STS.S91  Spec Subject: Sci, Tech & Soci

Ethnographic filmmaking has a long and rich history. From Haddon's pioneering 1898 sound and moving image recordings in the Torres Strait Islands, to Jean Rouch's Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961, directed with sociologist Edgar Morin), from Flaherty's enacted Nanook, 1922, and George Boas’ staged demonstration films with the Kwakiutl to Oppenheimer's re-enacted The Act of Killing (2012), technologies and modes of representation have changed, in the process challenging anthropological norms and provoking reflection on who represents and how.

Today's interactive, immersive and location-based technologies pose the greatest challenge yet. Their capacities for representing in innovative ways and forging new relationships among subjects, makers and the public, while exciting, can also seem at odds with the notions of expertise, authorship and the carefully structured points of view that characterized the past.

Students will develop their own project, with in-class workshops, doing two short interim projects and a final project.

This course will explore ethnographic filmmaking and particularly the fast-changing partnership between technologies and ways of seeing using three approaches:
1) a critical look at key moments in the history of ethnographic film making;
2) discussions with film makers regarding their visions and choices;
3) a semester-long interrogation of a project-in-development by a linear filmmaker who is shifting to interactive forms.

Film makers who have been invited to share their films and choices with us include:
Ernst Karel; Chris Bobel and Chris Walley; Daniel Hui; Lisandro Alonso; Alex Fattal; John Gianvito; Thorsten Trimpop.
We will discuss also films by Tim Asch, RJ Flarherty, Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, Joaquim Pinto, Lucian Taylor and Verena Paravel, Robert Lemelson, Joshua Oppenheimer, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Urophong Raksasad.

The discussions will focus on both
(a) production and editing techniques; (b) intellectual contributions.
These latter will explore the trade-offs, balance, or other relations in:
(1) using cultural genres from within local traditions (vs. universal “philosophical”
or personal and poetic forms);
(2) registering vs. staging “reality” (letting the material “speak” vs. speaking for)
(3) use of “footage” in narrative film (integrity, context);
(4) using sound, dialogue, and visuals in disjunctive vs. sync’d fashions.
(5) what film can do that even the best writing cannot vs. the limits of film

Most sessions will be split in two: a working-practice segment, and a discussion session.