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An ethnographic film is a documentary film related to the methods of ethnology. It emerged in the 1960s as an important tool for research in the domain of visual anthropology, when filming human groups in society.

Different Mediums
The actual medium of "film" is strongly associated with early ethnographic studies. The medium of film was initially used by ethnographers in the course of their professional work to document subjects in the field. Today ethnographic films are made in video and digital media as well, and may contain elements of text and animation. Other mediums in video and digital media focuses on the study of culture in forms of Hollywood movies, documentaries by non-anthropologists, home movies and even Youtube.

Origins
Prospector, explorer and, eventual filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty is often considered as the forefather of ethnographic film. His film Nanook of the North falls into the second category, combining home movie, documentary and stagecraft. Flaherty's attempts to realistically portray Inuit people (although he actually used actors and staged a good deal of the production) were nevertheless valuable pictures of a little-known way of life, and with good reason, viewers saw his films as "real." Flaherty had no method of study nor training in anthropology, but he did have good relationships with his subjects, at least most of the time.

Other firsts include that of Robert Gardner and Karl Heider who carefully planned to use filming and editing as crucial research techniques, resulting in the classic multi-point of view Dead Birds (1964), while David Mayberry-Lewis was among the first to receive enough funding to send many video cameras into the field, in one field setting, gaining multiple simultaneous points of view.

Also the contribution of Felix-Louis Regnault should be noted as his project may have started the movement. He was filming a Wolof woman making pottery without the aid of a wheel at the Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale. He published his findings in 1895. His later films followed the same subject, described to capture the “cross cultural study of movement”. He then proposed there to be an archive of anthropological film after becoming more experienced with motion pictures.

Another event to note would be that of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, began by Alfred Cort Haddon in 1898, which covered all aspects of the Torres Straits life. Haddon, in writingto his friend Baldwin Spenccer, he reconmended to him how he should use film as recording evidence. Spencer then recorded the Australian Aborigines, a projected that consisted of 7,000 feet of film. His project was later housed in the National Museum at Victoria. 

The genre flourished in France in the sixties due to the role of ethnographers as Marcel Griaule, Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch. Light 16 mm cameras synchronized with light tape-recorders would revolutionise the methods of both cinema and anthropology, founding a new discipline, visual anthropology.

Rouch, who has developed the concept in theory and practice, went against the dogma that in research, the camera must stay out of the event, taking some distance, as simple observer. He decided to make the camera interfere and he himself became an actor in the action and so became one of the pioneers of docufiction. This was of course earlier deemed the "observer effect" by Gregory Bateson, who was perhaps unaware of the dogma Rouch was attempting to violate. Bateson, as one of the earliest to write about using cameras in the studies of humans, was not only aware of the observer effect, but both he and his partner, Margaret Mead, wrote about many ways of dealing theoretically and practically of that effect.

Gregory Bateson discovered in the 1930s that using film, frame by frame, was an essential component of documenting complex rituals in New Guinea; John Marshall made what is likely the most-viewed ethnographic film in American colleges (The Hunters), his filming of the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari (the !Kung-San) spans from 1951 to 2000. His ethnographic film N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman is not only ethnography but also a biography of the central character, N!ai, incorporating footage from her childhood through adulthood. Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch's two famous films, The Ax Fight and The Feast (filmed in the 1960s) are rarely forgotten by those who get the chance to view this up close and carefully documented ethnographic account of an Amazonian rainforest people, the Yanomamo. Robert Gardner and Karl Heider were among the first to carefully plan to use filming and editing as crucial research techniques, resulting in the classic multi-point of view Dead Birds (1964), while David Mayberry-Lewis was among the first to receive enough funding to send many video cameras into the field, in one field setting, gaining multiple simultaneous points of view.

Different Types
Within the genre of Ethnographic Film exist different categories, each having different purposes of their film. These categories can be identified in the areas they tend to focus or the process they go through when analyzing film.

Objective Recording
“Objective recording is characterized by a structure which is imposed by an actions”. Within this type of recording exists two subcategories: Descriptive and Analytical. Descriptive film began in 1898, as a form of still photography, usually consisting of various photos taken of the same subject in a sequence. Only a few were edited in the 1900 to the 1940’s. With later descriptive films, attempts were made to record behavioral processes by recording from a remote view. (Example?) In analytical film, the film is inspected frame by fame to look out for certain patterns that cant be seen unless the action was repeated continuously. This was usually done for communication process such as a parent-child interaction. After a complete analysis, the film is cut and reassembled to show the newly found evidence.

Scripted Filming
With Scripted Filming, the film is imposed by a filmmaker. It is a longer type of film that is used to illustrate a theme about the culture in study. Here, the filmmaker goes out into the field with an idea he wants to capture. He later scans the film in a selective manner, choses the parts of the film that best relates to his idea and disposes of the remaining footage.

Reportage
Reportage is best recognized as the category most able to preserve film due to it’s restructuring process. The main subject recorded is an event or a complete segment of life. In this type of film, the recorder can be turned on or off at any time and the focus can be of anything as long it as it carries a significant contribution. Reportage film is built on the concept that culture of a society cannot be reported until some time is spent in that culture, building an understanding of it’s people as the reporter and the inhabitants understand themselves.

This leads to an implication that the anthropologist is filming blind. When familiarity is built with the studied people, units of life can be found to which observers will mostly agree with. When these units are filmed, then it finally can be classified as Reportage. 

Issues
Although Ethnographic Film can be seen as a way of presenting and understanding different cultures that is not normally seen, there are some issues in the case of portrayal. As of late, Ethnographic film has been influenced by ideas of observational cinema, like that of the British Free Cinema movement. With the arrival of lightweight sound cameras and their accessories, it opened up possibilities of being able to film almost everywhere. This led to revealing private and informal behaviours to already discreet film-makers. The issue of presentation was noted by Flaherty, when he realized that when the audience is shown a individuals dealing with problems, it helps them affirm the rationality of their own choices. Despite new lightweight camera equipment, the status of the camera was still seen as an invisible presences. This only led to undermine the idea of film being an disembodied observer. It was later realized that the procedure of filming could carry false interpretations of the behaviour recorded. Film-makers then had a new intention of their films being self-revelatory, making sure to film the primary encounter as evidence of their production. An example of this would be Chronique d'un éte, a film by Rouch and Morin where it touched on questions on how film deals with reality and changed the course of ethnographic film-making. Due to the difficulty of film being a direct representation of the subject, film-makers then perceived their work as a venture of the complexities of the presented cultural, or at least their work as a continuing inquiry. However, the camera will always continue to see selectively, leaving the film-maker with the precaution of interpretation during the process of recording. With observing informal events, a technique of filming from different angles or shooting the scene more than once has been developed. 

Major Contributions
The Academy Award-winning film Black Orpheus can be considered another milestone in the second category. Much like Flaherty's work, director and producer Marcel Camus strove to depict the mythos of a culture, in his case, a favela in Rio de Janeiro at the time of Carnaval. He managed to preserve some of the few scenes of a mid-20th century Carnaval, as most scenes were filmed without preparation. The actors were hired, but the extras were real participants.

Further readings

 * Loizos, Peter: Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness, 1955-1985, University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition 1993, ISBN 0226492273
 * MacDougall, David: Transcultural Cinema, Princeton University Press 1998, ISBN 0-691-01234-2
 * Ruby, Jay: Picturing Culture. Explorations of Film and Anthropology. University of Chicago Press 2000, ISBN 9780226730981