, 18-20, 25, 31)