An ethnographic film is a documentary film related to the methods of ethnology. It emerged in the 1960s as an important tool for research in the domain of visual anthropology, when filming human groups in society. There are two main types of ethnographic films: those created specifically by ethnographers in the course of their professional work and those created by others, but used in the study of culture. Programs in visual anthropology train professionals to make the first kind of film; Hollywood movies, documentaries by non-anthropologists and even home movies and Youtube fall into the second category.[1] While the actual medium of "film" is strongly associated with early ethnographic attempts, today ethnographic films are made in video and digital media as well, and may contain elements of text and animation.
Gregory Bateson discovered in the 1930s that using film, frame by frame, was an essential component of documenting complex rituals in New Guinea; John Marshall made what is likely the most-viewed ethnographic film in American colleges (The Hunters),[2] his filming of the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari (the !Kung-San) spans from 1951 to 2000. His ethnographic film N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman is not only ethnography but also a biography of the central character, N!ai, incorporating footage from her childhood through adulthood. Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch's two famous films, The Ax Fight and The Feast (filmed in the 1960s) are rarely forgotten by those who get the chance to view this up close and carefully documented ethnographic account of an Amazonian rainforest people, the Yanomamo. Robert Gardner and Karl Heider were among the first to carefully plan to use filming and editing as crucial research techniques, resulting in the classic multi-point of view Dead Birds (1964), while David Mayberry-Lewis was among the first to receive enough funding to send many video cameras into the field, in one field setting, gaining multiple simultaneous points of view.
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Prospector, explorer and, eventual filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty is often considered as the forefather of ethnographic film. His film Nanook of the North falls into the second category, combining home movie, documentary and stagecraft. Flaherty's attempts to realistically portray Inuit people (although he actually used actors and staged a good deal of the production) were nevertheless valuable pictures of a little-known way of life, and with good reason, viewers saw his films as "real." Flaherty had no method of study nor training in anthropology, but he did have good relationships with his subjects, at least most of the time.[3]
The genre flourished in France in the sixties due to the role of ethnographers as Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch. Light 16 mm cameras synchronized with light tape-recorders would revolutionise the methods of both cinema and anthropology, founding a new discipline, visual anthropology.
Rouch, who has developed the concept in theory and practice, went against the dogma that in research, the camera must stay out of the event, taking some distance, as simple observer. He decided to make the camera interfere and he himself became an actor in the action and so became one of the pioneers of docufiction. This was of course earlier deemed the "observer effect" by Gregory Bateson, who was perhaps unaware of the dogma Rouch was attempting to violate. Bateson, as one of the earliest to write about using cameras in the studies of humans, was not only aware of the observer effect, but both he and his partner, Margaret Mead, wrote about many ways of dealing theoretically and practically of that effect.[4]
The Academy Award-winning film Black Orpheus can be considered another milestone in the second category. Much like Flaherty's work, director and producer Marcel Camus strove to depict the mythos of a culture, in his case, a favela in Rio de Janeiro at the time of Carnaval. He managed to preserve some of the few scenes of a mid-20th century Carnaval, as most scenes were filmed without preparation. The actors were hired, but the extras were real participants.
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