The Last of the Great (Foot-Slogging) Explorers: Lewis Cotlow and the Ethnographic Imaginary in Popular Travel Film

This essay focuses on the popular travel films and books of Lewis Cotlow (1898-1987), an American explorer, author, filmmaker, insurance broker and amateur ethnographer who made photographic expeditions to Africa, South America, New Guinea, and the Arctic from the 1930s to the 1950s. This essay aims to uncover the shared historical practices and narratives in travel film and ethnographic film, examining scientific films in light of popular forms of anthropological cinema. In particular, the author examines the construction of an ethnographic imaginary and modes of ethnographic realism in the feature-length color film Jungle Headhunters [1950], shot during Cotlow's various expeditions to the Amazon during the 1940s.     

Comic woman,victim woman: Pushing gender and genre boundaries in popular Hindi Cinema

“Women's film” in Hollywood is associated both with the genre of melodrama, the “weepie”, and with female spectatorship. In the Indian context of popular Hindi cinema, first, genre analysis itself is a questionable line of inquiry since several genres, the melodrama, musical, gangster, or mystery, combine in a single film, known locally as the masala (spicy) film; and second, films are scarcely divided by a gendered viewership. Yet I identify “women's films” as a distinct category in Hindi cinema, emerging around the ‘70s. These women's films typically center on female protagonists, dramatize their victimization and vindication; by the ‘80s under a range of influences these films mutated into rape‐revenge narratives.

However, another strain emerged within the ‘70s’ “women's film,” which drew on cinema's rich visual iconographic tradition of the sight gag, promulgating the comedic/tomboy heroine figure. It favored laughing and mocking patriarchal structures rather than surrendering to them in tears. Focusing on Ramesh Sippy's Sita aur Gita [1972] emblematic of this trend I explore theoretical concerns about associating genres with gender. In keeping with recent poststructuralist theories about gender and media ‘consumption I show how the film destabilized clear‐cut gender identification and stood for a promising trend that was sadly undercut. Thus, while genre might still be a useful analytical tool for Hindi cinema, defining women's film as female‐centered narratives is a viable category as long as we appreciate the instability in gendered viewer identification.     

Playing primitive: “In the land of the headhunters” and/or “war canoes”

Edward Curtis's 1914 film of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia is analyzed from the perspective of early ("primitive") cinema and the avant‐garde. The original film, In the Land of the Headhunters, is recontextualized and compared both to Nanook of the North and fiction filmmaking of the silent period; the restored film, In the Land of the War Canoes, is considered from the perspective of ethnographic spectatorship and native reappropriation of colonialist texts. As an allegory of the “salvage paradigm,” Curtis's ethnography is positioned within a postmodernist discourse on cultural representation.     

Theoretical perspectives on cinema in Africa: Culture,identity and Diaspora

The study of African cinema is often assumed to be the study of black film. This paper examines this notion with respect to definitions of Africa, questions of identity, and different historical discourses of resistance. Western psychocentric approaches to film criticism are criticized. The issue of authorship is revisited with the question: Can a white director make a film reflecting the “black” experience? This question is explored with reference to debates about Spike Lee's Malcolm X and South African director Oliver Schmitz's Mapantsula. In the process, J examine how meanings are articulated and rearticulated in specific contexts by both those who define them and audiences which interpret them. The articulations of “race wars” in the USA and South Africa respectively are discussed, as is the relationship between race and class in the anti‐apartheid struggle. The disarticulation of Black Consciousness in South Africa from its popularizer, Steve Biko, by film activists in the Mass Democratic Movement during the 1980s, provides a background for the emergence of “non‐racial” cinema. Reception is suggested as a more subtle means of film categorisation. Mapantsula, for example, though made by a mainly white crew, is understood by black audiences to be a film accurately reflecting the experience of the black oppressed in South Africa. Though reception is a dynamic response, shifting and responding to historical trajectories and new discourses, with interpretations fragmenting between different classes and class fractions at different times, such a strategy for area and cultural classification of films avoids the pitfalls of categories based on ideology, myth, race and language.     

Autosonntag (Switzerland, 1930) -- A Film Safari in the Swiss Alps

Two couples discover the attractions of the mountain world. With the cine camera they bring along, they record domestic animals and farmers, vegetation and impressive views. The result is a five-and-a-half minute amateur travel film documenting their excursion. In Autosonntag ( A Sunday Drive , Switzerland, 1930), the amateur film intersects with the genre of the travel film to form a kind of "safari to the Swiss interior" Between spontaneous observation, playful staging, and photographic posing, a specific tourist gaze emerges. Through the filming process, the mountain people are turned into trophies to be brought home from the "film safari"     

Active viewing: An Ethnography of the Indian film audience

Audiences of popular Hindi cinema¹ present a strategic site for study of the active audience as they adopt a viewing style that is participatory and interactive. In cinema theaters viewers applaud and whistle loudly, sing along with the soundtrack, shout out comments and throw coins at the screen. Viewers transform the meaning of the film and shape the collective experience of viewing. Plural audiences encounter varying interpretations of the film arising from a diversity of world views and from life‐worlds different from their own. Rather than homogenising viewers, mass produced Hindi films appear to differentiate them. The intersubjectivity of the viewing experience becomes an achievement, rather than a taken‐for‐granted. The film is seen to become a resource both for the formation of community and for the generation of conflict and the theater, a public forum and arena for situated culture wars.     

Who Has the Last Laugh? Nanook of the North and Some New Thoughts on an Old Classic

Since its release in 1922 Nanook of the North has remained at the heart of debates in documentary and ethnographic cinema. Long considered a foundational work, Flaherty's film has been hailed and disparaged in equal measure. After an absence of several years, I returned to a viewing of Nanook and found myself surprised by what I saw. Drawing on the work of early cinema historians, I seek here to challenge contemporary critiques and articulate a case for a new reading of the film.     

Centenary commemorations or centenary contestations?—Celebrating a hundred years of cinema in Bombay

The commemorations of the hundredth year of the arrival of cinema in India staged by the Government of Maharashtra were a combination of public and semi‐public rituals inscribing the history of cinema in India onto the urban landscape of Bombay. This article examines those commemorations to show how the history of cinema becomes an arena for the state to proclaim its distinct cultural identity. The centenary commemorations are an example of how a world‐historical moment like the Lumière screenings is appropriated by the state government to assert a particular cultural claim over the city of Bombay.     

Hollywood and the Travelogue

Although documentary films, in formats such as the travelogue-expedition film, are rarely considered as a basis for insight into the Hollywood cinema, the early 1930s provide one historical period during which travelogues produced by independent filmmakers achieved such public popularity that the Hollywood studios were forced to respond. Studios produced some feature-length documentaries themselves, began distributing others, and generated "hybrid" films, such as M-G-M's Trader Horn [1931], that demonstrate a surprising willingness to give up the priority of narrative for the advantage of providing audiences with digressive documentary interludes devoted to the spectacle of exotic cultures, landscapes and wildlife.     

A Resource Guide to Travel Film Repositories

Travel films, broadly defined, exist in most moving image collections. Theatrical shorts and features, television series, tourism promotion films, professional and amateur lecture films, expeditionary films and footage, unedited amateur footage are all held by regional and government archives, museums, historical societies, universities, libraries, commercial footage houses, and film distributors. The following is intended to be an annotated guide to a representative set of repositories in North America containing significant amounts of travel film material.     

The shaping of Gujarati Cinema: Recognizing the new in traditional cultures

The study of ethnographic film has turned to the study of indigenous productions, primarily nonfictional videos made by native persons for internal and external consumption. This study was prompted by the need to locate alternate ways of seeing that Nonwestern peoples may have. This paper suggests that it is important to study local genius by studying their fictional films as well, and suggests that newness may not be found at first encounter but later after native groups domesticate foreign technology and make it their own tool. In citing this, the paper describes the various genres of films within contemporary Gujarati cinema and how the hybridity of its present forms has been procured from several sources that make for a distinctiveness which underlines emergent creative social forces at play.     

Clique Size and Network Characteristics in Hyperlink Cinema

Hyperlink cinema is an emergent film genre that seeks to push the boundaries of the medium in order to mirror contemporary life in the globalized community. Films in the genre thus create an interacting network across space and time in such a way as to suggest that people’s lives can intersect on scales that would not have been possible without modern technologies of travel and communication. This allows us to test the hypothesis that new kinds of media might permit us to break through the natural cognitive constraints that limit the number and quality of social relationships we can manage in the conventional face-to-face world. We used network analysis to test this hypothesis with data from 12 hyperlink films, using 10 motion pictures from a more conventional film genre as a control. We found few differences between hyperlink cinema films and the control genre, and few differences between hyperlink cinema films and either the real world or classical drama (e.g., Shakespeare’s plays). Conversation group size seems to be especially resilient to alteration. It seems that, despite many efficiency advantages, modern media are unable to circumvent the constraints imposed by our evolved psychology.     

Media spectacles: The production and reception of Tamil Cinema advertisements

Contemporary popular arts in Third World locations are agents of emergent modernities produced in the context of global interactions. This paper focuses on hand‐painted Tamil cinema advertisements that dominate the urban landscape in Chennai (Madras). Based on ethnographic research I demonstrate that the production network of these objects—methods of training, application of technology, and stylistic criteria—is constantly mutating. Reception of the advertisements unpacks a complex semiotics of internationalism and neo‐traditionalism as well as a mix of commercial and esthetic messages. I argue that these cinema advertisements are emblematic of the modernity of post‐colonial visual culture in India.     

Difference and the I/Eye of the Beholder: Revisioning America through Travelogues

Drawing from and modifying elements of visual travelogues, Ellen Spiro's 1993 film Greetings from Out Here and Renee Tajima-Peña's 1996 film My America ( or honk if you love Buddha) explore contemporary Southern gay and Asian-American lives from minority perspectives. In this article I examine the extent to which the filmmakers use travelogue conventions to draw viewers into a trip of discovery about other Americans. I discuss the filmmakers' standpoints and use of narrative, the ways in which they build on American ideology about travel and visual imagery, and the associations Spiro and Tajima-Peña make between tourism and the American road movie genre.     

The Neoliberal World Order and Patriarchal Power: A Discursive Study of Korean Cinema and International Co-production

This research is an attempt to examine the ideological aspects of Korean cinema in the context of politico-economic changes. Korean cinema is in the process of economic restructuring, driven by neoliberal forces on a global scale. These economic forces also influence film texts on a concrete level, creating hybrid characters and narratives in blockbusters and co-produced films. These new genre films have tended to reinforce patriarchal ideology, making it increasingly pronounced, as Korean films become more technologically advanced and the production system globalized. To illustrate these effects, this article offers a textual analysis of Never Forever [Kim Jina 2007], which was the first U.S.–Korean co-production.     

The association of urbanicity and travel time with lung cancer screening utilization

BackgroundTo examine 1) the rate of lung cancer screening (LCS) utilization in a large healthcare system in South Carolina; 2) associations of urbanicity and travel time with LCS utilization.MethodsLCS-eligible patients from 2019 were identified. The outcome was LCS utilization. The exposures were zip-code level urbanicity and travel time from the centroid of zip-code area to the nearest screening site (<10,10-<20, ≥20 min). Covariates included age, sex, race, marital status, insurance, body mass index, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Charlson Comorbidity Index (0, 1, 2, ≥3), and zip-code level median income. Chi-square tests and logistic regressions were employed.ResultsThe analysis included 6930 patients, among whom 1432 (20.66%) received LCS. After adjusting for covariates, living in a non-metropolitan area (adjusted odds ratio: 0.32; 95% confidence interval: 0.26–0.40) and having longer travel time (0.80 [0.65–0.98] and 0.68 [0.54–0.86] for 10-<20 and ≥20 min travel time, respectively, compared to <10 min travel time) were significantly associated with lower odds of LCS utilization.ConclusionsThe LCS utilization rate of a healthcare system was about 20% in 2019. Living in non-metropolitan areas or having longer travel time to LCS site were associated with lower LCS utilization.     

Live Birth and Cumulative Live Birth Rates in Expected Poor Ovarian Responders Defined by the Bologna Criteria Following IVF/ICSI Treatment

ObjectiveTo determine the live birth and cumulative live birth rates of expected poor ovarian responders according to the Bologna criteria and to compare their outcomes with those of expected normal respondersDesignRetrospective analysisSettingUniversity infertility clinicPatientsA total of 1,152 subfertile women undergoing their first in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycleInterventionsWomen were classified into 4 groups according to the Bologna criteria for comparisonResultsWomen with expected poor response (POR) had the lowest live birth rate than the other 3 groups (23.8%, p = 0.031). Cumulative live birth rates were significantly lower in those with expected POR than those with expected normal ovarian response (NOR) (35.8% vs 62.8%, p<0.0001). In the subgroup analysis, the cumulative live birth rates in expected PORs were significantly lower in those who had ≤3 oocytes retrieved (18.6% for ≤3 oocytes vs 44.0% for >3 oocytes, p = 0.006) whereas the live birth rates in fresh cycle did not differ (17.8% vs 30.9%, p = 0.108).ConclusionWomen who were expected POR according to the Bologna criteria had lower live birth and cumulative live birth than expected NOR but they still can achieve reasonable treatment outcomes and IVF treatment should not be precluded.     

A Black Box for Participatory Cinema: Movie-making with “Neighbors” in Saladillo,Argentina

This article explores the phenomenon of neighborhood cinema (Cine con vecinos) in Saladillo, Argentina. Since 1995 it has been appropriating screening and production spaces wrested from local television, and more generally challenging the hegemony of national TV and industrial cinema production. Cine con vecinos is analyzed here in terms of social agency, participation and sociality. It has democratized media production through films shot entirely with locals, and has also promoted a revival of local movie theaters. Finally, the prospects of this type of cinema are assessed in contrast to other types of participatory community cinema, and also in view of its recent project of making a future “community set,” or large-scale production site, for community cinema.     

The Future of Lao Cinema: The New Wave

The debut work of Mattie Do and Anysay Keola attests to the manner in which Lao cinema is being shaped by a new wave of young filmmakers determined to build a viable movie industry in the Lao PDR. With Chantaly, the first Lao horror movie, Mattie Do conjures up a world that cannot be fully explained rationally. She relies on the phi figure, and the belief of Lao people in supernatural beings, to raise serious questions about the traditional position occupied by women in the Lao family. Another film, Anysay Keola’s At the Horizon, the first Lao thriller, provides an edgy vision of contemporary Laos. The divide between the poor and the rich, tradition and modernity, is conveyed most originally via the soundtrack. Mattie Do and Anysay Keola are part of a new wave of promising young Lao directors who are fashioning a modern film industry in Laos.