FilmConferenceProgramme

To those of us involved in the teaching of various media, the phrase 'the future of ethnographic film' is a problematic assertion. Does the medium have any future? Should it have any future? Has the ethnographic film not dissipated, or better still, been absorbed by late 20th century cultures into various forms of filmmaking which reach ever-greater audiences who take the genre of viewing Others as a possibility that can be applied to the Self?

In the Conference we would like to ask the speakers and audience to seriously consider 'the end of the ethnographic film' and to challenge them to think about what this means for filmmakers and students who see themselves as being ethnographers. Our challenge is based on the assumption that the dispersal of the ethnographic impulse into other forms of filmmaking has meant that a visually intelligent audience finds the ethnographic outside the 'traditional' "Disappearing World" formula. Why watch a film about courtship and marriage in India or Pakistan, for example, when we can watch "East is East" or "Goodness Gracious Me"-- in a post-modern ironic way, of course -- any number of films, including those of our own societies, on romance and weddings? Why look for `primitives' in the Amazon when "Big Brother" or "Castaway" can chart, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, our own ability to be tribal/primitive?

The conference topics will consist of five, overlapping, themes which are listed below as a series of comments and questions.

1. Eye and Other

The making of a film need no longer be an expensive and difficult process. With video cameras, PCs that can edit film, everyone is invited to be the 'eye' which exoticises the Other. Are we all ethnographic filmmakers?

2. Filming one's own

Along with the rise of the home video, the rise of the 'native' ethnographer/filmmaker means that 'filming one's own' blurs the lines even further: what is the difference between a documentary and an ethnographic film? Thus, the exoticisation of the Other has become the exoticisation of the Self - why go to Papua New Guinea when US High School Proms are a bizarre ritual all on their own?

3. Filmmakers as ethnographers

In a circular relationship, the technology which has allowed for creator access to the Other has also become part of ordinary filmmaking. More portable cameras of better quality, along with the improved technology for editing mean that the line between an art film and ethnographic film has become increasingly blurred. Even feature films now strive for the intimacy which the ethnographic film had specialized in creating.

4. Documentary as Art

The second part of the circular relationship based on improved technology is that ethnographic films are now able to achieve a level of aesthetics that crosses the line between documentary and art film. Or perhaps ethnographic films were always Art films?

5. Making it

The ethnographic film appears to have suffered as a result of all the above factors. They are no longer seen as audience pullers and when they succeed they appear to do so by being less a detailed description of one society packaged into 40 minutes with a David Attenborough-like voiceover than the representation of particular events in specific locations that somehow resemble our own societies all too well. What does this mean for young filmmakers who are/have trained as ethnographers? What does the future hold for them? 'Making it' becomes a double-edged phrase: will they make it, will the films be made?