Documentary Educational Resources - Filmmaker / Jablonko, Marek / All Films

Her Name Came on Arrows

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Her Name Came on Arrows
Buy Now: $295.00

In the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, French anthropologist Maurice Godelier invites five of his Baruya friends and informants to his house to discuss Baruya kinship and rules of marriage. As Godelier poses questions, the kinship rules that provide the cohesive fabric of Baruya culture are brought to life. Abstract terms are given practical meanings as Godelier investigates Baruya customs of stealing wives, exchanging sisters for wives, stealing names and exchanging 'food for blood.'

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To Find the Baruya Story

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

To Find the Baruya Story
Buy Now: $320.00

This multi-faceted film illustrates anthropologist Maurice Godelier's fieldwork methods and personal relationships among the Baruya, a group of peoples living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. The film follows Dr. Godelier as he explores the complexities of food production and the effects of new technologies, and details the Baruya's traditional salt-based economic system. Godelier comments: "I have to find and bring together the different pieces of Baruya culture... That's my job, to find the story."

About the Digitally Remastered DVD Edition: A crucial segment of To Find the Baruya Story, missing from all previously distributed VHS and DVD versions of the film, was recently found on an original 16mm master print. The sequence – Godelier's visit to the women's menstrual huts and the subsequent decontamination ritual his male informants insisted that he undergo – is a key to understanding Godelier's ability to study both Baruyan men's and women's worlds.

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Undala & Undala Conversations

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:38:00 GMT

Undala & Undala Conversations
Buy Now: $295.00

Undala (color, 28 min, 1967)

Undala was filmed in 1964 in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan just before the emergence of the technology required for the field recording of synchronous sound. Dust hangs over the land, diffusing the light, muting shadow, and adding a patina of gold to each scene. As an intense and purely observational experience, it could be seen as a precursor to what is being referred to today as "sensory ethnography."

The village Gangwa is presented as first encountered by a team of filmmakers and anthropologists. A musical score by Harold Schram, a student of Indian classical music, accents the movement and rhythm of a medley of visual impressions of daily work activities: a potter opens a flawless clay vessel on his potter's wheel spinning on a spike of wood, a carpenter planes a sliver from a plank held without tool or vise and men lift 340 pounds of water from a shaft well in the skin of a flayed bovine. The tactility of grit and dust, of sweat and heat, of abrasive winds and squinting eyes, and of water flushing from a leather bag, infuses the viewing with the sensate — an embodied world of the craftsmen that no longer exists.

The Selection Board of the IX Festival dei Popoli awarded Undala special mention: “For the accuracy with which significant aspects of everyday work in a third world country are revealed and for the quality of the image.” (March 4, 1968, Florence). The film received the Cine Golden Eagle, with screenings at the Brussels Film Festival and the International Festival of Short Films, Krakow, Poland, in 1968.

Undala Conversations (color, 30 min, 2011, 16:9)

In 2009, the ethnographer Thomas Rosin, who studied Gangwa across a span of forty years, and the producer Allison Jablonko meet to discuss the early work. In Undala Conversations, they watch the original film and explore its evidence of a feudal architecture and settlement plan, the virtuosity of craft production, and the causes of the single example of ineptitude filmed among working men. They review how the first impressions of fluid movement, concealed faces, and the deft coordination of craftsmen, captured by Undala's cinematographer, Marek Jablonko, led to puzzles and questions, opening numerous avenues to research that the anthropologist pursued in subsequent years.

A discussion of farming practices reveals a sophisticated regime involving partnerships in irrigated farming, rainwater harvesting and aquifer recharge coordinated with husbandry that made the Thar of Rajasthan one of the most densely populated deserts in the world.

"Suitable for college courses in cultural anthropology, economic anthropology, ethnographic film, and Indian/South Asian studies, as well as general audiences." -- Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

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