Here Is the Definitive AZ of Documentary
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Advance praise for Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: "Here is the definitive A-Z of documentary filmmaking. No stone is left unturned, no truth unshared, and fresh insight informs every chapter. Student fiction filmmakers should also savor this book, because only if your dramatic film achieves a real sense of actuality, no matter what your style may be, can you begin to convince your audience." MIKE LEIGH, director of Secrets & Lies "Anthropology needs an up-to-date manual on filmmaking. Fifty years ago Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson demonstrated what film can do for ethnography. It was daringly novel then, but times have changed, the technology has changed, and now every fieldworker expects to be able to work in this new medium. In presenting the new technology and the history of ethnographic filmmaking together, Cross-Cultural Filmmaking represents a coming-of-age for anthropology." MARY DOUGLAS, author of Purity and Danger " Cross-CulturalFilmmaking 'is the ideal 'how to' companion for the serious documentarian and ethnographic filmmaker. Informed by theory, seasoned by experience, and sensitive to issues of cultural dif- ference, this book enlarges our understanding of documentary produc- tion as both creative art and social praxis." BILL NICHOLS, author of Representing Reality and Blurred Boundaries "This is an extraordinarily valuable work that many of us have been waiting for. Gracefully integrating the most progressive ideas about what ethnographic media could still be, this volume provides a thorough account of the use of film and video as a mode of ethno- graphy as well as a nearly irresistible enticement to give it a try." GEORGE E. MARCUS, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University "Barbash and Taylor have created a thinking-persons guide to docu- mentary filmmaking. Not only is it required reading for any student who wants to learn production techniques, but it offers an indispens- able refresher course for seasoned documentary filmmakers who want to catch up on the latest critical thinking about their practice. Cross- Cultural Filmmaking even makes enjoyable reading for a determined non-producer like myself." B RUBY RICH, Professor of Film Studies, University of California, Berkeley " Cross-Cultural Filmmaking is the definitive guide to making an in- formed and sawy contribution to the 'photochemical permeation of the world.'" PAUL RABINOW, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley " Cross-Cultural Filmmaking is an excellent book. It provides a wealth of sensible and perceptive advice in a calm, jargon-free style. Beautifully organized and filled with instructive examples, it deals with the whole range of visual, financial, ethical, and aesthetic issues in documentary filmmaking in considerable depth. It will immediately become the standard manual for teachers and filmmakers." ALAN MACFARLANE, Professor of Anthropological Science, Cambridge University Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor Technical illustrations by SANDRA MURRAY Figure drawings by CHAD VAUGHAN A HANDBOOK FOR MAKING DOCUMENTARY AND ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMS AND VIDEOS University of California Press Berkeley, Los Angeles, London Front cover: Still from A Wife among Wives (1981) by David and Judith MacDougall, courtesy Fieldwork Films. Front insets (top to bottom): Trinh Min-ha behind the camera, courtesy Women Make Movies, Inc.; Lorna Marshall interviewing !Kung San men, courtesy Documentary Educational Resources; Helen Van Dongen and Robert Flaherty editing Louisiana Story (1948), courtesy Museum of Modern Art; David MacDougall and Thomas Woody Minipini, working on Goodbye Old Man (1977), photograph by Judith MacDougall, courtesy Fieldwork Films. Back cover: From The Nuer, photograph by Robert Gardner, copyright the Film Study Center, Harvard. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1997 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barbash, Ilisa, Cross-cultural filmmaking: A handbook for making documentary and ethnographic films and videos / Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Taylor, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08759-3 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-520-08760-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures in ethnology. 2. Motion pictures—Production and direction. I. Taylor, Lucien. II. Tide. GN347.B37 1997 305.8'00208—dc20 96-17662 Printed in the United States of America 987654321 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. For Joseph andfor Jasper Ethnographic film is the documentary's avant-garde. Who is more self-conscious than an anthropologist with a movie camera? The ethnographic film's most scrupulous examples don't simply document alien cultures, they necessarily question the nature of filmmaking itself. For, even more than conventional documentarians, visual anthropologists are compelled to consider the relation of the filmmaker (and the film process) to the filmed. —J. Hoberman [A]t a time when modernist experimentation is old hat within the avant-garde and a fair amount of fiction-filmmaking, it remains almost totally unheard of among documentary filmmakers, especially in North America. It is not political documentarists who have been the leading innovators. Instead it is a handful of ethnographic filmmakers like Timothy Asch (The Ax Fight), John Marshall (Nai/), and David and Judith MacDougall who, in their meditations on scientific method and visual communication, have done the most provocative experimentation. —Bill Nichols There is the rest, the most difficult, the most moving, the most secret: wherever human feelings are involved, wherever the individual is directly concerned, wherever there are interpersonal relationships of authority, subordination, comradeship, love, hate—in other words, everything connected with the emotive fabric of human existence. There lies the great terra incognita of the sociological or ethnological cinema, of cinematographic truth. There lies its promised land. —Edgar Morin [T]he movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and the world, and the expression of one in the other. —Maurice MerUau-Ponty .