Beyond observation : a history of authorship in ethnographic film
Registro en:
978 1 5261 4729 5
10.7765/9781526147295
Autor
Henley, Paul
Institución
Resumen
This book offers a historical account of a genre of cinema that combines
two distinct practices: the craft of non-fiction film-making, and eth-
nography, 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.