Beyond observation

Front matter

bir

SA HISTORY OF

Beyond observation

Part I Histories: ethnographic film in the twentieth century 1 2 3

Travel films, melodrama and the origins of ethnofiction The invisible author: films of re-enactment in the post-war period

Records, not movies: the early films of John Marshall and Timothy Asch

Reflexivity and participation: the films of David and Judith MacDougall in Africa and Australia

Entangled voices: the complexities of collaborative authorship

The subject as author: indigenous media and the

Video nas Aldeias project

Part II Authors: three key figures g 10 Colin Young: the principles of Observational Cinema vii

256 288

Contents

Part III Television as meta-author: ethnographic film in Britain

Ways of doing ethnographic film on British television Beyond the ‘disappearing world’ — and back again The decline of ethnographic film on British television

Part IV Beyond observation: ethnographic film in the twenty-first century The evolution of Observational Cinema: recent films

of David and Judith MacDougall

Negative capability and the flux of life: films of the Sensory Ethnography Lab

An epilogue: return to Kiriwina — the ethnographic film-maker as é thor

Appendix: British television documentaries produced in collaboration with ethnographic researchers

315 320 348 370

514 525

Figures

1.1 Alfred Haddon and Baldwin Spencer — unwitting

witnesses. page 33

(a) a Islanders recreate the journeys of their

e-hero in the form of a shark. (b) T alla dancers carry dance sticks entwined with human hair.

1.2 Though an excellent photographer, Theodor

Koch-Grünberg had difficulty mastering the skills of cinematography. 38 with ethnograp. 1.6 — au |

1, Cameroon, as featured ule’s films of the Dogon (shot in 1935). 47 (1935) Left, fishing is ond cted by means are intercut aie onde of a ‘tank statue of the Buddha. 50

iti oo Amoaha Doa of Anthropological Research do Museo do P e Haw, 55

2.6 a9

3.3 rosso expedition of 1930-31. ene sextet i in the films of Margaret Mead

= ie = ea jai opiu colony of Annam filmed i Del at Capital - I

= late a lia (1905. “a four minutes,

Simba, King of the hae (1928), « id Osa Johnson.

Grass — A Nations Battle for Life (1925). The story of Bakhtiari migration is built around the headman Haidar Kahn and his son Lufta.

In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914). Left, Motana watches Naida depart; right, Motana’s party arrives in style for the wedding feast.

Nanook of the North (1922) retained certain features

of the travelogue, but offered an unprecedented intimacy with the subjects.

Nanook of the North (1922). Left, the family makes haste to find shelter; right, Alakariallak and ‘the hold that life has’.

Netsilik themes. The series was mainly concerned with ecological adaptation. Aimed at high school pupils, there was ai: a deities Aep on o ected by Martin

Netsilik characters. Itimanguerk, left, a headman of around $0. With his wife, right, he provides a

thread of continuity through the 11-hour series. (Images courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources).

At Patantja Claypan (1967). Left, a girl takes refuge from intense midday sun; right, a senior man sets out to hunt emu. (With permission of the Ngaanyatjarra Community Association).

The Hunters (1957). Left, the hunters are introduced with romantic profiles; right, the giraffe has come to a halt, but still will not fall. (Images courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources).

58 63 66

79 84

TOI

4.4

5-5

5.6

An Argument About A Marriage (1969). /Tikay, left, threatens /Qui but /Qui, right, does not allow himself to be provoked. (Images courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources).

Magical Death (1973).‘The hekura, being beautiful, are likewise attracted to beauty’; right, in The Feast (1970), the headman calculates the distribution of food. (Images courtesy of Documentary Educational adler: step a woman sem fe across pie vill: laza. (Images courtesy of Documentary

E onal Resources).

To Live with Herds (1972). Left, Logoth leaves for the cattle camps. Right, severely affected by drought, the Jie sell their animals. (Images courtesy of David MacDougall).

ing Camels (1977). The formal blessing of the marriage is only an interlude in the incessant haggling about bridewealth. (Images courtesy of David MacDougall).

Left, in A Wife among Wives (1981), the prosp

E editing Cole old

is advised by Thomas Woody Minipini. (inane courtesy of David MacDougall).

Left, Takeover (1979): the Federal Minister of Aboriginal

Affairs assures the Aurukun elders that nothing will happen without their consent. Right, The

House-Opening (1980): the brother of the deceased man wails formally on the shoulder of his widow.

(Images courtesy of David MacDougall).

Familiar Places (1980). Left, anthropologist Peter Sutton discusses mapping with Angus Namponan; right,

Jack Spear sings about the Dreamtime sisters. (Images courtesy of David MacDougall).

Left, Jero Tapakan appeals to her guardian deity in

A Balinese T nce (1979); right, Jero discusses this film with anthropologist Linda Connor in Jero

7.2

7.4

8.3

Yirrkala Film Project. Left, Pain for This Land (1970-71) — the Yolngu wanted to film traditional custom as much as the impact of the bauxite mine; right, Ian Dunlop with Dundiwuy and his daughter in Conversations with Dundiwuy (1995). (With permission of the Yolngu community).

The Drums of Winter (1988). The Yup’ik potlatch is the occasion for exchanges not only between the living, but also between the living and the dead.

| ry of a [Kung Woman (1980) — ‘Death cing wih me’; right, A Kalahari Family: Death

Is a by Myth (2001) — captured by a night-time camera, an 1 elephant destroys the Ju/hoansi irrigation system. Intrepid Shadows, left,

featured a traditional mask modified by a vertical strip resembling film stock. Right, in The Navajo Silversmith, the main character walks a great deal.

Left, Mokuka, of the Kayapo Video Project, at a rally in 1989 to protest against the Altamira dam. Right, the Kayapo also use camcorders to record traditional ceremonies.

Modes of collaboration. Left, a Q’echqi’ Maya crew in the community of Esperanza Chilatz, Guatemala, April-May 1995 (© Carlos Flores); right, In Search of a Bororo Mr. Right (2019) — a romantic comedy with an ethnographic subtext.

Video nas Aldeas cinematographers. Left, Kasiripina l i, who shot additional footage for Meeting the

; (1993); right, Divino Tserewahú, the Xavante cameraman. h iges courtesy of Documentary ional Resources).

Hyperwomen (2011) was co-directed by the indigenous cinematographer Takuma Kuikuru.

Jean Rouch in 1954 on the Gold Coast (now Ghana), aged 36. (© Jocelyne Rouch).

Experiences of migration. In Les Maitres fous (1955), left, a migrant is possessed by the ‘Lieutenant from

the Red Sea’; right, Moi un Noir (1960) is based on the real life experiences of Oumarou Ganda.

Le Dama d’Ambara (1980). The kanaga masks, left, evoke the Pale Fox, a trickster demiurge, while the longer serige masks, right, represent vertical snakes associated with immortality. (© Jocelyne Rouch).

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8.4

9.1

9.3

Sharing anthropology. Left, Damouré, Lam and Douma Besso in Kumasi Market in 1954 (© Jocelyne Rouch); right, Jean Rouch shoots Damouré, Tallou Mouzourane and Lam in Amsterdam in 1992. (© MM Filmprodukties).

Les Tambours d’avant ( vee the musicians that sien was still sh eer rii mik va i e in Chronicle of a Summer (1961).

Riet Gardner, aged 58, in Varanasi in 1984. (Photograph courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources).

s r Left, the beating of women is part of Hamar tra en are also afflicted, through their own tyranny... ’. (Images courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources).

Deep Hearts (1981). Left, a man prepares for the geerewol ceremony; right, a young woman selects her favourite. [Photographi courtesy of Documentary Educational ds (1964). Left, a Dani man injured by an enemy arrow while right, a warrior looks over the battleground.

Forest of Bliss (1986), material metaphors. (Images courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources).

Forest of Bliss (1986), subjects as metaphors. (Images courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources).

t of Bliss (1986), metaphors of transition to the hore’. (Images courtesy of Documentary lucational Resources).

Colo Young in his gist year, in conversation with the author, August 2017. (© Richard Henley).

The ‘as if? chronology of The Village (1968). (Images courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources).

Peter Murray (1975). ‘The more energy you put into a piece, the brighter its light’.

Left, Cuyagua — Devil Dancers (1986); right, Cuyagua — The Saint with Tivo Faces (1987). (Photographs © Paul Henley).

Celso and Cora (1983). After one of their recurrent arguments, Celso ends up sleeping rough with their daughter.

TL

II.2

11.4

IL.§

11.6

12.1

12.2

12.3

12.4

The Last of the Cuiva (1971) opens with a go-second pre-title sequence intercutting images of the Cuiva and the cowboys threatening their way of life.

In i ge Big Moka (1974), two Melanesian ù Y compete for prestige in a moka gift-giving ceremony.

New ‘ways of doing’ ethnographic film for television, 1977. Left, Some Women of Marrakesh, the first film to be made by an all-woman crew; for Eskimos of Pond Inlet, right, members of the comm all stages. (Photograph by Alex Williams, courtesy of Hugh Brody). ions appearing worlds i in Communist Asia. Left,

í F ti 75); right, Inside ty were consulted at

Films about the N Mursi i age-set aes ene

Villes councillor of a world that disappeared long ago in France.

Baka: shia n the Ti a econ in search

© Phil peen pe image sọ Ta ioni, both courtesy of Phil Agland).

The Ark bia Left, the Head a bids i. to threaten to ‘sd ld the see tes Cs some women become hysterical.

one of Simel’s sons, undergoes the ibaa ceremony.

12.6

14.2

14.3

(Images courtesy of Documentary Educational Resource poh

Miisia’s senior wife misses she up ene: righ it, pie ran off to town as she could no longer tolerate beatings.

Surv of the Rainforest (1993). During a three-day

Yanomami village on the upper

Orinoco, ack sits with his guests. (© Andy Jillings).

ies made in China by Phil Agland. Left, the cturist Dr Teng is a leading character in Beyond ds (1994), whilst his daughter, Teng Shao, and her landlady, Mrs Feng, right, feature prominently in Shanghai Vice (1999).

Films by Kim Longinotto. Left, in Divorce Irani (2004), a woman pleads for divorce in an Islami in Tehran; right, a Senegalese judge dispenses justice in Sisters in Law (2005).

oyal Watchers (1997). The Queen, left, meets the ‘royalists’ outside Lincoln Cathedral, while Diana, Princess of Wales, right, meets the same group in London three days later.

Welcome to Lagos (2010). Left, cattle are brought to Lagos market from as far away as Chad and Southern Sudan. wees Eric danas ala’ Tae Sionit, scavenges ae goats and right, Miminu and Franchiscu’s son, 2 David MacDougall). ilms directed by Judith MacDougall. Left, Diya

Goa concerns a family of potters in Dehra Dun, north India, while The Art of Regret (2007), right, explores the uses of photography in Kunming, southwest China. (Images courtesy of David and Judith MacDougall).

Doon School Chronicles (2000). The first film of the quintet focuses on the way in which the environment of the school moulds the boys. (Images courtesy of David MacDougall).

14.6

14.7

15.2

15.4

16.1

16:32

16.4

Later films focus more on the boys’ own agency.

Left, an argument breaks out in The New Boys

(2003); right, Abhishek Shukla, principal subject of

The Age of Reason (2004). (Images courtesy of David MacDougall).

Films at the Rishi Valley School. Some Alien Creatures (2005), above, is similar to the Doon School films, whilst Schoolscapes (2007), below, is more experimental. (Images courtesy of David MacDougall).

Gandhi’ Children (2008). Street children and orphans are given food and lodging at the Prayas Home, but it is also a place of imprisonment. (Images courtesy of David MacDougall).

Sweetgrass (2009). Left, Pat Connolly complains to his mother by mobile phone ab fe on the high plains.

Right, at the end of the trail, John Ahern moves on to an uncertain future.

Sweetgrass (2009). Left, a ‘bellwether’ ewe. Right, the sheep are herded through the forest on the way to the high plains.

Foreign Parts (2011). Left, Road Runner says his prayers. Right, Joe Ardizzone, ‘When the real estate taxes

come up ... then all of sudden they know exactly where we live’.

Leviathan (2012). Left, the only well-lit shot of a human being is a reflection. Right, many dramatic shots were taken from GoPro cameras dropped over the side of the trawler.

Manakamana (2014). Each time a new set of travellers emerges from the darkness of the terminal works as

an amusing coup de théâtre.

Cultural mapping in Tiacks Across Sand (2012). (Images by Kirk Tougas, courtesy of Hugh Brody).

Transfiction (2007). Fabia Mirassos, left, who plays Meg, and Bibi Meirelles, who plays Zilda, at the salon where Fabia works as a hairdresser. (© Eric Brochu, courtesy of Johannes Sjöberg).

Koriam’s Law and the Dead Who Govern (2005). Left, the people of Pomio, New Britain, offer food and money to the dead. But the Catholic priest, right, urges them to help their children instead.

The Hamar trilogy. In The Women Who Smile (1990), left, and Tivo Girls Go Hunting (1991), the focus is on

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16.5

16.6 the lives of women. Right, the third part, Our Way of Loving (1994), also embraces other themes, including the male initiation ceremony.

Duka’s Dilemma (2002). Left, when Duka’s husband takes a much younger wife, Boro, initially she feels threatened. But after she helps Boro giving birth, the two wives become mutually supportive.

Kalanda (2015). Left, the film-maker sits at the feet of a master-hunter; right, whilst learning to hunt, he used an extreme wide-angle lens to emphasize his perceptual frustration. (Images courtesy of Lorenzo Ferrarini).

Acknowledgements

T book has grown directly out of the thirty years that I have taught on the various postgraduate programmes offered through the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Most of the chapters began life as notes for a series of lectures on the history of ethnographic film that I gave over many years and in a variety of guises. Although they have undergone many transformations since, my primary intended audience remains those who are approaching ethnographic filmmaking for the first time, whether it be as students, as teachers of anthropology or any other academic discipline that involves ethnography, or as film-makers working in other documentary genres who may be interested to discover more about ethnographic film.

While I hope to have been able to impart some elements of wisdom to the many students who have passed through our programmes, I am certain that I have learned a great deal from them, so my first expression of gratitude here is to them. I am also particularly indebted to David Turton, then Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at Manchester who was responsible, together with Marilyn Strathern, head of the Department, and Leslie Woodhead, the distinguished documentary director, then of Granada Television, not only for the conception and creation of the Granada Centre in 1987 but also for appointing me as its first Director. I am also grateful to the many other anthropologist colleagues at Manchester, in the broader department as well as in the Granada Centre itself, who have made the Centre such a stimulating and unusual place to work over the past thirty years.

I would probably never have been invited to teach at Manchester had it not been for the time that I had spent at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) at Beaconsfield, in the years 1984—87, as a beneficiary of the Ethnographic Film Training programme, a project conceived and funded by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) with the aid of a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. Much more recently, during 2014-17, the Trust again provided me with inestimably valuable support in appointing me to a Major xviii

Acknowledgements

Research Fellowship dedicated to an investigation of early ethnographic film. The early chapters of this book represent the first fruits of that period of research.

The people who made the RAI-Leverhulme programme at the NFTS happen in practice were Colin Young, then the Director of the School, and Herb di Gioia, head of the Documentary department. Colin and Herb, both individually and in unison, have inspired the careers of a great many film-makers, and not just in documentary. Their pedagogical styles were rather similar: an unusual combination of being very laid back and informal at a personal level, with being very stern and disciplined when it came to instructing us in how to make films. Why they should have taken such a particular interest in ethnographic film-making when neither had a background in anthropology, nor in any other social science, remains something of a mystery. But the fact remains that they did so, and with great passion, and through the four of us who went through the RAI-Leverhulme programme their ideas and attitudes towards the making of ethnographic film have been passed on to many hundreds of students of anthropology. In acknowledgement of this great debt, both personal and collective, I dedicate this book jointly to them.

I would also like to acknowledge here how much I have benefitted over the years from the advice of David MacDougall, who also first learned his trade as a film-maker under the watchful eye of Colin Young. David has been most generous in commenting with characteristic care and acuity on many chapters of this book. I would also like to thank the various other friends and colleagues who have read and commented on drafts of chapters that are particularly related to their own work. Here I am especially grateful to Phil Agland, the late Asen Balikci, Hugh Brody, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Pip Deveson, Ian Dunlop, Lorenzo Ferrarini, Carlos Flores, Faye Ginsburg, Aaron Glass, Paul Hockings, Gary Kildea, Melissa Llewelyn-Davies, Brian Moser, Johannes Sjöberg and Peter Whiteley. I apologize in advance for not always following their suggestions!

A great many others have contributed directly or indirectly to the development of the ideas that I present in this book. It is always invidious to offer a list of names, since it is only too easy to miss someone out, particularly when referring to a period as long as the thirty years that this book has been in gestation. So I shall with great restraint restrict myself to mentioning only Peter Crawford and Paul Stoller who acted as the supposedly anonymous but generously self-revealing readers of the manuscript for Manchester University Press. Their comments were extremely helpful in the preparation of the final manuscript.

This book features almost a hundred figures, the great majority of which are based on ‘screen grabs’ that are used here on a ‘fair dealing’ basis. However, I would like to register here my gratitude to a number of people for their

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Acknowledgements generosity in allowing me to use the remaining images. Among individuals, I am particularly indebted to the magnificent cinematographer, Phil Agland, one of whose images adorns the cover of this book, whilst others are to be found in Chapters 12 and 13. Here too David MacDougall, equally accomplished as an image-maker, has made a major contribution to this book, generously providing images scattered through Chapters 5 and 14, while Jocelyne Rouch has shown a similar generosity in allowing me to use a number of her late husband’s images in Chapter 8. I am also very grateful to Carlos Flores, my son Richard Henley, Lisa Silcock, Andy Jillings and Eric Brochu for allowing me to use their images in Chapters 7, 10, 12, 13 and 16 respectively.

Among organisations, Documentary Educational Resources (DER) of Cambridge, Massachusetts has been especially generous in providing me with images. I am particularly grateful to Alice Apley, the Executive Director for authorising this use and to Frank Aveni, the Director of Design and Media, for the care and diligence with which he sought out the best quality versions of the images that I requested. I would also like to thank the Ngaanyatjarra and Yolgnu community associations for securing permission from relatives to use the images of Aboriginal people that appear in the relevant figures of Chapters 3 and 6.

Meanwhile, in the later stages of production, Tom Dark, social sciences editor at MUP, has shown Job-like patience with the many missed deadlines and word-length overruns that have characterised the preparation of this manuscript. I am indebted both to him and to his various colleagues at MUP who have worked on the book, including particularly Rob Byron and Dee Devine, as well as to the freelance copyeditor, Doreen Kruger. I thank them all for their very valuable contributions. All translations in this book are my own.

Finally, I would reserve the most heart-felt thanks of all to my wife Olivia who has shown an even greater patience throughout the many years that I have been writing this book as well as bringing her proverbial eye for detail to the revision of the final text.

General introduction: authorship, praxis, observation, ethnography

‘TS book offers a historical account of a genre of cinema that combines two distinct practices: the craft of non-fiction film-making, and ethnography, a particular approach to carrying out and representing social research. It is an account that straddles a period of approximately 120 years, from the middle of last decade of the nineteenth century, when the moving image camera was a primitive instrument that was troublesome and expensive to use, and which was therefore reserved to professional elites, mostly in the global North, to the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, by which time digital technology had brought the possibility of film-making within the range of both the technical capabilities and budgets of many millions of people the world over. During this period, there have also been major changes both in the conception of ethnography within academia and in the political constitution of the wider world. All of these factors have impacted on the development and diversification of the genre of ethnographic film, as I seek to show.

This book has grown out of the course on the history of ethnographic film that I taught at the University of Manchester for many years, and it retains a tone of address aimed, if not at students exactly, at least at those who are relatively new both to non-fiction film-making and to ethnography. Although it is a substantial book, I make no claim that it is comprehensive: it is a history rather than the history of ethnographic film authorship. Indeed, it is only a very partial history in that it is primarily concerned with English-language films, supplemented by a few forays elsewhere, notably into the work of Jean Rouch, the leading French ethnographic film-maker who is a towering figure in the field, and about whose film-making I have already written at length in an earlier book.' I am only too aware that many traditions of ethnographic film-making have been developed in other languages, not only within Europe but also in other continents, notably Latin America, China and Japan. Even with regard to English-language films, I have had to be highly selective, and there are many film-makers whose works I would have liked to include, had it not been for the fact that this would have tried the publisher’s patience even more than it has already been tested.

In approaching this history, I am particularly concerned with how ethnographic films are actually made, not just in terms of the techniques and technologies involved, but more generally, in terms of the whole process whereby an idea is turned into a finished ethnographic film. Again, the origins of the book in the lecture course that I taught at Manchester are relevant here: that course formed part of a Masters programme in which we instructed students in practical film-making and, as part of this instruction, in time-honoured fashion, we encouraged them to look at the work of the Old Masters of ethnographic film history (and they were mostly ‘masters’, regrettably), not merely to critique their work as examples of how the West construed its Other (though we encouraged that too), but also in a more pragmatic way, to examine their films as artefacts, to look for the seams, to examine how they achieved their effects, all with a view to assessing these films as models or anti-models for their own work. My hope is that this book could serve a similar purpose for any novice ethnographic film-makers who come to read it.

There is a tendency to write or talk about the history of ethnographic film in terms of visual metaphors, that is, as if it were a succession of ‘visions’, ‘views’, ‘looks’ or ‘gazes’, even ‘glances’, emanating from ‘eyes’ that have been diversely construed as innocent, imperial, Third or, more locally, as Nordic, and varying in accordance with a range of different ‘visualisations’ or ‘ways of seeing’. This is, of course, hardly surprising, given the importance of visual technology in the making of ethnographic films. It is also undoubtedly the case that the visual practice of ‘observation’, in a range of different modes, has been a crucial component in the making of ethnographic films over the years. Equally certain is the fact that to make an effective and engaging ethnographic film requires both a developed visual sensibility and an informed understanding of film as a medium of visual communication, not to mention considerable visual skills. But, for all this, I would contend that there is much more to ethnographic film-making than matters relating to the visual. Rather than thinking of the history of ethnographic film-making as a succession of ‘ways of seeing’, I suggest that it is more productive to think of it as a succession of ‘ways of doing’, in which observation, in a variety of guises, is but one component, even if an important one.

In the course of this book, I shall seek to substantiate this proposition through the detailed consideration of a large number of particular examples. But as a first approximation, one can identify here, in a summary way, a number of key respects in which it is necessary to go beyond observation in the making of ethnographic films. First, and most obviously, an ethnographic film involves sounds as well images, listening as well as looking, or at least it has done so, certainly since the development of portable synchronous sound around 1960, and even before that too, given that ethnographic films have featured soundtracks of voice-over commentary and effects, music, even some isolated examples of synchronous dialogues, since at least as far back as the 1930s. Indeed, sound has been the ‘secret sharer’ for most of ethnographic film history, and one that has been all the more neglected since its effects are often undetected by ‘audiences’, who, in unwitting contradiction to the very etymology of the term by which one refers to them, are much more likely to think of themselves — and to be thought of by third parties — as ‘viewers’ or ‘spectators’ rather than ‘hearers’ of ethnographic film.

Second, the making of an ethnographic film requires a range of craft skills that amount to considerably more than the fortuitous mechanical operationalisation of an act of observation. Possibly the most significant of these skills and certainly one of the most difficult to acquire is not, as is commonly supposed, the operation of a moving image camera, but rather the ability to manage one of the most distinctive features of cinema, namely, the linear disclosure of a story or an argument about the world in a manner that is both coherent and engaging for an audience while at the same time remaining within the constraints of a time-based medium. Or, to put it more succinctly, the making of an ethnographic film, certainly one that aims to go beyond the merely descriptive, requires the skilful deployment of a filmic narrative.

A third way in which the making of an ethnographic film requires one to go beyond observation concerns the relationship between the film-maker and their subjects. As the leading ethnographic film-maker David MacDougall once remarked, ‘No ethnographic film is merely a record of another society: it is always a record of a meeting between a film-maker and that society. The manner in which an ethnographic film-maker manages this relationship is a very important part of their ‘way of doing’ ethnographic film-making, and it is one that has ethical, even political implications, as well as epistemological and stylistic consequences for the films that they make.

Finally, an ethnographic film will normally involve more than observation in the sense that — although it is almost a tautology to say so — in order to be ethnographic in anything more than a descriptive sense, an ethnographic film requires an ethnographic analysis. It is impossible to state succinctly what form this analysis should take since it depends on precisely how one defines the much-debated term ‘ethnographic’. This is an issue that I will address at some length below, when I will offer a definition of the term as I propose to use it in the course of this book.

As will become clear, in the course of this review of 120 years of ethnographic film-making, I advocate a very particular form of ethnographic film authorship based on a very particular conception of ethnography. This is a second sense in which this book could be considered no more than a partial historical account. In fact, the whole book should be regarded not as a dispassionate chronicle but rather a sustained argument in favour of a very particular approach to ethnographic film-making.

AUTHORSHIP, PRAXIS, OBSERVATION

In pursuit of this argument, the book is divided into four parts. In the first, in the course of seven chapters, I offer an overview of (predominantly) English-language ethnographic film-making over the course of its first century, from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Then, in the second part, I examine in greater detail the approach to ethnographic film-making of three key figures in that history: Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. The third part also consists of three chapters, in which I discuss the remarkable phenomenon of ethnographic film made for British television that was at its peak between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s. Finally, in the last part, in a further three chapters, I consider a number of examples of English-language ethnographic film-making practice over the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, and consider what promise these might hold for the future of the genre. The whole book is then rounded off with a brief Epilogue.