Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / History / History of Anthropology / All Films

In Search of the Hamat'sa

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

In Search of the Hamat'sa
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The Hamat'sa (or "Cannibal Dance") is the most important-and highly represented-ceremony of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) people of British Columbia. This film traces the history of anthropological depictions of the dance and, through the return of archival materials to a First Nations community, presents some of the ways in which diverse attitudes toward this history inform current performances of the Hamat'sa. With a secondary focus on the filmmaker's fieldwork experience, the film also attends specifically to the ethics of ethnographic representation and to the renegotiation of relationships between anthropologists and their research partners.

The material for this film was gathered and shot over the year between 2002 and 2003 during the course of research for Glass's dissertation in Socio-Cultural Anthropology. The research process consisted of extensive archival work - in which he traced the history of ethnographic representation of the Hamat'sa (in texts, film and photography, art gallery and museum display, and intercultural performance) - followed by an eight month period of residence in the Kwakwaka'wakw community of Alert Bay, BC. The film was edited in a documentary filmmaking course in the Program for Culture and Media at New York University. It is intended to communicate some of the complex issues involved in representing indigenous peoples and their expressive practices, especially as anthropological materials increasingly end up back in Native communities where they are used and debated as one kind of historical resource among many.

"...Glass is to be commended in his filming, as well as his writing and editing. It is provocative without being pompous, sympathetic but not romantic, and reflexive without being overly self-obsessed."
— Alexander D. King, Museum Anthropology Review

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Australian Anthropological Society Film Festival, Sydney, 2009

Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, Taiwan, 2009

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, New York, 2008

Society for Cultural Anthropology Meeting, Long Beach, CA, 2008

8th Astra Ethnographic Film Festival, Sibiu, Romania, 2006

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Margaret Mead: A Portrait by a Friend

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:49:00 GMT

Margaret Mead: A Portrait by a Friend
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"The way to be a citizen of the world is to be at home in a lot of places." –Margaret Mead

Jean Rouch filmed this loving and humorous portrait of anthropologist and filmmaker Margaret Mead in September 1977 while he was a guest of the first Margaret Mead Film Festival. As both a friend and colleague, Rouch reveals a glimpse of the legendary Mead in her later years. Fellow filmmaker John Marshall was the sound recordist.

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Remembering John Marshall

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 08:59:00 GMT

Remembering John Marshall
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A portrait of filmmaker and activist John Kennedy Marshall, who began his career in the 1950s documenting the lives of the Ju/'hoansi people of Namibia - among the last remaining hunter-gatherers - for anthropological audiences. In the 1980s, Marshall became an activist helping the Ju/'hoansi fight for land and water rights. He made important contributions to cinéma vérité filmmaking and leaves behind an extensive ethnographic film archive including over 20 films on the Ju'/hoansi.

Features interviews with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Robert Gordon, Alexandra Eliot Marshall, Cynthia Close, Sandeep Ray, Karma Foley, Jayasinhji Jhala, and Rakhi Jhala.

"Gives a beautiful sense of Marshall's life."
— Faye Ginsburg, Director, Center for Media, Culture & History, New York University

"Alice Apley and David Tamés, combining anthropological and filmmaking expertise, have rescued the reputation of an important anthropological filmmaker from his own obsessive perfectionism with this brief, graceful and intensely moving tribute to the late John Marshall."
— Tim Wright, filmmaker & educator

"Expertly-edited, fascinating glimpse into the psyche and politics of a trailblazing filmmaker"
— Kim Romano, filmmaker

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

EthnoFilmfest, Berlin, 2007

Society for Visual Anthropology/AAA Conference, Washington DC, 2007

Plymouth Independent Film Festival, Plymouth, MA, July 18-22, 2007

Washington DC Independent Film Festival, 2007

International Ethnographic Film Festival of the Royal Anthropological Institute, UK, 2007

Tribute to John Marshall, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 2006

Woods Hole Film Festival, Massachusetts, 2006

Vermont International Film Festival, 2006 Northampton Independent Film Festival, 2006

The Tank, New York City, 2006

European Association of Social Anthropologists' Film, Video & New Media Festival, Slovenia, 2008

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Roots of African Culture

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 08:59:00 GMT

Roots of African Culture
Buy Now: $295.00

"This is very important for us. Not only to engage and for the reconstruction of the historical past, but also for our national heritage." — Professor Yonah Seleti

Historical revisionism and propaganda were important elements of apartheid ideology, proclaiming that black peoples were not the owners of Southern Africa by stating that the whites arrived in the same areas at nearly the same time. Today, a crucial objective of South African education is to erase this interpretation as presented in earlier textbooks, and to give their students a genuine history of their country.

Roots of African Culture, a video produced by the University of Natal, is an indispensable pedagogical tool for this purpose. Recording the teaching process of Professors Jeff Guy, Leonard van Schalkwyk, Haskell Greenfield, and Yonah Seleti, this video depicts the entire process through which students are enabled to rediscover the history of Africa. Examples of falsified apartheid literature are juxtaposed against the fieldwork evidence that shows evidence of the first South African settlements, in existence well before the arrival of European populations in Natal area in 1652.

Under the supervision of experts, students participate in archaeological excavations in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, between "historic" Natal and the Zulu Kingdom, where African communities lived in the Iron Age. The entire process of excavation of a site is described and carried out. The process of "Carbon 14 dating" is explained.

Through this concrete and delightful academic experience students are finally able to affirm the existence of African farming communities during the 8th century.

Suitable for African Studies, archaeology, anthropology, history, and educational practice.

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Secrets of the Tribe

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:46:00 GMT

Secrets of the Tribe
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The field of anthropology goes under the magnifying glass in this fiery investigation of the seminal research on Yanomamö Indians. In the 1960s and '70s, a steady stream of anthropologists filed into the Amazon Basin to observe this "virgin" society untouched by modern life. Thirty years later, the events surrounding this infiltration have become a scandalous tale of academic ethics and infighting.

The origins of violence and war and the accuracy of data gathering are hotly debated among the scholarly clan. Soon these disputes take on Heart of Darkness overtones as they descend into shadowy allegations of sexual and medical violation.

Director José Padilha brilliantly employs two provocative strategies to raise unsettling questions about the boundaries of cultural encounters. He allows professors accused of heinous activities to defend themselves, and the Yanomami to represent their side of the story. As this riveting excavation deconstructs anthropology's colonial legacy, it challenges our society's myths of objectivity and the very notion of "the other."

“In the world documentary section, one of the best is the new work by Brazil's José Padilha, who did the excellent Bus 174. His complex, shattering Secrets of the Tribe examines the effects that waves of cultural anthropologists have had on the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon basin, a society that had been totally isolated from nominal civilization.”
— Kenneth Turan, LA Times

“The interviews with the Yanomami, who describe entire villages of people dying, sexual abuse and the havoc wrought by anthropologists who traded information for steel axes and machetes, create a cumulative effect that can only be described as heartbreak.”
— Shari Kizirian, Documentary Magazine

“Director Jose Padhila has brilliantly turned the methods of anthropology on the anthropologists themselves... The result is a film that challenges us to look at definitions of self and other, and that provides a record that is almost the same as the entire history of contact and colonialism suffered by many Indigenous peoples of many lands over many centuries - but in this case condensed into thirty or so sordid and appalling years... (Secrets of the Tribe) provides us with a clear and cautionary tale of how ego skews perspective and, in doing so, creates a world of suffering. I left the theater ashamed to be a member of the "academic tribe." And having said that, this is a film that I would recommend to all - especially academics.”
— Michele Desmarais, Journal of Religion and Film

“While there is plenty to be appalled about here, Secrets of the Tribe is actually quite funny, insightful and entertaining. The egos, the inconsistencies and the battle of the minds keep the narrative moving forward at superb speed, raising questions about motive, opportunity and objectivity along the way.”
— John Esther, Moving Pictures Magazine

“If ever there existed the notion that anthropologists are a group of innocuous and dispassionate individuals interested largely in detached analysis about non-Western cultures, Padilha demolishes it. In so doing, he provides viewers with a glimpse into how professional egos, jealousies, and politics have shaped the reproduction of knowledge about what was, until recently, one of the last isolated and pristine indigenous tribes on the planet. …The debate (Padilha) reveals makes us want to understand more about the actual details and substance of the arguments engaged. This, in my view, is what is most significant about his film. It is happily the case that Documentary Educational Resources is distributing this work. As noted, it won't explain to students all they should know, but I can't think of a more engaging way to introduce them to issues about methods and ethics in fieldwork, the relative scientific and humanistic aspects of anthropological investigation, and debates about the cultural versus biological determinants of behavior. ”
— John Homiak, American Anthropologist, Vol. 114, No. 1

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Contro-Sguardi International Anthropological Film Festival, Italy, 2012

Sundance Film Festival, 2010

Independent Film Festival of Boston, 2010

HotDocs, Canada, 2010

Roma Independent Film Festival, Italy, 2010

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Through These Eyes

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

Through These Eyes
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At the onset of the space race in the 1960s, the U.S. government feared its educational system was slipping behind that of the Soviet Union's. A controversial science initiative, Man: A Course of Study, grew out of this response with the ambitious goal to teach American children what it meant to be human.

At the program's core was a benchmark of visual anthropology, the Netsilik Eskimo series, which captures a year in the life of a small Inuit community on the cusp of contact. Ultimately, Man: A Course of Study created a clash of values that rippled throughout the schools of America and revealed the fragile relationship between politics and educational reform.

Weaving together remarkable archival and contemporary footage, Through These Eyes revisits the politics and controversy of this unprecedented era in American educational reform and offers an historical perspective on the study of anthropology.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film, London, 2005

American Psychological Association Annual Convention, Washington DC, 2005

Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival, Washington DC, 2005

Gottingen International Film Festival, Germany, 2006

Days of Ethnographic Film, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2008

EASA Film, Video & New Media Festival, Slovenia, 2008

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Taking Pictures

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:56:00 GMT

Taking Pictures
Buy Now: $320.00

Australia's most internationally renowned documentarists (Kildea, O'Rourke, Connolly/Robin Anderson) are part of a group of expatriates who honed their documentary filmcraft while residents of Papua New Guinea. Their films, brimming with wit and character, capture the energy and contradictions of a country in transition from a backward colony, to a young nation in the modern world.

But whose stories are they? Filmmakers are now often challenged about cultural rights, and the Western domination of representation. Taking Pictures explores the issues and pitfalls of filming across a cultural boundary - through interviews with Australian filmmakers and by sampling their powerful award winning documentaries about PNG that include First Contact, Trobriand Cricket, The Shark Callers of Kontu, Joe Leahy's Neighbours, Black Harvest, Cannibal Tours and Man Without Pigs. It also covers the work of indigenous PNG filmmakers, and their own experience of interpreting film and culture.

Taking Pictures is a inquiry into the practicalities, politics and aesthetics of the documentary experience.

"A 1930's black and white clip of Papua New Guinea (PNG) people opens this stunning documentary film. We never see the photographer, a white Australian explorer. The people in front of the camera are not actors yet they are acting. Victor Turner called life a performance and we are all in a play. In a documentary film we expect reality and yet only get a glimpse of what we want reality to be. The question is, are the people playing to the camera or is the action real? Is it part of reality or a play? For anyone interested in cultural ramifications of documentary film or ethnography this is more than a glimpse into the lives behind the lens and in front of it. I would highly recommend this film for college/university undergraduates, graduates and faculty."— Patricia Sarchet, MLS, State University of New York at Buffalo

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