Powering popular conceptions: The !Kung in the Marshall family expedition films of the 1950s

The paper develops a theoretical framework for the study of ethnographic film out‐takes in relation to material that is included in released ethnographic film, in this case, the films by John Marshall on the Kalahari San. The significance of what is included in relation to that which is excluded is called the theory of structured absences. This theory is then applied to the study of the 700,000 feet of 16 mm out‐takes not used by Marshall in his released films on the Ju/'hoansi.

The difficulties of analysing archival film are discussed, and issues of representation in relation to exposed footage, released films, and the director's own theory of documentary, are critically examined. The anthropological significance of Marshall's filmic contribution on the Kalahari San is assessed.     

Around the World in Eighty Minutes: The Travel Lecture Film

The travel lecture film is the archetypal form of the travelogue in cinema. It formed an important part of early cinema, flourished in later years, and continues today, notwithstanding predictions of its demise in the age of television, virtual reality, and the Internet. This essay examines the world of itinerant film lecturers who present silent travelogues with live narration throughout North America. In the tradition of Burton Holmes, these live travel lectures take place at hundreds of venues across the United States and Canada, including museums, concert halls, universities, and community clubs.     

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.     

Touring the Dream Factory: The Dream-Film Connection in The Wizard of Oz and A Nightmare on Elm Street

This essay explores the complex interplay of dreams and film, using an analysis of The Wizard of Oz (1939) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) to illustrate how an interdisciplinary approach can provide fruitful insights into how dreams influence films, and films influence dreams. The essay suggests that reflecting on the dreams-film connection can deepen our understanding of the cultural dimensions of human development, particularly in the context of modern American culture. By using the methodological resources of psychology, sociology, history, film criticism, and theology, the essay argues more generally that the interdisciplinary analysis of films offers significant new possibilities for the development of dream studies. Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.     

Race and place at the city limits: imaginative geographies of South Central Los Angeles

In the early 1990s, a new cycle of films emerged that depicted complex portrayals of the lives of African-Americans in the neighbourhoods in which they lived. This so-called ‘hood genre was quite radical in its foregrounding of structural racism and police violence. But Hollywood's marketing of these films muted this radical content by directly contradicting explicit signifiers in the films’ story worlds. While many of the ‘hood films take place on the urban fringe and in suburbs, their promotional materials worked to confine the action, to a mythic ‘inner city'.

This essay studies the two most popular films of the genre, Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, to illustrate how ‘paratexts' redistricted 'hood films. Through a comparative analysis of the films and their promotional materials, this essay argues Hollywood marketed a racialized ‘imaginative geography' for this important genre of African-American cinema.     

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.     

Palestinians in film: Representing and being represented in the cinematic struggle for national identity

The Israeli‐Palestinian conflict has frequently been the focus of Western‐produced documentary films, which seek to explain the core of the problem. Claims to a truthful representation of reality have traditionally been linked to a parallel assumption of ethnographic authority over Palestinians who, unlike Israelis, had until recently little access to filmic means of representation. Through a number of documentaries, produced by both Palestinians and non‐Palestinians, the paper analyzes the crucial impact of the Intifadah on the development of local media in the Occupied Territories. The paper argues that by taking up film and ethnographic techniques as they had been developed in the West, documentaries produced by Palestinians have successfully generated alternative views of the conflict.     

The influence of porosity on the hemocompatibility of polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane poly (caprolactone-urea) urethane

BackgroundThe physio-chemical properties of blood contacting biomaterials play an important role in determining their hemocompatibility. It is shown in literature that surface roughness and porosity have significant effect on hemocompatibility. In this study, we use a biocompatible, low thrombogenic nanocomposite polymer called POSS-PCU to test this hypothesis: would porosity compromise the hemocompatibility of POSS-PCU. We compared the hemocompatibility of POSS-PCU films of various pore sizes with PTFE, which is a commercially available material used in most blood contacting devices.MethodsSterilized POSS-PCU films with different size pores were prepared as samples and porous PTFE film were selected as control. And all samples were subjected to SEM for topograpgy, mechanical test for characterization and hemocompatibility tests to evaluate contact activation, platelet adhesion and activation, as well as whole blood clotting response to the samples.ResultsWCA significantly increased with the pore size of POSS-PCU film, whereas both tensile stress and strain decreased significantly as the sizes of pores increased. However, when compared to PTFE film with same size pores, POSS-PCU films showed both higher tensile stress and strain. Pore size had little impact over POSS-PCU's surface chemistry groups as tested by FTIR analysis. Contact activation and platelet adhesion essay also showed no significant difference between different POSS-PCU samples. However, in whole blood reactions, POSS-PCU with pores size around 2–5 μm showed higher BCI than plain films and those with pores size around 35–45 μm. POSS-PCU showed lower thrombogencity and higher hemocompatibility comparing with porous PTFE on the aspects of platelet activation, adhesion and whole blood reaction.Summary and conclusionsPOSS-PCU polymer films as a biomaterial in chronic blood contacting implants show significant lower thrombogencity and higher hemocompatibility than porous PTFE film. It is desirable as a coating or covering material in small diameter stents for treating cardiovascular diseases, cerebral vascular diseases and peripheral arterial diseases.     

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.     

The history of visual anthropology in India and the task ahead

This paper is a brief history of the earliest efforts of anthropological film making in India. It includes documentation of ethnographic films, the international body in India, and seminars at Delhi and Jodhpur. The filming of the rich cultural heritage of the country; stock‐taking; realistic fiction films; national, regional, and global networks; educational, archival, and research activities are explored. Additionally, the author looks to future tasks to be undertaken by visual anthropologists in India.     

From Documentation to Representation: Recovering the Films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

Although the seven films made by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, based on footage shot in Bali and New Guinea during 1936–39, are identified as a landmark in various histories of ethnographic film, these films have been the subject of remarkably little analysis in the anthropological literature. In contrast, their photographic work has received much more extended commentary. Making a close reading of the films in their final edited form, this article aims to recover this aspect of Mead and Bateson's work from its relative neglect. We consider the circumstances under which the films were made, the theoretical ideas that informed them, and the methods employed in shooting and editing. Notwithstanding recent skepticism about both the theoretical ideas and the quality of the research on which Mead and Bateson's work in Bali was based, as well as the naiveté of some of the filmmaking ideas found in the films themselves, when considered as a group, they continue to be interesting examples of a particular transitional phase in the history of ethnographic film.     

Orientalism in the Documentary Representation of Culture

Structured around the idea that there is a non-linguistic and cross-cultural, possibly biological, basis on which the understanding of pictures rests, this essay looks at the ways whereby images in documentary films challenge the notion of cultural difference. Drawing on Said's Orientalism [1978] and its impact on the basic assumptions of anthropologists, the essay stresses Said's relevance to documentary film theorists, and discusses the work of visual anthropologists and filmmakers influenced by Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the phenomenology of perception. Discussion suggests that the kind of knowledge disclosed by revelatory films represents an important answer to one of the fundamental epistemological issues that Said does not take up in Orientalism, namely the question of the materialization of an “authentic human encounter” not subjugated to the dead book. The essay implies that we should have no objection in principle to the self/other dichotomy when it is used intelligently.     

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.     

Primal Anxiety,Sanctified Landscapes: The Imagery of Primitiveness in the Ethnographic Fictions of Laurens van der Post

An image of Bushmen etched by ethnographers rapidly emerged as a centerpiece of anthropological practice during the first decades (1947-1968) of the Cold War. But that unifying image of a mythic human past--of absolute primitiveness with ethnographic authenticity--was constructed in the Kalahari before any anthropologist arrived there. The popular image was forged in Laurens van der Post's TV films for the BBC, first shown in 1956, and in his books derived from those films, and almost simultaneously by the Marshall family's work. The Cold War forged a crisis in Euroamerican ontology, a crisis of personal and collective identity, of continuity with the past and continuation with the future. It was most forcefully couched in terms of a threat to cultural life as Western Europe and America knew it, a threat perceived to be posed by modernity with its science and technology and its more perplexing questioning of cultural meaning, a threat made tangible in an atmosphere of immanent nuclear annihilation and lingering ecological dissolution reinforced by a modernist communist menace. "A metaphorically powerful response to the crisis arose in a revival of attention to humankind's presumptive primordial roots; along with extinct and extant primates, Bushmen quickly became a main subject of this attention, proposed as examplars of Euroamerica's image of what its evolutionary alter ego ought to be and could become again. I focus on this image as it evolved in the work of van der Post, who articulated most explicitly that diffuse Euroamerican fear smoldering in the ashes of World War II. Van der Post configured his myth in conceptions of natural being and an individualized collective unconsious drawn from Jung and the antimodern reflections of T.S. Eliot. The imagery of his books and films has since been absorbed by countless millions all over the world. The expression of spiritual loss found in them resonates with general cultural fear persisting in Euroamerica; that, coupled with the compensation of mystical love, is what appeals to those who share his faith. Bushmen ethnographers, although moving from a differnt motivation, echoed the essentialist rhetoric embedded in this popular discouse. An analysis of van der Post's contribution to this discourse tells much about the anthropological interest that followed."     

The Reprise of Malinowski

ABSTRACT

Ways of Baloma is a deliberate attempt to move Anthropology as a discipline by means of a new account of a classic locale for the practice. How does it manage this purpose? This essay evaluates Mosko’s attempt from the perspective of another ethnographer with long-term ethnographic research in the Kula Ring. Paradoxes abound in the book and are featured in this review. For while Malinowski’s theoretical pronouncements quickly lost their significance for most anthropologists, his Trobriand ethnography became a model in its own right. And it is this model Mosko attempts to hold up for review and revision based on his view of the contemporary theoretical state of the art. This review outlines some of the strategies and ideas, as well as the regional locale, Mosko deploys in an attempt to make a new Trobriand ethnography a model for anthropological analysis.     

Picturing women,class, and community in Arab Detroit: The strange case of Eva Habib

This essay explores the on‐going struggle to reveal and conceal the image of Eva Habib, an Arab American woman who worked in a Detroit factory and was photographed in her coveralls circa 1925. Eva's image has been a source of controversy in Detroit's Arab community since it first became public in the 1980s. I chart the evolution of this controversy, examine the interests of the parties involved, and draw conclusions about how this controversial image simultaneously undermines and reinforces popular notions of women, work, and class among Arab Americans.     

Mainstreaming Arabs: Filmmaking as image making in tales from Arab Detroit

The documentary video, Tales from Arab Detroit, is enjoying a rare blend of critical and popular success. This essay is an attempt to explain why the video is so popular with American audiences (Arab and non‐Arab alike). Special attention is given to (1) the representational strategies the makers of Tales used to shape their video; (2) the identity politics underlying these strategies; and (3) how interpretive differences among the filmmakers culminated in a video that resembles, in unforeseen ways, the Arab community it depicts. The essay doubles as a critique of “main‐streaming,” a representational technique that dominates sympathetic portrayals of Others in American popular media. Tales, it is argued, possesses all the strengths and weaknesses of this technique.     

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.     

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.