Includes bibliographical references (pages 497-524) and index.

General introduction: authorship, praxis, observation, ethnography -- Part I. Histories: ethnographic film in the twentieth century. -- Introduction -- The long prehistory of ethnographic film -- Travel films, melodrama and the origins of ethnofiction -- The invisible author: films of re-enactment in the post-war period -- Records, not movies: the early films of John Marshall and Timothy Asch -- Reflexivity and participation: the films of David and Judith MacDougall in Africa and Australia -- Entangled voices: the complexities of collaborative authorship -- The subject as author: indigenous media and the Video nas Aldeias project -- Part II. Authors: three key figures. -- Introduction -- Jean Rouch: sharing anthropology -- Robert Gardner: beyond the burden of the real -- Colin Young: the principles of Observational Cinema -- Part III. Television as meta-author: ethnographic film in Britain. -- Introduction -- Ways of doing ethnographic film on British television -- Beyond the 'disappearing world' - and back again -- The decline of ethnographic film on British television -- Part IV. Beyond observation: ethnographic film in the twenty-first century. -- Introduction -- The evolution of Observational Cinema: recent films of David and Judith MacDougall -- Negative capability and the flux of life: films of the Sensory Ethnography Lab -- Participatory perspectives -- An epilogue: return to Kiriwina - the ethnographic film-maker as author -- Appendix: British television documentaries produced in collaboration with ethnographic researchers.

A history of ethnographic film from the birth of cinema in 1895 until 2015 that analyses a large number of films made in a broad range of styles, on a broad range of topics and in many different parts of the world. For the period before the Second World War, it considers films made in reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogue genres as well as more conventionally ethnographic films made for academic and state-funded purposes. It then describes how after the war, ethnographic film-makers developed various different modes of authorship inspired by the ideas of Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. It also considers films made from the 1970s by the indigenous subjects themselves as well as those made for British television up until the 1990s. In the final part, it examines various possible models for the future of ethnographic film.

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Open Access EbpS