Ethnological film

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The ethnological film or ethnographic film is a form of the documentary film within the ethnology (ethnology) and ethnography (ethnography). The aim of the ethnological film is to present foreign cultures within their socio-cultural , socio-economic and geological-biological environment, i.e. to describe their living conditions, norms , values and cultural techniques . An important feature of the ethnological film is the viewing of a selected group ( ethnic group , indigenous people ). The film narration is usually developed on the basis of one or more main characters who represent the entire group (see also field research and participant observation ).

The ethnological film is summarized together with the ethnographic photography under the heading of visual anthropology (use of media ). If an ethnological film deals with phenomena from the German-speaking or European cultural area , it is usually referred to as a folklore or cultural-scientific film .

history

The first ethnographic films were made around 1900 in the course of colonization and expeditions of discovery and research . The focus was on gaining biological and anthropological knowledge about members of other cultures by recording and trying to analyze movements in manual activities or ritual activities on film material. The International Congress of Ethnology in Paris in 1900 already spoke out in favor of adding film archives to the ethnographic museums that were just emerging. The first feature-length film of an ethnographic character was Robert J. Flahertys Nanuk, the Eskimo (1922), which combined fictional with documentary elements and was way ahead of its time, especially with regard to the cooperation between filmmakers and protagonists.

Until the 1950s, however, ethnographic film remained mainly an internal science tool without much external impact and had to be subordinate to written work results. In the late 1950s and early 1960s a public interest in ethnographic film arose, which found expression in special festivals such as the Festival dei Popoli in Florence and the Cinéma du réel in Paris . Filmmakers such as Jean Rouch ( Ich, ein Schwarzer , 1958), John Marshall ( The Hunters , 1958) or Robert Gardner ( Dead Birds , 1963) dealt with ethnographic film. The improved technical possibilities such as the more easily transportable device or the synchronous sound recording gave the genre new impetus and offered space for innovations, such as those implemented by David and Judith MacDougall in their trilogy Turkana Conversations (film recordings 1974, published 1977/79/81).

Cooperation with television in particular helped ethnographic film to reach a broad audience, for example in the case of Ivo Strecker's Sweet Millet (1994) and Sorge and Hope in the Face of the Drought (1994). Important scientific sponsors and cooperation partners of television in Germany are the Institute for Scientific Film in Göttingen and the Society for Cultural Studies Film , also in Göttingen. The Swiss Society for Folklore also realized the collaboration between ethnologists and professional filmmakers, for example with Hans-Ulrich Schlumpf's The Beautiful Moment (1985).

The Portuguese documentation É na terra nicht é na lua (2011) describes the life of the inhabitants of Corvo , the smallest island in the Azores.

aims

The direct visual and auditory means of the film are intended to give the viewer an understanding of ways of life that are alien to them. In the case of a subordinate scientific claim, the emphasis on exotic elements often dominates . The travel or expedition film in this sense often conveys ethnographic information, but mostly remains in the view of the amazed outsider.

Modern ethnographic film is not restricted to uninvolved observation, but uses the process of filming from conception as a form of communication and as a cooperative project. Artistic forms of expression through the means of film such as editing and rhythm , the use of music or elements of dramaturgy are also worked out together.

The ethically responsible search for suitable forms of representation and often also a clear partisanship for the people depicted in the film in their needs and their fight against cultural destruction, displacement and expropriation come to the fore of filmmaker interest.

Scientific importance

In theory, ethnological film essentially deals with the question of the extent to which audiovisual recording techniques can be used for scientific purposes within ethnology and whether the possibilities of expression of the film are scientifically relevant or not. The film is accused of primarily being used for entertainment, which is why ethnological film is viewed by many ethnologists as a medium of presentation that is not particularly suitable for scientific purposes and belongs more to the field of popular science. In particular, the difficulty of building theories using cinematic representations is pointed out.

In his book Transcultural Cinema , the ethnologist and filmmaker David MacDougall examines the differences between words and images . He confirms that the theory formation as it takes place in written form is not possible in the film, but the film has other interesting display options because it is a fundamentally different medium to the text. Texts are always dependent on describing complex environments in simplified categories and "foreign" must always be contrasted with "known" in order to be describable in writing. The film, on the other hand, has the possibility of reproducing the complexity of a situation in a largely realistic manner and therefore conveys cultural differences to the viewer in a more intuitive way.

Film festivals

A selection of ethnological / ethnographic film festivals :

Germany
Austria
  • ETHNOCINECA - Ethnographic and Documentary Filmfest Vienna, Vienna: with the cooperation of MASN-Austria (Moving Anthropology Student Network), for the first time in 2007, in May 2014 for the eighth time, organized by the "ETHNOCINECA - Association for the Promotion of Audiovisual Culture" founded in 2011

Prices

  • ETHNOCINECA Student Shorts Award (ESSA), audience award of the Vienna ETHNOCINECA film festival, awarded for the first time in 2014

See also

literature

  • Ballhaus, Edmund; Engelbrecht, Beate (ed.): The ethnographic film. Introduction to methods and practice. Berlin: Reimer 1995. ISBN 3496025522
  • Friedrich, Margarete et al. (Ed.): See the strangers. Ethnology and film. Munich: Trickster 1984. ISBN 978-3923804030
  • Banks, Marcus; Morphy, Howard (Ed.): Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1997. ISBN 0300066910
  • Hoefer, Georg: Myths in Ethnographic Film. On the survival of the hunter-gatherer myth in the field of ethnographic documentary film. Coppengrave: Coppi-Verlag 1994. ISBN 978-3930258024
  • Husmann, Rolf (ed.): With the camera in foreign cultures. Aspects of film in ethnology and folklore. Emsdetten: Gehling 1987. ISBN 978-3890490083
  • Grimshaw, Anna; Ravetz, Amanda: Observational cinema. Anthropology, film, and the exploration of social life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2009. ISBN 978-0253221582
  • Gürge, Peter: Cultural studies filming in transition. The film work of Edmund Ballhaus. Norderstedt 2000, ISBN 978-3-8391-0616-7
  • Hockings, Paul (Ed.): Principles of visual anthropology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 2003, 3rd edition. ISBN 978-3110179309
  • Krech, Hartmut: Photographs of people. From type picture to anthropological photography. In: Photo history . Volume 4, Issue 14, 1984 ( online ).
  • Krech, Hartmut: A picture of the world. The requirements of anthropological photography. (Dissertation, University of Cologne, 1984). Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1989. Foreword and introduction (HTML)
  • Loizos, Peter: Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness, 1955-1985 , University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition 1993, ISBN 0226492273
  • MacDougall, David: Transcultural Cinema , Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998. ISBN 0-691-01234-2
  • Marks, Dan: Ethnography and Ethnographic Film. From Flaherty to Ash and after. In: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 97, No. 2 1995, pp. 339-347.
  • Pink, Sarah: Working images. Visual research and representation in ethnography. London: Routledge 2006. ISBN 978-0415306546
  • Ruby, Jay: Picturing Culture. Explorations of Film and Anthropology. University of Chicago Press 2000. ISBN 9780226730981

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Homepage: freiburger-filmforum.de.
  2. ↑ Homepage: gieff.de.
  3. ↑ Self-presentation: organization. ( Memento of the original from September 25, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved October 18, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gieff.de
  4. ↑ Homepage of the festival: onewithamoviecamera.
  5. ↑ Homepage: Münchner EthnoFilmFest.
  6. ↑ a b Homepage: ethnocineca.at.
  7. ↑ Self- portrait : ETHNOCINECA - Association for the Promotion of Audiovisual Culture. October 15, 2013, accessed October 18, 2014.