Ethnographic Cinema

Ethnographic Cinema

Although Lewis Jacob's The Documentary Tradition handles ethnographic cinema within a linear chronology of cinematic time periods whereby ethnographic cinema is not segregated from other documentary cinema per se, ethnographic film is a problematic term for a cinema which, like other types of documentary (ie. social documentary and newsreels) has everything in common with social documentary with the only difference being that ethnographic film has historically been understood to treat a non-Western, dark-skinned subject. As much of ethnographic cinema has been critiqued for its relationship to nationalism and imperialism (ie. Murnau's and Flaherty's Tabu), other films (ie. Fuente's Bontoc Eulogy and O'Rourke's Cannibal Tours) have approached this question of how "film truth" and the ethnographic gaze are linked to a notion of imperialism. And often narrative and ethnographic cinema have been used synchretically to examine these very questions. Some of the filmmakers who have examined this problematic are Luis Bunuel, Jorge Sanjines, Tim Asch, Jean Rouch, Glauber Rocha, Chris Marker, Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysles, Marlon Fuentes, Marlon Riggs, Barbara Hammer, Michelle Citron and Dogme 95. Papers are not limited to these auteurs and may likewise examine ethnographic "truths" of sexuality, race, nation, biology, and class.
This Area will focus upon ethnographic cinema which questions this gaze. These are the three panels for whom chairs and members are needed:

1. “Ethnographizing the West”
This panel should question this nexus of ethnographic/documentary cinema undertaken by cinema which turns the gaze back onto the Western subject. This panel should investigate ethnographic cinema whose subject is Western.

2. “Colonialism and Ethnographic Cinema”
This panel should focus upon the relationship between ethnographic cinema and colonial and neo-colonial practices.

3. “Ethnographic and Narrative Cinema”
This panel will concentrate on cinema which merges the conventions of narrative and documentary cinema in in order to uncover a deeper cinematic truth (cinema vérité) or simply to interrogate the very notion of ethnographic truth.

The Film and History League conference details can be found at www.filmandhistory.org. The meeting will run from 8-12 November, 2006 in the Dolce Conference Center near the DFW airport. Guest artists for the meeting are D.A. Pennebacker and Chris Hegedus, proponents of direct cinema and the study of American politics/arts/society.

Send all proposals via email by 30 July, 2006 to:
Julian Vigo
julian.vigo@umontreal.ca