Transcultural Cinema

Description

This text articulates central issues in the relation of film to anthropology. The essays provide an overview of the history of visual anthropology, as well as commentaries on specific subjects, such as point-of-view and subjectivity, the use of subtitles, the role of the cinema subject, the difference between films and written texts and between the position of the filmmaker and that of the anthropological writer. Ultimately, the author disputes the view that ethnographic filmmaking is merely a visual form of anthropology, maintaining instead that it is a radical anthropological practice, which challenges many of the basic assumptions of the discipline of anthropology itself.

David MacDougall is Queen Elizabeth II Fellow and Convenor, Program in Visual Research, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, Canberra. Lucien Taylor is the author, with Ilisa Barbash, of Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos (California). Formerly, he was the editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review, published by the American Anthropological Association.

"With the voice of an essayist that combine the artistic sensibility of a Bresson with the writerly craft of a Barthes, MacDougall thinks through a theory of the documentary in terms of epistemological issues... [T]his is a first-rate book."--Choice "David MacDougall ... has carried out more research in non-Western cultural contexts than most academic anthropologists and, as this book attests, is well read in the literature... The twenty or so films that he has both shot and directed have been highly influential in establishing a model of good practice in ethnographic film-making. MacDougall also has the ability to write elegantly and reflectively about what he does."--Paul Henley, London Review of Books