Tag Archives: Film

Tales from the Jungle

I couldn’t bear to watch this, but I figure its worth a mention: the BBC’s series “Tales from the Jungle” has been uploaded to YouTube. The entire episodes on Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Carlos Castaneda are up. There is also a show called “First Contact” in which “Adventurous and high-paying tourists are being offered the chance to make “first contact” with some of the world’s last remaining uncontacted tribes.”

I made it about 10 minutes into the Malinowski film before giving up. Maybe someone else will have greater fortitude.

By Aeroplane to Pygmyland

For those of you who are eager for a ‘first contact’ fix (or a ‘criticize essentialized representations of first contact’ fix) but are burned out on the Korowai, may I suggest the Smithsonian’s excellent website on Matthew Stirling’s 1926 film “By Airplane To Pygmyland”:http://www.sil.si.edu/expeditions/1926/. Done in collaboration with SIL (who I think have the footage that forms the core of this ‘digital curation’), the website has both the original footage of the expedition as well as photos and interpretive essays. The site is too big and I am — alas — too busy to give it a thorough going-over. One thing that I love about the title is that the ‘aeroplane’ part probably sounded as sexy and mysterious to its 1926 audience as the ‘pygmyland’ bit. Serious though — this is a great and deep on-line resource for teaching culture contact and the representation of the colonized.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

Physicists hate it when Anthropologists misuse Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to give added weight to the commonplace observation that the ethnographic observer has an impact on the subjects and activities being observed. Not only is it unnecessary to evoke physics, it is bad physics:

Another common misconception is that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is equivalent to the statement, “You can’t measure a system without changing it.” In fact, it applies to unmeasured states and does not really take account of the effect of measurement.

Nonetheless, it has become anthropological shorthand to refer to our academic concerns that we (the observer) might be unduly influencing what we observe. The same concern affects documentary filmmakers, as it is not uncommon for the presence of the camera to have a strong influence on the events being recorded.

This fact struck home yesterday as we were interviewing a key subject. His kids came tearing across the frame: an older sister chasing her younger brother. As she ran, the sister yelled: “They should film our fight!” As shooting anything else had become impossible, we complied.

PS: I’m happy to say that DER has made our short film (which the current project is building upon), Acting Like a Thief, freely available from Google Video in its entirety. If your university library doesn’t yet have a copy of the film, please request that they purchase one. Doing so will help us demonstrate the wisdom of such an Open Access model, as well as supporting our current production!

Apocalypto Roundup

I haven’t seen Apocalypto yet, but there has been a lot of buzz on the blogosphere, so I thought I’d present some of the highlights.

Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log says:

Originally the buzz surrounding the film was mostly about Gibson’s choice to shoot the entire film in Mexico with local actors speaking Yucatec Maya. Now, of course, observers are more interested in speculating if the film will be dead-on-arrival at the box office thanks to Mel’s notorious anti-Semitic rant and DUI arrest last July. But linguistic issues are still getting some attention in the Apocalypto coverage, for instance in this Associated Press article describing the mixture of excitement and ambivalence among the Yucatec Maya community about a major Hollywood movie filmed in their indigenous language.

He then goes on to discuss the “foreboding Greek title,” after which he links to this post by John Lawler:
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Video in the Villages

Wired has an article about indigenous media production, based on the 13th Native American Film + Video Festival, organized by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).

The emphasis of the article is on how indigenous media is being used as an organizational tool. This is nothing new for anthropologists, Terence Turner having written about the same phenomenon as early as 1992. This being an article from Wired, I’m surprised that there wasn’t more of a focus on online media. Obviously in many communities it is difficult to access online media, however, activists do often have access to the web and being able to download material and redistribute it offline seems like a reasonable next step (if it isn’t already being done). This is one of the premises of the v2v network. CurrentTV is also interesting, working like Digg in allowing users to vote on which material will get broadcast. Taiwanese Aborigines are already using online media quite extensively, with blog.ohaiya.com and the more wide ranging Docupark wiki also hosting some Aboriginal content.

For anthropologists wishing to teach Turner’s article the Video in the Villages collection is available from DER, and I see that the film festival website links to various distributors for each of the works they presented. The advantage of material screened at festivals and distributed in the US is that it will have English subtitles. The need for subtitling is a big barrier for indigenous activism that seeks to reach a wider audience. One option is dotsub.com which “provides free browser based tools that allow anyone to translate films from one language into countless other languages.”

Images of Empire

When I came back from my research trip to England this summer I wrote a post complaining about how few of these archives were online. At the time I knew one of the collections was working hard to put things up on the web, but I was waiting for the official announcement – which I finally got today.

Images of Empire today launches its new website at www.imagesofempire.com, providing online access for the first time to the unique archive of historical images held at the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, UK.

Visitors to the website can now explore over 6,000 still images and film clips from the collection, which is currently the UK’s largest dedicated resource of photography and film on the British colonial period. Images from the archive can be navigated and viewed using an advanced search facility and photographs from the collection are available to order online. Registration is free, enabling users to build lightboxes, order high-resolution files and access supplementary information. Further images from the Museum’s collection will be made available online at regular intervals as more of the archive is digitised.

By presenting this collection online, Images of Empire creates a valuable commercial resource for both professional picture buyers and academic researchers, and supports the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in its mission to provide a national forum for preserving, exploring and studying Britain’s cultural heritage associated with the former Empire and today’s Commonwealth.

From my experience there, I’d say the collection is somewhat idiosyncratic. A lot of film footage of colonial officers and their pets, but lots of wonderful treasures as well. The point being that it is one of those collections that will probably work best for you if you are just curious and browsing around rather than if you are trying to find something specific.

Remembering Clifford Geertz: Some links

For those who are interesting in learning more about Geertz or did not get a chance to meet him or see him speak in person, I’d like to recommend Alan Macfarlane’s “video interview”:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/geertz.htm with Geertz. It is part of Macfarlane’s “Interviews With Ancestors”:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/audiovisual.html websire, which I’ve mentioned in the past but which I’ll link to again since it is such an incredible and wonderful resource. Macfarlane has also made the “audio of Geertz’s 2004 lecture”:https://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/263 available as well as “the full video taped interview”:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/DO/filmshow/geertz1_fast.htm for people who would like to watch the whole thing.

There are also some other links that we have mentioned here on SM in the past that will help people who are interested in learning more about Geertz, including his memoir “A Life In Learning”:http://www.acls.org/op45geer.htm and the exhaustive “HyperGeertz Catalog”:http://www.iwp.uni-linz.ac.at/lxe/sektktf/gg/Geertzstarteng.htm. Many of his essays appear on the web as well.

Popular Films for Teaching Linguistic Anthropology

I recently queried the Linguistic Anthropology e-mail list, Linganth, for suggestions as to popular films with language related themes. Most professors teaching linguistic anthropology in the United States rely on a few tried-and-true films in their classes: American Tongues, Crosstalk, and a few TV documentaries about animal communication and the evolution of language. Unfortunately, these films don’t really hold up in Taiwan, where watching films is difficult without subtitles and subtitled films are limited to a few famous documentary films and mainstream hollywood fare (including classics). For this reason I wanted to have a good list of mainstream films I might consider for use in my classes.

I was treated with a wealth of materials, including three articles on the subject from the Anthropology News SLA column, written by Mark Peterson (with contributions from the Anthrosource e-mail list), materials from Hal Schiffman’s course “Language and Popular Culture,” and many additional suggestions from list members, which I’ve included below the fold.

One topic which is quite popular with the linguistic anthropologist crowd is Star Trek, so I it is worth mentioning a new documentary film about people who speak Klingon. Unfortunately, I don’t think Star Trek is very popular with my students, who grew up on steady diet of Japanese anime. Perhaps I need to compile a list of linguistically interesting anime?
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The new new video

I don’t know how many anthropologists actually take seriously the idea of making video into a real tool of the trade–but I was amazed to find and play with eyespot, an online video-mixing site replete with Creative Commons tracks, Prelinger archive footage and an increadibly cool little interface. I can imagine this being an amazing tool for the creation of an ethnographic video as a collaborative effort, especially if your people produce and want to share their own video… bandwidth and memory notwithstanding (it was too much for me to upload a 12MB file).

The Other Superhero Movie

I am crazy busy this week as I pack for a rather last-minute move, conveniently timed to coincide with the first week of my 4-week summer session (2 classes, each meeting 2 1/2 hours, 4 days a week, one in the morning, one in the evening). But I wanted to mention Henry Jenkins’ thorough and thoughtful discussion of Krrish, a Bollywood production being billed as India’s first superhero movie. ALthough the formula will sound familiar to Western movie-goers, Jenkins notes that Krrish is a distinctly Indian twist on the superhero pattern:

Much like the western Superman who has been read as an embodiment of national myths and ideals, there is much which speaks to the specifically Indian origins of this particular story.

For one thing, the early signs that young Krishna may have superpowers come when he turns out to be a protégé at sketching and then confounds the teachers at his local school with a spectacular performance on his I.Q. exam. The American counterpart would have led off with his strength, his speed, or maybe even his X-ray vision but having a superior intellect has rarely been a prerequisite for becoming a superpower in the western sense of the term. Throughout the film, in fact, the other characters consistently cite his “talents” but rarely his “powers” as if he were destined to become an extremely gifted knowledge worker (and indeed, it turns out that the ethics of knowledge work for hire are at the center of this epic saga.)

…

Westerners are going to be tempted to read the film as a symptom of cultural imperialism — taking a strongly western genre and trying to sell it back to the American market. But that’s too simple — especially given all of the ways I’ve identified above that the superhero genre gets reworked to speak to specifically Asian values and concerns and the ways it gets mixed with other genre elements which are more closely associated with the Bollywood tradition.

Krrish isn’t playing anywhere even close to Las Vegas (despite a growing Indian population here, I might add) so I’ll have to take Jenkins at his word, but it sounds like a Superman Returns/Krrish double-feature would be a great way to spend an afternoon. [Via BoingBoing]

Border Nationalism in Germany: An Ethnographic Film

Here is a twenty four minute ethnographic film that is enjoyable for the way it reveals the messy process of doing ethnography. Discovered on Anthropologi.info, the filmmaker, Johannes Wilm, has his own blog, where he explains why and how he made the film as well as some of the background and terminology necessary to make sense of his interviews.

By coincidence I am visiting my parents right now, when the Danish minority has its annual meeting (in Danish: “Årsmøde”). It lasted for three days, and I was back in Oslo the last day, so I decided to take my sister and shoot a little video of one of the celebrations in a tiny little village called “Ascheffel” (just far enough away for me not to run into old teachers from kindergarten, etc.).

I’m glad to see anthropologists video blogging like this. While such raw reports from the field are bound to be less polished than what we are used to seeing on television, I enjoyed watching it and I think our readers will too.

30 Days of Cinétrance

One of the hardest things to do when teaching visual anthropology is to get students to understand the constructed nature of reality. Although still difficult, this is easier to do when talking about written texts. Students are inclined to believe what they see with their own eyes. One reason for this might be the fact that students are regularly asked to produce written texts, but rarely asked to manipulate images. Reality TV is not the phenomenon here in Taiwan that it is in the US, but one strategy I often use is to discuss the efforts of reality TV writers to unionize. As one union official put it:

“The secret about reality TV isn’t that it’s scripted, which it is,” Mr. Petrie said in a statement. “The secret is that reality TV is a 21st-century telecommunications industry sweatshop.”

Such scripting doesn’t entail writing dialog so much as fitting existing dialog into a standard three-act narrative arc. Or even creating situations designed to ensure that the narrative moves in a certain direction.

Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences. Specifically, experiments in social psychology. Interestingly, while it would now be considered a gross breach of professional ethics to engage in the kind of social experimentation we see regularly on reality TV, it is somehow OK if we do it for the camera. (In much the same way that paying someone to engage in sexual acts is illegal if done privately, but perfectly legal if done for film or TV.)
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Should You Study Visual Anthropology?

In Karen Nakamura’s recent blog post: “Careers: Visual anthropology as a field of study?” she republishes a letter she sent a student asking about graduate study in visual anthropology.

  1. Visual anthropology is on the margins of the discipline. Few programs offer degrees in it and there are even fewer jobs.
  2. It is my own belief that photography or film work that isn’t backed by participant-observation research is weaker than that that is. If your goal is to fly in, take photos, and fly out, then you might want to pursue a degree in journalism.
  3. There are dwindling grants for visual social science research. You would most likely apply to standard anthropology grants — which means that your work should speak to the discipline of anthropology in some way.

Like Karen, when students approach me about pursuing a career in visual anthropology, I usually attempt to dissuade them. The reason being that if they are interested in producing visual documents, they are unlikely to be able to do so in a Ph.D. program in anthropology. Only rarely are visual documents accepted in lieu of written ones at the graduate level. While some may complement their written thesis with “supplementary materials,” they will most likely remain just that.

Of course, if someone is interested in media studies and would like to do an ethnography of visual media production, then I think they’ll do OK.
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Land Has Eyes on DVD

I wouldn’t normally stoop to peddling anything but myself on SM, but I thought I should mention that “Vilsoni Hereniko’s”:http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/people_3.html award-winning film “The Land Has Eyes”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/ is “now available”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/dvdsales.htm for schools and libraries on a DVD. I’ve “mentioned the movie before”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/ and encourage everyone to see it if they are interested not just in Pacific films, but in good films regardless of where they come from. It is an especially good teaching aid because “free teaching guides”:http://www.thelandhaseyes.com/studyguides/index.html which incudes many free articles about Rotuma. Hereniko also has an truly excellent essay entitled “Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism”:http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/files/IndigKnow.pdf which is available for free download as well. I really like this article and I teach it all the time. Of course I live in the Pacific and share a university with Hereniko, but I think the article is useful for people outside of the Pacific — it is insightful in a lot of ways, and there are also lots of things for students to disagree with in the paper. Yet it’s written in such a way that the disagreements are remarkably fruitful, and in general I find it to have a sort of depth in discussion that just reading it doesn’t necessarily reveal. At any rate if you are looking for a film about Pacific islanders that is not Once We Were Warriors or Whale Rider then I’d encourage you to check out The Land Has Eyes.